[pbasista]

Your post has some fair points. But it also makes statements that seem illogical to me. For example:

> I don't want $10 aliexpress smartwatches to be able to seamlessly connect to my phone

Why? What is an objective reason for something like that?

You are the gatekeeper of your devices. You choose which accessories to pair. If you only want Apple-made devices to connect to your phone, fine. You do that. No one is suggesting or even implying that customers should be forced to use non-Apple devices.

The main point is to give the customers a choice. And let them decide what they want.

[bigglywiggler]

What I don't want is for the protocols that allow for apple's seamlesness to be opened to cheap trash. If Apple is forced to make it open to manufacturers of cheap trash and support it for manfacturers of cheap trash then it won't be economical for them to make cool stuff anymore and we won't have cool stuff anymore. I also dont want it to be easier to make devices that could maliciously take advantage of the friction removal capabilities that Apple builds into their devices. Customers already have a choice, e-waste slop garbage or apple products. The idea that they should be able to have both is quite ridiculous.

[troupo]

> What I don't want is for the protocols that allow for apple's seamlesness to be opened to cheap trash.

You either allow "cheap trash" that no one forces you to buy, or you exclude everyone. Here's Pebble on how they can't make their otherwise capable watch compatible with Apple products for absolutely arbitrary decisions on Apple's part: https://ericmigi.com/blog/apple-restricts-pebble-from-being-...

> Customers already have a choice, e-waste slop garbage or apple products.

Ah yes. As we all know, there are exactly two categories of products: Apple's flawless products and cheap trash. Nothing in between.

[bigglywiggler]

I used to have a pebble time, it worked fine for me with my iphone that I had at the time. It died when I swam with it the first time. I loved that thing, was really bummed when it died. My Apple Watch SE2 blows literally everything it could do out of the water. Even not including the apple proprietary walkie talkie feature which I use more than anything else on my watch because me and my wife love it. Except the battery life but I can't sleep with a watch on so it doesn't really matter. It still gives me 2-3 solid days. It's a shame that they had/have difficulty making it work but the reality is that I never ever used it to do any of the things that they couldn't get it to do. And I don't use my current apple watch for any of that either. I never cared about sending texts with it, I didn't do much with the watchfaces and I'd never have paid for one. I used it to control music, count steps and see notifications without going in my pocket. If it lived up to it's waterproofing claims I'd probably still be using it today. It certainly wasn't trash and I want to see them succeed but if they had these features then [URL for first google result for aliexpress smartwatch removed] would also have these features and that would not be what anyone wants. Least of all the repebble team who wouldn't have any edge over the dollar or so price new user welcome deal on that particular piece of ewaste. IMO pebble should focus more on the things that people actually care about like the cool e-ink screen, distraction-lowered functionality, battery life and making sure it doesn't die the first time you swim with it like in the ads than bashing Apple for making their stuff more secure than everyone else and raising the barrier to entry for manufacturers of slop. Pebbles worked great on Android but 40% of their current customer base uses an iphone and they still want the pebble. Maybe the 'less developed' functionality wasn't so bad? Maybe, like me, they wanted a smart-lite watch as opposed to a smartwatch? If I had known that they were actually making watches again then I'd have actually bought one instead of my apple watch and I'd live happily never knowing about walkietalkie. I do marketing, if by some chance Eric Migicovsky reads this then I'd be honored to quit my current job and go sell pebbles for him.

[troupo]

This huge meandering text completely avoids addressing the issues described at the link.

> Pebbles worked great on Android but 40% of their current customer base uses an iphone and they still want the pebble. Maybe the 'less developed' functionality wasn't so bad?

Yes, because the watch isn't "cheap garbage" as you pretend that everything non-Apple is.

The question is: why can't they have the dame functionality on iOS?

[bigglywiggler]

It wasn't that long and it didn't meander much. It's clear that you didn't realy understand what I was saying. Sure, Pebbles weren't cheap garbage but mine literally died the second that I tried to use it the way that it was used in their ads. I didn't care about the less developed functionality at all. You still don't address the fact that the vast majority of tech out there right now is e-waste.

The point which I was making is that Eric and the pebble team complained about Apple instead of competing in the space that they themselves had created. They were first to market with a smart watch and instead of just finding the consumer base which exists for what they had built and catering to them they tried to appeal to literally everyone and lost. They lost to literally better devices, better screens, better hardware, better software and better capabilities across all ecosystems. Cheap devices using Google's watch OS wiped the floor with Pebble. They had a loyal fanbase who liked the watch for what it was. I was part of that fanbase.

I suggest that if they had just did what they could for apple users and moved on to focus on the nerdy, first adopter types who actually liked their product and are somehow still coming back for it now then they'd have succeeded. It's hard to understand why they spent so much time and money focusing on ios notifications when Android also has a much higher market share and the majority of their customers were/are there anyway. They could have continued to develop their device in that direction and probably still been around today. they could have made better e-ink screens, better colour, better battery life, better charging hardware, better build quality, better waterproofing, built-in GPS, a real attempt at fostering a developer ecosystem for their OS or any number of other great features but they spent gorillions on ios notifications?

I'd also like to take a second to point out that they sold out to fitbit at the behest of their VC overlords because they were insolvent and ditched their userbase hard. Fitbit absolutely bought them out in order to take their IP and kill them as competitors for good. Complaining about Apple on the relaunch and relying on a community of enthusiasts to maintain an opensource codebase for their OS after Google bought out fitbit isn't really very customer focused of them.

Myreply to your question is why should they be able to have that functionality? Why should Apple allow other companies to compete with them within it's walled garden whch they made effort building and have the features that they designed and spent money developing? Why can't other companies develp their own cool features and their own ecosystems? It may benefit some people who want to use non-Apple stuff with Apple stuff but how does this actually benefit Apple and it's customers?

[pbasista]

There are many misleading claims based on wrong assumptions and plain falsehoods in your post.

> What I don't want is for the protocols that allow for apple's seamlesness to be opened to cheap trash.

Why not? Is there any objective reason for that?

> If Apple is forced to make it open to manufacturers of cheap trash and support it for manfacturers of cheap trash

What are you even talking about? No one is suggesting that Apple should be supporting other manufacturers' products in a sense that it should be Apple's responsibility to make sure that they work.

This discussion is about interoperability. The only ask is to do things in a standardized way. So that other manufacturers can develop interoperable products, if they so like.

[bigglywiggler]

Right, but they have to do R&D for their cool stuff because the standardized way doesn't allow for their features. Then other manufacturers get salty because they didn't do any of their own expensive R&D to make things work properly and the EU makes laws to force Apple to open up their R&D and support iit so that other companies don't have to do their own. The EU is definitely saying that it should be Apple's responsibility to maintain support of it's proprietary features for 3rd party products. If you don't want Apple products then don't buy them? In fact, what is the objective reason that other manufacturers should be able to make interoperable products?