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Comment by thatfrenchguy | Hacker News Reader

I mean, even if you assumed that it would actually take 40 minutes (it likely doesn’t), I suspect Apple engineers working on this cost the company more than $249k a year

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Wow sounds like the $99/yr the commenter was saying developers "pay" Apple is a trivial amount and cannot be used to justify the development of an entire SDK that maybe a dozen companies will use.

But Apple already justified building a secure, private, on-device SDK that exactly one (1) company will be guaranteed to use.

I see no reason it cannot be a private entitlement similar to the other sensitive entitlements on iOS.

Internal API is not an SDK. It regularly astounds me how many commenters on a so-called hacker forum seem to think it is. Is everyone else publishing their tightly coupled business logic code as API these days? Is that what GraphQL is?

I would hope that security critical parts of the OS that can't be exposed as an API aren't being used to communicate with the apple watch. Why would the apple watch need access to these APIs that can't be publicly exposed? Is there any reason beyond apple wanting to make sure other smartwatches are second class citizens in their ecosystem?

This isn't exposing business logic, this is an operating system vendor deciding what it exposes to vendors. There is clearly an API that the apple watch is using to communicate with the OS, why shouldn't other vendors be allowed to access this?

Apple can revoke the entitlement if it's abused, as they've done many times in the past with signed apps. Nobody (including the EU) is demanding that it be an zero-auth free-for-all API, only that competitors can use it. It's not an absurd demand and there is absolutely precedent for Apple individually trusting competitors in this regard.

If you're astounded by hackers asking practical questions, maybe you should stop carrying water for corps and see how your back feels. Let's talk shop, what are the roadblocks Apple faces here?

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