This is all before even getting into things like ecosystem integration.

The first iWatch was announced in September 2014 and released in April of 2015.

The Pebble was discontinued in 2016.

What integrations are you expecting Apple to have released prior to its own release? What functionality did iOS lack that android provided that hampered Pebble's development on iOS?

Just a side note: apple has in past started limiting other companies products as soon as they decide to create a competitor and sometimes years before it hits the market.

IIRC Spotify has been bitten by this at least once, which resulted in a lawsuit.

If it was a "it worked and then Apple took away this API that we were going to use" that would be one thing. If it was "the iPhone didn't have the functionality for other devices to read messages over BlueTooth until 2015 with iOS 8" - that's a different claim.

So this behavior isn't a relic of old APIs

> > If you look at the history between Tile and Apple, we had a very symbiotic relationship. They sold Tile in their stores, we were highlighted at WWDC 2019, and then they launched Find My in 2019, and right when they launched their Find My app, which is effectively a competitor of Tile, they made a number of changes to their OS that made it very difficult for our customers to enable Tile. And then once they got it enabled, they started showing notifications that basically made it seem like Tile was broken.

> Prober is talking about changes that Apple made to location services permissions. For privacy purposes, Apple stopped making it easy for apps to get permanent access to a user's location. Apps in iOS 13 were not initially allowed to present an "Always Allow" option when requesting location access, and the feature had to be enabled in the Settings app. Apple also started sending regular reminders to customers letting them know their location was being used.

> Tile was not happy with these privacy changes and that privacy tweak set Tile against Apple, with Tile in 2019 calling on Congress to "level the playing field."

> > The main points of differentiation of AirTags vis a vis Tile are enabled by platform capabilities that we don't have access to.

> Apple has, in fact, launched the Find My network that gives third-party accessories some of the same access that AirTags have, and Find My network accessories will be able to access the U1 chip in the iPhone 11 and 12 models much like the AirTags, but Tile won't be able to use the Find My network unless it abandons its own app and infrastructure, which it is likely unwilling to do.

> Prober said that Tile has been "seeking to access" the U1 chip since its introduction in the iPhone , and has been denied.

----

Should Apple have a "grant once for app, always allow location service?" (note: this would allow an innocuous app to turn into a tracker with a later update). Or should Apple have a "this app has accessed your location {N} times in the last 24 hours?" ... or some other functionality?

Is "grant once, always allow" a security risk for users?

For U1 chip access: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/nearbyinteraction/... and https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2021/10165/

Users should be allowed to grant grant “always” permission, for that app version. The next time it gets updated, they get hit with the prompt again.

In fact I’d like that to happen for all permissions, so I regularly review them, and I know when an app update has occurred.

Then you don't run the risk of normalizing people always just clicking allow on the prompt that happens all the time (hello windows 7 UAC), which still giving them easy diacoverability and hints of poor behavior with existing permissions.

I think users would hate that since they don't understand why the app keeps asking again and again. Some apps are updated on a weekly basis.

The example given there is the Weather app and widget which I've gotten notifications for myself.

You will also note:

> Navigation apps like Google Maps, Waze, Apple Maps, and so forth work best when they can pinpoint your exact location with precision. But a weather app, on the other hand, works just fine even if it’s only allowed to determine the city where you live or just an approximate region.

Maps, Messages, HomeKit, Clock, Siri, Weather, Wallet - they're all in there. System services too (and you can disable the system service's access to location data - e.g. Apple Pay Merchant Identification, Compass Calibration, Setting Time Zone).

For things that like to access the location in the background (Weather especially does this) you may get "Weather" has been using your location in the background. An example of this can be seen at https://www.lifewire.com/turn-on-mobile-location-services-41...

Its not just "I am using the location data always" but also "this has been accessing your location in the background" which is the type of thing that Tile does.

Apple tends to not have apps that access location information in the background and so this sort of message is not one that people tend to see. Weather is the one that does for weather alerts.

Apple Maps doesn't access location in the background so one wouldn't ever see the a message from it.

Find my system is part of the operating system itself - not an application running in user space. It can be disabled in the "Share My Location" settings in Location services in settings and in System Services "Find My iPhone" because that part of is not a user space app running but rather part of the kernel.

Access to the U1 chip? They can do that.

Show up in Find My? Let's get some standards for secure and authenticated transmission of item location to other parties.

Have Apple's phones automatically detect 3rd party BTLE products and report their whereabouts to a 3rd party? This is a privacy nightmare. Side note - why Apple's phones? How about a patch to Android too?

Something else?

> Apple stopped making it easy for apps to get permanent access to a user's location.

> The main points of differentiation of AirTags vis a vis Tile are enabled by platform capabilities that we don't have access to.

Apple makes it easy for their product (AirTags) to have always on location permissions. Apple makes it hard for their competitor (Tile) to have always on location permissions.

Apple is using their ecosystem to advantage their AirTag business instead of competing on the same playing field as Tile.

Does Tile have a secure way of receiving those messages that does not compromise the security and anonymity (exposing the identity of either the device or the receiver, or the location of either) of the person whose device picked up the message so that this can be implemented in Android core and Apple?

> You are asking to have Apple pick up random BLE messages and send them to various 3rd party vendors with corresponding location information?

I'm not asking for anything. This is just one of many examples of the form: Apple offers API for 3rd party accessory, accessory is successful, Apple launches 1st party accessory, Apple restricts 3rd party accessory API.

Is this behavior illegal? The Department of Justice says it is. The courts will decide.

This is not true. Apple's own apps, like the Weather widget, will display location permission "nag" screens occasionally just like third-party apps do.

> ... but not a message on the same access from apple maps or apple photos.

Apple Maps doesn't use your location in the background. It only uses your location while the app is open, or while you're actively navigating using it.

Apple Photos is your photos. It'd be weird to warn the user that it "has access" to itself.

https://x.com/ericmigi/status/1770832870870827149

But seperately, I think it's really bad for innovation if no new product categories can exist unless Apple makes them first! You can imagine a different type of company that would have been delighted to work with Pebble and add functionality to their operating system, because third party compatibility strengthens their core product.

And of course, if this were the Mac, Pebble would not have needed Apple's cooperation...

You'll pry my Garmin from my cold, dead hands but there's no mistaking it for an actual "smart"-watch. I value it entirely for health & fitness, and the very few "smart" things it can do are just nice-to-have icing on the cake.

Also, you can interact with Apple Health from any smart device via a companion app. You just have to grant permission.

#1 is valid though.

But like the other commenter said, you can’t reply to notifications or calls when the watch is paired to an iPhone, but you could when paired to an Android, which is a feature I definitely miss from when I had a Pixel.

I tried Garmin watches, and they're certainly better as "exercise tracking devices" than anything Apple offers, but they weren't tightly enough integrated with my iPhone to make it "worth it" to me to wear them all the time.

An Apple Watch Ultra - on the other hand - is a poorer exercise tracking device, but gives me enough "integrated with my iPhone" benefit to become the first watch I've worn consistently in 30+ years.

I assumed this was the result of design and development choices by Garmin, but it'll be interesting to see if their are meaningful ways that Apple restricts smartwatch developers from including similar levels of integration.

Tile created trackers and every so often I get an annoying popup

> ~"Tile has been using your location, do you want to stop this?"

Apple then created a competitor product, 'AirTags', but their product does not have these popups.

This is anti-competitive because Apple bypass the restrictions they made on their platform for their product that their competitive have to follow.

The other big one is Apple muscling itself into the music streaming market by converting Music.app into Apple Music. In a fair world, Apple would have been required to show a pop-up that offered Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, Deezer etc. in a random order. You can’t unmake an omelette, so I feel Apple should be forced to pay billions to these competing services as recompense.

This is a huge one! I love this feature, but really would like to see it shared with Google and Waze.

On a personal note, I never in my life want to see advertisements for third-party software by default.

You might want to avoid buying any new Apple products then, or your iPhone settings screen will regularly show you adverts for free trials for Apple News, Apple TV, Apple fitness, Apple Arcade.

Better still, unlike every other free trial in this ecosystem, these terminate the moment you cancel the trial, rather than at the end of the trial period.

Apparently they didn’t because Apple Music boomed right after that change.

> It is by no means unfair, immoral, or unethical for a company to prefer and promote their own products.

It is when that company is one part of a duopoly, especially for a device pretty critical to daily life :+)

> On a personal note, I never in my life want to see advertisements for third-party software by default.

It’s a one-time pop-up, on opening the music app the first time. Same as the browser choice pop-up on your desktop. Hardly an advertisement.

I wonder how much offering discounted subscriptions to students or iCloud Family users also contributed to its success.

> It’s a one-time pop-up, on opening the music app the first time. Same as the browser choice pop-up on your desktop. Hardly an advertisement.

I don't like browser selection options either. Then again, I tend to use Apple's default apps unless I have an unusual reason to use something else.

Unfairness is at the heart of so many antitrust lawsuits (whether successful or not). Anyone old enough to recall Microsoft in the 1990s would say that many people (not at MSFT) were pointing out how unfair bundling Internet Explorer was. You may disagree but it was one of the reasons MSFT got sued.

Maybe I misunderstood your point, but could you clarify a bit what you mean? If I open App Store on my iPhone, it is full of third-party software advertisements by default and I don't even know if they can be turned off.

> Seeing them as apart of the normal platform UI (Microsoft Start menu, looking at you) is distasteful.

Then it doesn't sound like a one-time prompt as part of setup would be an issue.

Ordinarily I hate market interventions like this, but with iOS+Android being a duopoly, we don’t have a free market so special rules start to apply.

> > The main points of differentiation of AirTags vis a vis Tile are enabled by platform capabilities that we don't have access to.

> Apple has, in fact, launched the Find My network that gives third-party accessories some of the same access that AirTags have, and Find My network accessories will be able to access the U1 chip in the iPhone 11 and 12 models much like the AirTags, but Tile won't be able to use the Find My network unless it abandons its own app and infrastructure, which it is likely unwilling to do.

> Prober said that Tile has been "seeking to access" the U1 chip since its introduction in the iPhone , and has been denied.

---

Here's the developer docs for accessing the U1 chip https://developer.apple.com/documentation/nearbyinteraction/...

... and a presentation on the use of the U1 chip with 3rd party accessories at WWDC 2021 https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2021/10165/

For "find my" integration this would suggest two things.

First, that Find My should also query some 3rd party services for location of items - that I should be able to register a 3rd party with a standard API (akin to IMAP for email) that has location tracking info. That's reasonable - I look forward to a standard (and secure) API that doesn't leak my own location data when querying it.

Secondly, if it was "I want tiles to seamlessly be found by Apple devices just like AirTags are - the entire Apple network can find them" this gets into a question of how much cryptography and security would Apple need to open up to have 3rd party BLE devices ping to other services outside of their control that may leak the location information of people walking past them. Why should {arbitrary phone creator} need to ping a 3rd party whenever someone comes within range of the BLE device? That is, if Android devices aren't required to ping Apple's Find My network when in range of an AirTag, why should Apple be required to ping Tile's servers when in range of a Tile?

None, simply proxy it through Apple's existing servers and do not include any information about the device that found the tracker. If you are worried about rogue devices telling iPhone to ping rogue services, then just add a service whitelist to the scheme: Apple trusts Google's service and Tile's service, Google trusts Apple's service and Tile's service, but <random URL> isn't going to get pinged.

Now just make a process by which you prove legitimacy in order to get added to the list and require platform approval.

> Why should {arbitrary phone creator} need to ping a 3rd party whenever someone comes within range of the BLE device?

Because if every phone could ping the network associated with every tracker, then the strength of the network is all participating devices, not just OEM's brand. Apple gets the benefit of having a better Find My network outside the US where Android dominates, and Android gets the benefit of a better Find My network inside the US where iPhone dominates.

> That is, if Android devices aren't required to ping Apple's Find My network when in range of an AirTag, why should Apple be required to ping Tile's servers when in range of a Tile?

Required is a strong word, but Android should ping Apple's network when it sees an airtag, and I bet Google would take that deal if it were available.

All this is sidelong to the point though, that Tile cannot build an app that iPhone users can use that can tie into the beacon functionality the iPhone is already doing in order to enable Tile users with iPhones (that is, those iPhone users with the Tile app installed) have as reliable and friction-free an experience as iPhone users have with airtags.

Doing a "ping this other service" leaks information about the device that has been found. It also opens up Apple to knowing about who found the device or where it was found from information sent across the network. This is an important thing in security of the AirTag (and the rest of the Find My network) - the person detecting the BLE message has zero knowledge about it (other than its existence), Apple has zero knowledge about the person finding it or the device - only the Apple account that is associated with, and the person who owns the Apple account only has knowledge about where and what device - not who found it.

To not compromise the security of the Find My network, other vendors

https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/security/sec6cbc80fd0/...

> In addition to making sure that location information and other data are fully encrypted, participants’ identities remain private from each other and from Apple. The traffic sent to Apple by finder devices contains no authentication information in the contents or headers. As a result, Apple doesn’t know who the finder is or whose device has been found. Furthermore, Apple doesn’t log information that would reveal the identity of the finder and retains no information that would allow anyone to correlate the finder and owner. The device owner receives only the encrypted location information that’s decrypted and displayed in the Find My app with no indication as to who found the device.

This would be an opportunity for Tile to work at trying to establish a standard like was done with UWB ( https://www.nxp.com/applications/enabling-technologies/conne... ) so that multiple vendors could use the technology and chips for interoperability.

Apple giving their tracking product a 3 or 4 year head start over it's competitors.

If you're going to compete against other products on your platform, give it a level playing field.

> Tile is preparing to introduce a new product this year that will serve as a rival to Apple’s long-awaited AirTags and other lost-item trackers coming to the market, including those from Samsung, TechCrunch has learned. While previous Tile trackers have leveraged Bluetooth to help users locate lost items — like a misplaced set of keys, for example — Tile’s new product will take advantage of UWB (ultra-wideband) technology to find the missing items. It will also use augmented reality to help guide users to the lost item’s location via the Tile mobile app.

> ...

> Apple last year began to give third-party developers access to its U1 chip, which uses UWB technology to make the iPhone spatially aware, via its “NearbyInteraction” framework. Some Android devices also ship with the technology. It’s unclear to what extent Tile is using the new frameworks with its forthcoming product, and the company is likely under NDA with regard to its work with Apple specifically, per earlier reports.

> ...

> Meanwhile, according to a new research note from analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, Apple will reveal its own Tile competitor, AirTags this year. Apple has already all but confirmed AirTag’s existence, as it even accidentally published references to its lost-item tracker in an official support video at one point. Leaked images of the AirTags also began to circulate this week, adding fuel to these reports of a “soon-ish” AirTags launch.

> A UWB-powered tracker could help allow Tile to maintain its position in the market. Tile, as of last year, had sold 26 million Tile devices, and was locating around six million items per day across 195 countries. Tile’s website now says its devices reach over 230 countries and territories. With this scale, Tile today leads the market. But Apple’s AirTags could have a first-party advantage with deep integrations into its “Find My” app — a concern that was brought up by Tile in last year’s antitrust hearings in reference to how Apple wields its platform and market power to overrun competitive businesses.

----

I would like to see an integration similar to how mail and homekit work for the Find My : Devices. Enter in the server and account info and be able to get the location of a device registered to that service. Note that that has all sorts of privacy issues if not properly designed.

However, such integration would also eliminate the moat that tile perceives that it has for its product and the differentiation for it.

https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2021/10165/ appears to suggest differently.

It isn't something that any device can do by default. For example, Samsung integrated it into their Smart Tags ( https://www.androidpolice.com/samsung-smarttag-2-uwb/ )

But even the weather app triggers that same location pop up.

Someone other than Apple tracking you, however, is notable, and so people (at least I) would always want to know if someone other than Apple is tracking me via software operating on the device.

The point is Apple as a platform provider made something (location without warning) on the platform available to themselves as a platform user (Airtags), that they didn't make available to other platform users who are their competitors (Tile).

One might retort "Fine, but then granting that permission once is enough." Apparently, that is only true sometimes, and only for Apple.

This is clearly Apple apps being treated differently.

The whole point of the notification is to notify you when an entity is tracking you. If you already know Apple is tracking you, then it does not make a difference if Apple's App A or App B or App C is tracking you, it is all Apple.

For me it makes no sense to make it only about the entity. It's like saying "the US government is tracking you", instead of saying "the US government is tracking you through this app right now"

- I’ve had employers that require a confirmation step from an app as a form of 2FA. If my phone isn’t awake, the notification comes to my watch and I can approve my login from my wrist

- If some action requires typing on my watch, I get a prompt on my iPhone to do the typing there instead of on the tiny watch keyboard. The characters I type via the phone appear in real time on the watch as if I were typing directly

- Dismissing and snoozing notifications syncs so I don’t have to dismiss and snooze notifications on multiple devices

- Similarly, if I set an alarm on my phone, the alarm will ring on my phone and, if I’m wearing it, vibrate my watch without further setup. Again, actions I perform to that alarm can all be performed on the watch or phone.

I’d guess these are all tiny, tiny quality of life features, but I’d be very surprised if other non-Apple watches have the ability to implement them.

Maybe the Apple Watch is not the best fitness tracker watch but it’s plenty good for me and it’s health integration is pretty good especially with the ultra.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/sync-across-your-dev... and https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2023/04/26/phone...

I assume that this functionality is available to other devices too.

https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2023/04/26/phone...

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/sync-across-your-dev...

> Read and reply to messages with ease, make and receive calls, and manage your device’s notifications right on your PC (1) (2)

> 1 Messaging feature is limited by iOS. Image/video sharing and group messaging is not supported. Messages are session based and will only come through when phone is connected to PC.

> 2 Phone Link for iOS requires iPhone with iOS 14 or higher, Windows 11 device, Bluetooth connection and the latest version of the Phone Link app. Not available for iPad (iPadOS) or MacOS. Device compatibility may vary. Regional restrictions may apply. Trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

When a phone call comes in, or I get a notification (text, calendar, app notification etc) - my Apple Watch does a really good job of (quite often) giving me enough info from my wrist that I don't need to pull my phone out of my pocket.

Garmin watches have some of this integration (IIRC you can definitely get texts, I don't remember what else) - but certainly not all of it. I haven't tried smartwatches from other manufacturers.

On Android you could pick a pre-written reply to texts or even dictate a response.

On iOS you couldn't do anything but close the notification.

It’s a different business model.

The Apple Watch itself has WiFi and optionally LTE. It does like to boost off an iPhone’s Bluetooth and let the iPhone do the heavy lifting, but it isn’t required to connect to the Internet and honestly works better when it does (at the cost of battery life). So yeah, more or less, but you still need the Watch paired to an iPhone (because it is an iPhone accessory at its core), and the data is going to be logged to the Health app, and the relevant data (heart rate, workout time, whatever else gets logged for the workout) can be made available to an ecosystem of independent hardware and services. The weight my scale logs for example gets tracked by the vendor service, the Health app, and my food tracker via the Health app.

Either way, Fitness+ is a premium service, not a feature of the iPhone. That it requires specific hardware doesn’t make it particularly special in this regard either.

Totally different markets. The lack of sensor compatibility and lack of battery life make the Apple Watch a non-starter for a lot of the really serious fitness/sports use cases.

To buy them in the first place, for many consumers. Which is exactly what apple had hoped to achieve.

The two main differences are notifications filtering (choosing which apps can send notifications to the watch) and actioning notifications from the watch.

https://support.garmin.com/en-US/?faq=TLeDN92ZU0AgN4df6HakwA...

IIRC, when the Fossil hybrid smartwatches first launched, this capability was not enabled, and they got a lot of feedback on it. By the time I tried one a few months later, the capability was live.

It looks like on Garmin you can only roughly affect which apps send notifications through via the "notification center" designation. If you otherwise don't care about the notification center (I don't), then it's a decent way to filter. But if you otherwise would care about what's in your notification center, then it's not great.

I wonder if Garmin thought they were helping people by mirroring the notification center preferences? If so, they should have let people choose between "use my notification center preferences" and "I'll choose my own apps".

It’s pretty obvious what Apple’s argument would be for why third party smartwatches can’t access the notification settings of all apps - security. It’s totally feasible for them have iOS manage those notification settings and send the desired notifications to the smartwatch. They just don’t because… why would they? It makes the Apple Watch enticing. I love my Forerunner enough that this only slightly annoys me.

Both the notification center workaround Garmin created and the “wait for a notification from the app before you can start filtering them” workaround suck. Apple should be providing the APIs to implement the same notification options on a third party smartwatch.

Similarly, if the notification has a "Reply" option (say a Slack message), can you reply on your watch? Very useful when I get a work message when I'm walking the dog.

As I mentioned in another comment, the inability to reply from third party watches is a bummer.

Sending messages from watch for example. Apple only allows that for Apple watches

Both Garmin and Tile work flawlessly on my Android devices. I've tried to help my wife add them to her iPhone and it's just not worked right, it's a fight to keep things connected and the Tile app only works when it's open and you can't reply to messages from the Garmin and on and on.

I appreciate the efforts to protect privacy and battery life, I can certainly imagine a different Bluetooth device than the Garmin with a worse app that would use the permissions granted it for nefarious purposes, or a worse tracker than the Tile that would wear down battery life with poorly-coded constant background activity, but Apple are clearly also acting in their own selfish interests.

Apple block Garmin watches from replying to text messages as they do on Android for example.

Only Apple Watches are allowed to do that.

I also note that iOS regularly tries to nag me into blocking Garmin Connect from sending notifications to my watch.

Ostensibly that’s to preserve battery life but they don’t do that for their own watches either.

I've noticed this with wireless bluetooth headphone pairing. Sometimes it works, othertimes there are odd limitations and devices unpair randomly.

Also Samsung's Adaptive Fast Charging sends lower wattage through the cable if it detects a non-Samsung device. So Apple is not the only offender here.

The Garmin sadly misses out on notification filtering, focus modes, replies, solid Bluetooth (it drops out from time to time and the app needs reopening).

Airpods and other bluetooth Apple devices seamlessly sync with iPhones because of a wireless protocol they use that is only available on Apple devices. I forget what it's called, but this definitely limits connectivity of devices that aren't made by Apple.

I bought an Apple Watch and it was so fiddly and always trying to get my attention to the point I returned it.