Total bullshit
Apple says that it determined an Apple Watch with Android support wasn’t doable because of technical limitations. As such, it scrapped the idea.
What technical limitations? Smart watches that work with Android exist.
this post was submitted on 22 Mar 2024
73 points (84.8% liked)
Technology
59197 readers
2815 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
The technical limitation of not running iOS I guess.
stepsvsstepCount
God, this fucking API is untennable. Im out!
Well, you see, first off you need a microservice to distinguish between those 2 types of step, then you need separate microservices to handle storing those values. Then you need a GraphQL database in a multi zone Kubernetes cluster as a backend...
Ugh I feel dirty saying all that.
They put their best high school interns on it! What more could they do!?
Like Airdrop (using wifi) could never possibly work like normal Bluetooth sharing (using Bluetooth)
What technical limitations?
I'd guess it was the small battery in the watch. A lot of features on Apple's smartwatch cause serious battery life problems unless they can be offloaded to your phone at least most of the day.
For example if you have the weather conditions on your watch face... the watch can lookup the weather but it generally will ask your phone to do that. Stuff like that is a lot easier if you control the phone operating system and aren't just running an app.
... for example if you never launch the weather app on your phone, both Android and iOS will reduce it's ability to drain the phone's battery by running in the background. Apple makes an exception to that rule for weather apps where the user has a widget an Apple Watch face. How could the Android battery management systems know what widgets are on your Apple Watch?
I don't understand the issue. Why can't they just call the Android API when the user wants to view their weather? I'm just not buying that this would be so costly to the battery life that it would be unusable.
I am buying that apple wants to keep their walled garden and they're making up excuses to do so
And the linked Bloomberg article straight up says they cancelled the project because the Apple Watch drives iPhone sales, lol.
Because of Google’s limitations (and rightfully so, on Google’s part to limit it). Any app can call the weather API on Android if they want, assuming the user has given them permission, and the app is running. Since Apple doesn’t control the Andriod OS, they have to conform to the rules of any other app on the app store, meaning they are subject to the OS stopping their watch companion app if the user never opens it (and honestly as a daily smartwatch user, no one ever opens the companion app after setup). On iOS, Apple can waive these limitations for select Apps, like their watch app, but on Andriod, they have no such ability.
In short, they can call the weather API, but it’ll only work if the app is running, which by all accounts on Andriod, as a third party app, it shouldn’t be.
EDIT: I’ll also note that having used both platforms (WatchOS and Andriod Watch), Google and Apple have taken fundamentally different approaches to their watches, in a way that makes cross compatibility difficult.
Andriod Watches are fundamentally, an extension of the phone they are running alongside, they primarily exist to give you notifications, and the vast majority of apps are calling home to the phone to have their companion app perform tasks.
Apple Watches on the other hand are fundamentally “their own device”. They receive notifications just like Andriod watches do, but they can also function entirely on their own, they even have cell radios built in. They are essentially, their own small phone, only using the companion phone as a data connection, if you don’t have a sim for the built in radio. This is not really something Andriod is designed to accommodate. They only work well on iOS because Apple can exempt them from a lot of the restrictions third party apps have, they are built in from the OS level, where Andriod watches just aren’t.
Yep, a multi-billion dollar tech company, known for the "innovation", was stumped by cross-platform support. I totally believe that. 🤣
…they just couldn’t figure out how to hamper the watch in just the right way to convince users that Android OS was the problem, so they gave up.
Yeah...
For a time, Apple engineers were also deeply engaged in an effort to make the watch and Health app compatible with the billions of Android devices in circulation. The move, codenamed Project Fennel, would have brought the company’s health features — and the health benefits Apple has repeatedly underlined — to many more people, especially in countries where Apple has little market share. But other business considerations prevailed: The work was nearly complete when Project Fennel was canceled, in part because the Apple Watch is a driver of iPhone sales. “If you gave up the watch to Android, you would dilute the value of the watch to the iPhone,” said someone with knowledge of the decision. —Linked Bloomberg article
Sure.
In response to the DOJ’s assertion, Apple confirmed for the first time that it at one point considered Android support for the Apple Watch. After a three-year investigation, Apple says that it determined an Apple Watch with Android support wasn’t doable because of technical limitations. As such, it scrapped the idea.
Yeah, bullshit.
Somehow Garmin, Samsung, HTC, Huawei, Pebble (RIP), Fossil, Moto/Lenovo, etc. managed to do it just fine.
Rather than technical reasons, rather I suspect the real reasons were financial and ideological, i.e. it would would conflict with Apple's brand-wide pathos of vendor lock-in, and would mean the maximum amount of capital would not extracted from the rubes as a portion of it might -- shock, horror -- go to one of their competitors, Google or Samsung.
Apple spending 3 years researching and determining it is not doable due to technical limitations:
Which is exactly why they are getting sued, for creating vendor lock-in and monopoly.
Apple confirmed that it at one point considered creating an Apple Watch for Android.
The very first line is very very different than the title...
yeah my bullshit alarms are blaring like a tornado siren
I love the ending here:
9to5Mac’s Take It’s not Apple’s fault that there’s no Apple Watch equivalent on Android. Google bought Fitbit and still hasn’t created something that is good enough to entice Apple Watch users to switch.
Sure thing buddy, keep drinking that cool aid. In reality Apple probably realized that they would have to face stiff competition without their walled garden to protect them and that would have been a lot less lucrative.
And they're been taking more than a year to implement stalking detection for Android's AirTag equivalent, and it's still not done. The final spec came out in December, but it's being available to Apple since they announced it in Spring 2023.
https://www.androidauthority.com/apple-delaying-android-airtag-find-my-device-network-3425394/
I really like Air guard for this. It's on F-Droid.
That's only for AirTags tho, not Google's version that is supposedly coming soon.
I suppose support for those would be added promptly, seeing as it currently supports Tiles, Chipolos and Smartthings Tags (Samsung's equivalent)
I'm talking about iOS not currently detecting the upcoming trackers compatible with Google's Find My Device network, which is delaying Google's deployment (Google's justification is that they don't want to release the product unless iOS can detect them).
Oh sorry my bad!
In that case, I think it's pretty poor that Apple hasn't made any progress on this after having the specs available for so long, also considering you can already get your hands on third party Android apps that can arbitrarily use BLE to detect all kinds of nearby devices.
To me it feels like Apple is trying to saturate as much of the market as they can before they bake in support for third party tracker detection
Is the answer to their failure incompetence or greed? I'm sure Apple's engineers are smart enough to make something compatible with Android, so I can only assume their failure is due to not being able to get by with real competition.
Apple says it spent three years trying to bring Apple Watch to Android …
… without customers realising their watches offers nothing more than the competition, and the primary reason their watches were successful was the lack of such competition within their walled garden.
I have a vision of the Apple Watch Android port team sitting in an internal office, frisbee throwing business cards into a bin for three years.
🤣