I have a very capable smartwatch and it's ridiculously bad how hobbled it is on iOS. I'm glad to see this article specifically highlight the issues, and how it's 100% Apple's intention to make non-Apple wearables on iOS terrible.
Garmin Connect always runs in the background on my Android phone, watching for notifications, pulling data from and pushing data to Garmin servers on my behalf even when I'm not using the app. It's third-party, but it's reasonably well-written and doesn't nuke my phone battery or data plan - Android doesn't need to protect me or their reputation from Garmin. I can always check the weather or look at my daily workouts or whatever on my watch and trust that it's recently been upodated by the phone app phone. Garmin users with Apple phones complain that "Garmin doesn't work" after every iOS update that further hobbles the Garmin background service.
I get text notifications on my watch for any Android apps that provide notifications, and relevant ones (like text messages, whether SMS or RCS) provide an option to reply from the watch. I tap the top right button on the watch and scroll to "OK" or "Thanks" or "Can't talk right now" or whatever one of a half dozen canned responses covers 90% of my needs in this mode, and don't have to dig my phone out of my backpack or otherwise interact. Emails, calendar appointments, clock stuff, music controls, etc. all work over the watch. It's just as privileged as the phone, I'm not concerned about my Garmin intruding on my privacy as protected by Android, I wear the watch 24/7 and it has more data on me than the phone!
> get text notifications on my watch for any [...] apps that provide notifications, and relevant ones (like text messages, whether SMS or RCS [or iMessage])
I get this behaviour on iOS+Garmin, and can both see notification text (even when phone is locked and notification content hidden on lock screen) + can dismiss notifications just fine with "Clear" action (both points noted in the article as not being possible)
Fair enough though, I just can't reply or take a specific action in actionable notifications.
Media play pause next prev work as well, and calendars are all viewable too.
Widgets that use the phone+app as proxy for network access also just work (e.g weather refreshes, or I have a Home Assistant widget which hits my self-hosted instance just fine)
Apart from replying I don't have a hobbled experience at all.
On android, you can turn off forwarding notifications to the watch on a per-app basis, so for example I can have youtube put notifications into the android notification center, but not the watch.
On iOS, you can't configure which apps forward notifications to a garmin watch. You only get all or nothing. Apple watch can do this just fine.
Is that not an issue for you? Do you not feel hobbled by that?
Personally if I don't want it on my watch I also don't want it on my phone, so I simply disable all notifications at the app level.
That said, I seem to remember the trick on iOS is to remove one of the notification alert types (can't recall if it's "lock screen" or "notification centre" or "banner") and then it shows up on the phone but not the watch.
As pretext, you can say the competitor's app is doing something now considered insecure or not privacy-respecting, or is not compliant with some new user experience or quality curation that you do.
So if they detect a trend early enough, they implement it as first-party feature, dry out the existing competitors while restricting new competitors to enter based on the App Store Review...
"Apps that copy basic iPhone or iPad functionality (including but not limited to its UI, gestures, core features) will be rejected unless the app provides a clearly different purpose or adds unique functionality."
Note the "basic" line. And there are plenty of Photos, Notes, Streaming etc apps so not seeing where this is being used to exclude competitors.
Apple isn’t using that rule to take down alternate weather apps, despite them having their own native weather app. There’s still plenty of QR code scanning apps, despite that being built into default camera app.
I'm fairly sure "Only high quality apps should be available to users" was said more than once when the Apple AppStore first launched (together with the second or third iPhone I think?). Apple isn't really into the whole "users can choose what's best" thing, which once you understand this, a lot of their choices become understandable (albeit shitty none the less).
There's a lot of fair criticisms of Apple, but they don't have to be absolutely first at everything or never enter the market.
When Apple did offer Night Shift in iOS 9.3 it made the APIs to do this Apple-only, for ... reasons. As of today, no non-Apple app can modify color temperature of the display.
It was using private APIs.
This is never acceptable as it undermines the entire security architecture.
Private APIs for security reasons? Sure.
For this? Garbage. There is not a single cogent reason that a color temperature API is a security gate. Or if you think there is, what is it?
Those APIs are only there because they're needed by some higher-level system library that your app is actually allowed to use.
Sure, you could have all libraries be simple shims, all calls be interprocess, and all security be guaranteed by process boundaries, but that would kill performance.
If you only accept signed code and have W^X protections that apps aren't allowed to disable, this way is simpler, faster and just as secure.
Even innocuous apps like a calculator can, and do, use them for that purpose.
The App Store process automatically checks for them and blocks submission.
Curious how apps are bypassing this and not sure why they would be trying to prevent debugging when it's not possible to do this.
The actual reason behind F.lux for iOS being pulled - https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/3smf15/the_actual_re...
> Sure, it uses private APIs, but thousands of popular projects on Github (like game simulators) or that Apple TV web browser project all use private APIs and they are just fine.
> The issue is F.lux for iOS is not a true source-available download. It includes a full app bundle with pre-compiled binary (which in a nutshell, is an extracted .IPA file) packed within Xcode to utilize Apple's new free signing policy.
> And to making things worse, the same F.lux Xcode project does not only allow side loading F.lux itself, but also any unsigned IPA file. The only thing a user needs is to extract an unsigned IPA and drag all resources into the project. This allows pirates to install any stolen app, without the need to buy a developer certificate. I have tested and believe this is the true reason for F.lux project being pulled.
Screen tinting like that is exactly the kind of thing that should be an OS-feature, not an app feature.
They are similarly quite restrictive on MacOS, with some system-impacting features being locked behind “accessibility” permissions. So that arbitrary apps can’t interact with other apps unless they are actually doing something that needs it like “being a screen reader”.
iOS doesn’t have the same sort of permissions. Apps can’t take over interactions with other apps, or change display settings, etc. This is a security boundary. And changing that specifically for “changing screen colors” seems unnecessary to me.
It seems that third-party software, even software with accessibility permissions, doesn't work on password screens (and probably in a few other similarly-secure places), and you need those to be accessible. Not to mention weird places like system recovery, which (for very obvious and understandable reasons) does not allow 3rd-party software at all.
I guess you could use a third-party SR for most of your system and then toggle VoiceOver on when accessing the secure parts, but that would get very annoying very quickly.
There's also no 3rd-party access to some speech-related features, like the higher-quality neural Siri voices. You'd also need APIs for things like automatically being informed of incoming system notifications to read them as they come in (which the first-party VoiceOver does), and those don't seem to be available at all.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/16/22676706/apple-watch-swip...
This is also one of the things that makes a big difference between Windows and macOS when getting a new install/machine set up to basic usability. With the former, before I can get anything done there’s a whole laundry list of things that need to be installed and removed (which admittedly is now easier now that winget comes preinstalled), while that list is much shorter on a Mac. For me personally getting through that phase takes at least 3-4x longer under Windows.
I enjoy apple devices but hate the walled garden.
The reason Google loves RCS is because they spectacularly failed 4 or 5 times at introducing their own iMessage competitors.
Competing companies often act in their best interests. And both Google and Apple offer OS’s which have very different value systems. I think that’s good for consumers. If I want open (and all the pros and cons that come with that) I can buy an Android phone. If I want closed (and the pros and cons that come with that) I can buy Apple. If they Apple starts to open up a bit and Google locks things down a bit we get the worst of both worlds and no true options.
this is definitely an apple culture thing though. it's such a clear product choice to get apple users to pressure their friends into buying apple products.
Plus iMessage doesn't allow you to send RCS messages from your laptop, whereas it's easy to do that with Google messages. That makes people with iPhones think RCS is worse than it really is. It's just iMessage that's intentionally hobbled. Not to mention the hostile UI decisions made by Apple, which seems to be the main knock against anything non-blue.
It used to be black text on green: https://mobiforge.com/files/iphone-sms-1.jpg
The white-on-acid-green color combination would not make it through any accessibility review. It's literally impossible for a lot of color-impaired people to see, and objectively unpleasant otherwise.
Apple gets plenty of complaints about it. Just look at the Apple forums. Their literal advice to fix it is "make your friends buy an iPhone".
What form of color blindness doesn't let people differentiate between levels of brightness? I checked a couple color blindness simulators and it appears legible.
Heck, white on light green appears to be used in articles about good design for color blind accessibility without any indication that it there's anything wrong with it.
https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2016/06/improving-color-acc...
The argument is that they don't do it to maintain a secure experience but to stop competitors having feature parity with their products.
Personally, I find it annoying that my Garmin watch cannot reply to text messages on my iPhone.
I also find it annoying that my iPhone nags me to cut access to my watch to stop it getting weather updates. It doesn't even nag me the once but repeatedly.
It would be one thing if Apple even competed on features with Garmin but they don't.
I actually switched to an iPhone some time ago and was expecting it to be like you said. But I was shocked that iOS is actually less coherent and a mess in some places, and the App store could be curated better. To be honest the reason I still use it is because the hardware is really good and because it is pretty.
The trillion dollar companies are so massive that they are impinging upon every category of business that touches them. And they're so massive that their sinnew and tendrils touch everything under the sun.
Mobile computing is de-facto owned by two companies. It's owned, tightly controlled like an authoritarian government, and heavily taxed. Compared with the (formerly?) open web and desktop of the 90's - 10's, we've wound up in a computing universe where we're all serfs.
We're in a stagnant world where platforms don't evolve because that's where the moats lie.
Google, Apple, Amazon, and Meta desperately need to be broken up into multiple subsidiary companies. It'll oxygenate the entire tech sector and unlock pent up, unrealized value for the shareholders of these equities.
The reason we seldom see centicorn startups or blockbuster tech IPOs is because FAANG (or whatever we call it nowadays) has a dragnet where they can snuff out the markets of new upstarts or M&A on the cheap.
It costs nothing for Amazon to become Hollywood, buy James Bond and Lord of the Rings, become a primary care doctor, become a grocery store, and cross-sell all of these highly unrelated products on prime advertising real estate. It's essentially free for them to put ads at the top of the Amazon store and emblazen it on their delivery trucks and boxes. The old media, which were once healthy competitors, have to spend hundreds of millions to reach the same eyeballs.
We've wound up with Standard Oil 2.0 and it's deeply damaging our market. The innovators and innovation capital are no longer being rewarded. The calcified institutions are snuffing out everything that moves in search of remaining growth.
We must break up these companies. That is the only healthy way forward.
If it turns out that even then, 10-20 years from now the market is still making mostly glass/metal rectangles with the same feature set of today, then we can consider consolidating that productive capacity for the sake of efficiency.
Many of us are not required to use Apple devices (and we choose not to). Additionally, many of us are able to choose privacy-respecting Android variants (like GrapheneOS). It sometimes is less "convenient", but IMHO it is better then surrendering to the duopoly...
Government is a useful tool to clean up the dissenters who wish to act against the will of the people, but under a democracy you cannot believe that the majority are the dissenters. That defies the entire premise.
What we need is a law that requires companies like Apple to allow their customers to install and run the software they wish, and provide external developers with the same OS features their internal teams have access to.
Europe and Brazil already have such laws, though they could go farther.
In the US we had this bill, which would have covered most of these issues and had bipartisan support: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_App_Markets_Act
So major government intervention.
But the market (and society at large) is ultimately worse off when Pebble and FitBit and Garmin can't compete on a level playing field with Apple Watch— particularly when Pebble is targeting a completely different feature set, price point, and battery profile from what Apple Watch does.
Software companies bend the knee to Apple.
Global payments companies bend the knee to Apple.
Entertainment companies bend the knee to Apple.
On and on and on...
You cannot find a corner of the world that iPhone does not distort, tax, shape, or control in some shape or fashion. Some companies and industries to such an extreme that Apple becomes not just their landlord, but their master.
Desktop computing could never do this. Microsoft never had such draconian rules.
The automotive market doesn't resemble this. Dozens of countries have five or six major automakers. There's something for every budget and niche.
Gaming could never do this. There are three major consoles, six major PC distribution channels, mobile gaming, indie gaming, web gaming, tabletop/physical gaming - that market is huge. Honestly, this is what mobile computing should look like.
Only mobile computing and the web have become so perverted and encumbered. These markets are beyond Standard Oil levels of distortion. And the worst part is how massive, important, and all-encompassing these markets are. Everything in life is touched by these markets.
Why? Can't you just not take advantage of it is it's there? Why demand it to not be here? What ill consequences do you suffer from having the option for additional interoperability?
Still beats the Windows era when a single company owned desktop computing (which was the only type of computing for consumers).
> We've wound up with Standard Oil 2.0
Skipped right over Microsoft!
> We must break up these companies.
With Microsoft it was a complex consent decree. (The initial ruling to break up the company was overturned.)
You could install whatever you wanted on Windows. Any software, any browser. Microsoft was incredibly open with both software and hardware compatibility.
You didn't have to use IIS or C# or Microsoft technology to develop software. You could develop and deploy PHP, Apache, Perl, C, anything. And about that time, Linux servers and distribution were massively growing in popularity. There were so many options.
It was even easy to pirate Windows and other software if you really wanted to. Basically, it was a complete Wild West with lots of latitude and room to navigate for everyone. Microsoft really only pursued enterprise contracts.
And the market back then was incredibly small. The number of desktop broadband and dialup users pales in comparison to the total number of smartphone users we have today.
The situation today is wholly different on every level. Two companies own how society stays connected, how it conducts commerce, and how it shares information. It's gross how much power they have. And how they choose to enforce it and tax it.
It's also great that Apple is able to negotiate with countries as an equal wrt. user privacy, iMessage is the only e2e encrypted messenger allowed in China, and is currently able to mobilize a significant political movement against mandatory backdoors in the UK
The law doesn't care why they choose to do it. The result of the decision is what constitutes illegal monopoly behavior.
But we should also talk about the inverse thing where they give themselves an advantage in positive ways. Like for example, iOS devices will regularly advertise Apple’s own Siri intelligence or their own games subscription or news subscription or iCloud or whatever. These get special treatment and show up in unexpected ways - notifications that you cannot prevent ahead of time or in your system menu with an annoying badge you cannot dismiss until you click the thing. These are things Apple only does does THEIR OWN products and services. It gives them an anti competitive advantage against others, but it does so not by crippling others but by boosting themselves.
All of this should be illegal. I dislike regulations sometimes, for example when EU regulation gets into censorship. But they seem to be doing a lot more to help customers and support competition than the US. While Trump talked a lot about breaking up big tech, I am skeptical as to whether he’ll do anything to actually support competition and actual free markets. It will require regulation, not posturing.