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.
I too have a very capable smartwatch (fitness watch - Garmin Fenix) and it's remarkable how different my experience with messages and actions are relative to the experience of Garmin users with Apple phones.
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!
> 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
> 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.
The Garmin experience on iOS is noticeably inferior for me.
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?
I can understand someone would want that level of granularity.
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.
Don't forget the classic "Oh, that 3rd party app/feature is so popular, I bet we could build a identical/slightly less useful thing ourselves so people don't have to use other things than Apple software ever"
Conveniently, Apple's App Store Review Guidelines also include several rules that restrict apps from duplicating features that the OS already provides.
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...
I’m pretty sure this rule is only there to stop the hundreds of “flashlight” apps that used to exist. (Although, they appear to still exist) There isn’t tons of innovation or competition in “flashlight app” other than adding advertisements. There used to be a bunch of them that would only get popular out of necessity. The ones I’m seeing now in the App Store do seem to have non-default behaviors like “strobe light” at least, so they aren’t true clones of native functionality.
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.
Flashlight apps were a 3rd party innovation. Apple didn't originally realize that the camera's light could be used that way. I wonder how many other useful features don't exist today because of Apple/Google's greed prevent a truly free smartphone market.
So what? Why not let there be flashlight apps if users find them useful? Apple doesn't have to recommend them in the app store and can sort them to the bottom of search results page. But why can't the exist. If people don't want them they will choose not to install them.
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).
And yet Apple has shown many times a willingness to use vague language of their rules to block apps they don't want. Past behavior can't predict future behavior.
"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.
Do you think Apple will describe how they’re using this to prevent competition in their guidelines? You’ll need to read third party developers’ accounts for that.
I've never understood this Apple criticism (scherlocking). Someone built a search for your files, so it's not right for Apple to build a pretty key feature into the OS?
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.
The key criticism is the final step. They don't only duplicate the functionality. They then ban the original implementation from their stores because it can create "customer confusion".
Not explicitly (because that might be too openly anti-competitive even for Apple) but Apple refused to allow f.lux into the App Store, and it had to be sideloaded - and Apple leaned on them to stop offering that.
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.
> 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.
Not allowing third party apps to adjust screen colors seems like a reasonable security boundary to me. For the most part when you close an app on iOS, it gets closed. It doesnt get to keep changing system settings in the background. Would be awful if in addition to notifications, apps also got to adjust your colors.
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.
For context, as a software developer and Mac OS user who also happens to daily drive a screen reader, I seriously doubt whether you could implement a third-party SR on that platform.
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.
In Apple nomenclature, a private API is an API that your app is technically allowed to call, but that is subject to change at any moment and has 0 documentation and no backwards compatibility guarantees. If Apps were allowed to rely on those, they could just stop working across minor version upgrades or on new devices.
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.
No, all security-sensitive API surface requires being on the other side of a process boundary (and checks on who is allowed to talk to it). “Signed code” is not a thing given that you can just ship an app that can do anything and have its behavior change at runtime (that’s what an interpreter is!)
While this is true, many, many apps use private APIs. Even apps that don’t need them. One common use case is prevent an app from being debugged or run on certain devices - you can achieve that through private APIs.
Even innocuous apps like a calculator can, and do, use them for that purpose.
Almost every major third party app is using some private API or the other. There is even an internal list that Apple keeps of apps that are allowed to do. It’s quite trivial to bypass the App Store checks (which are quite bad and sometimes even flag legitimate use of system APIs).
The issue is that they don’t compete on equal footing, because they integrate whatever functionality they adapt with OS features and/or first-party apps in a way that third-party apps can’t. That’s anti-competitive and increases their moat.
It’s not exactly a new thing, either. Even back in the 80s and 90s, many times Apple either implemented obvious-in-retrospect functionality from popular freeware/shareware themselves or bought up the shareware and rolled it in.
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.
If necessary, you can even retroactively ban the competitor's app from the App Store that you control.
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.
I mean it’s also a lot more work to add all the features Pebble would need so it could simply be they don’t think it’s worth it (and it probably isn’t, given all the other broken stuff they need to fix).
it's pretty frustrating how "apple people" just don't care that it's apples fault. i routinely hear my wife mutter "i hate google so much!" when a google maps integration is being intentionally hobbled to keep her using apple maps. or when she has trouble managing rcs conversations because somebody in our social world has the gall to be on an android phone.
I am aware that apple blocks certain functionality to maintain a cohesive and secure experience. It is THE reason I buy their products, I want the curation. Otherwise I'd buy an android device.
> I am aware that apple blocks certain functionality to maintain a cohesive and secure experience.
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.
That's their justification. I never had security problems on Android, and I actually find Android to be more cohesive. Just a few things where iOS is uncohesive to me: You can customize the keyboard, but it will not work everywhere the same. Apps will send you randomly through hoops to click some permissions things in settings. App settings are sometimes centralized, sometimes in the app. There is no single way to "back" to the previous screen.
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.
That's all well and good. Opting into that knowingly is a reasonable decision. Hopefully knowing you've opted into that you aren't then cursing Google when they don't support some functionality blocked by Apple, or when RCS is poorly supported, but instead recognizing this as a trade-off you made opting into the Apple closed garden.
The reason Apple Maps even exists is because Google intentionally crippled their Maps app on iPhone in order to benefit their own OS.
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.
The "closed" approach is way better when it involves guardrails rather than handcuffs. Pixels offer guardrails; they're just as secure as iPhones but offer a lot more freedom to power users. Android is a lot more than just Pixels though and some of the other OEMs don't provide security updates quite as timely, creating a bad reputation
I’m not sure I agree. I’ve seen tech illiterate family members screw up Pixels and Samsung devices in the same way they screwed up Windows systems in the past. Even the most tech illiterate family members have done nothing bad to their iPhones. In fact I know one that was still using an iPhone 7 until last year and it was very functional. Two year old top of the line Samsung phones are crawling after two years. All anecdotal of course.
It does work. As I said, I had to go through it with a family member a few months ago. It's hardly Apple's problem if a user forgets their password AND email address.
I don't expect Apple to get someone back into an account they've forgotten everything about, but you shouldn't need to do that just to download a free app. Grandma already knows her passcode, that should be enough.
There are like 10 grandmas in my extended family (in-laws etc), none of them know their Apple ID passwords, none have recovery contacts. They probably forgot because it never asks for that password except when they want to download a free app, cause for some reason that's a highly sensitive thing.
i had the same problem with this behavior from google as i do from apple. i would be just as critical of google zealots blaming apple for google shortcomings as i am for apple zealots blaming google for apple shortcomings.
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.
RCS on iPhone just sucks though. All I have is anecdotal evidence, but it feels like I only get late or out-of-order delivery from iPhones.
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.
Arguably, that's more to do with the standard and Google's proprietary extensions. The colors thing has been discussed ad nauseum. SMS messages have been green from day one - see https://youtu.be/G8d7E26WLsY?t=1723. If colors were reversed, there'd be the same complaints. If the difference between iMessage and SMS were highlighted any other way, there'd be complaints too.
The standards issue is only relevant to E2EE. It has no bearing on the usability issues here. The E2EE issues should be fixed soon according to Apple. I'd bet a good amount of money the usability issues will remain.
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".
> It's literally impossible for a lot of color-impaired people to see
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.
As someone with strong deuteranopia (I struggle to differentiate shades of green and darker bluey-reds), I am extremely sceptical about that claim too. For what it's worth, I've never had a problem reading the white-on-green bubbles in Messages. I do agree that a contrast closer to WCAG's recommendation would be better (currently 2:1, recommendation is ~4.5:1), but this is a diversion. The point I was making is that no matter what Apple does here, there is visible differentiation, and people will complain about it.
Google provides a client and infrastructure, which they sell to carriers and which has a number of proprietary extensions, including E2EE if the message is Google to Google. If a carrier does not provide Universal Profile, Google provides it. If you send a message using Google Messages, it may default to Google's profile, which is not open and only available to Google Messages users, which is arguably no different to iMessage. Apple provides an RCS client which relies on carrier infrastructure. If there is no compatible profile AIUI, it falls back to MMS or fails.
My personal stance on this is that while I’m open to making iOS, etc more flexible, it needs to be done in a way that cleanly avoids the whole “grandma accidentally installed a pile of browser toolbars yet again” problem. I’m confident I can manage added flexibility myself but there’s a very real need for a truly foolproof, social-engineering-resistant option to point friends and family without such aptitudes toward.
perhaps i'm out of date! this may have resolved with the recent increased support of rcs and i maybe haven't heard this complaint lately, it's worth checking into again.
I don't like that iMessage = lock-in, but everyone else needs to make a better standard first. We got cross-platform encrypted covid chat before we got this. RCS has an FBI "do not use" warning on it because there's no E2EE. And the reason people don't want green bubbles is cause they always screw up the group chat.
The ONLY answer is antitrust action from every major government.
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.
100% agree that decisive anti-trust action is needed. In addition, many of us can (and do) choose to just not participate (to the best of our abilities) in the nonsense from these companies.
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...
Interoperability is a commons; the market won't protect it on its own, because each individual consumer's best action is to just get an iPhone and an Apple Watch.
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.
I don't, and I won't, but that doesn't really address the points in that post. There is nothing any individual can do about massive corporate cartels controlling entire industries and strangling all potential competition in the cradle, like they said anti-trust enforcement is the only way. But apparently it'll be difficult to garner support for that when people perceive it as an attack on their 'consumer preferences'
Apple and iPhone are a gravitational singularity distorting every single market in the world.
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?
IMO it makes sense to nationalize things that lend themselves to natural monopolies, or sectors where innovation has mostly dried up on account of maturity, where continued progress is largely driven by tax-funded research grants already. I'm not convinced that "computing" is such an industry, innovation seems dead there because of monopoly. In that case, they should be broken up to drive competition-fueled innovation, with careful supervision to monitor for and punish anti-consumer behavior, abuse of negative externalities, etc.
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.
i think this pov buys too tightly into the idea that national projects arent innovative they are often more innovative than the private sector but it requires buy in and focus from their managers and funding from politicians
The Soviet Union had everything nationalized and it always accountable only to the Politburo. This idea that governments are “accountable” is cute. Government shouldn’t be running businesses.
Building and maintaining a functional marketplace (e.g. through common-sense anti-trust enforcement) is about more than just optimizing for a specific outcome...
Microsoft of that era is a tiny bug compared to the trillion dollar giants of today.
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.
I don't think we need any major government intervention.
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.
> 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.
Trouble is that most major governments are democratic, meaning that the governmental powers that be are the very same people (the population at large) who are already not willing to do anything about it. The majority will clearly isn't there at this time (that can change in the future, of course).
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.
Apple Silicon could not have existed without the vast amount of capital that a trillion dollar company like Apple could've mustered, TSMC might even be one or two generations behind where it is right now if Apple couldn't afford bankroll the latest generation and temporarily monopolize it, and for that reason alone I'm fine with the state of affairs
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
Because everyone here commenting knows the reason?! This is all speculation by outsiders. Apple isn’t commenting and if they did, outsiders wouldn’t know if it’s the real reason. It could be that Apple lacks the patents, for some of these key features and they are making the best out of a bad situation. It is what it is and we can’t be sure why.
I honestly don't think Apple products are a smart choice for tech savvy people anymore if they ever were. You are paying a premium for easy to use, convenient servicing, and the aesthetic.
There are many anti competitive practices that Apple and Microsoft engage in. And a lot of it is not even “preventing” something but just bogging it down so it takes a lot of time and money and starves out anyone who could challenge them.
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.
