Comment by 0xffff2
2 years ago
Can you expand on what "integrated with my iPhone" means in concrete terms? I don't really understand what you mean.
2 years ago
Can you expand on what "integrated with my iPhone" means in concrete terms? I don't really understand what you mean.
I don't use smart watches but I have an example on the trackers.
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.
Longest-running example is Apple Maps displaying mapping on the lockscreen and having special bespoke turn-by-turn notifications, using a private API to which no other navigation app has access to.
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.
> Longest-running example is Apple Maps displaying mapping on the lockscreen and having special bespoke turn-by-turn notifications, using a private API to which no other navigation app has access to.
This is a huge one! I love this feature, but really would like to see it shared with Google and Waze.
People know how to use the App Store. If they want Spotify they know how to find it. It is by no means unfair, immoral, or unethical for a company to prefer and promote their own products.
On a personal note, I never in my life want to see advertisements for third-party software by default.
9 replies →
RIP lala.com, my first and favorite music streaming service - bought out by apple and summarily closed with previous users encouraged to migrate to Apple Music. I think I got a $15 credit or something. As if I needed a reason to further resent Apple.
> by converting Music.app into Apple Music
Apple made iTunes (which already supported Apple Music) into a dedicated Music app, and offloaded some of the other stuff iTunes could do into separate apps and the Finder.
1 reply →
Not saying this to defend Apple, but last week I had that same location tracking pop up for Apples Weather app.
Yes but that doesn't distract from the airtags issue, because airtags are supported by the OS itself, not a specific app. Good on Apple for applying the same rules to it's apps, but not so good on Apple for not giving Tile a way to work in the same manner as airtags.
7 replies →
Also, Apple licenses out the Find My tech to other trackers. But... you don't get the new precision finding features.
> But... you don't get the new precision finding features.
https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2021/10165/ appears to suggest differently.
2 replies →
Not really defending Apple here since they do have an unfair advantage over on these trackers.
But even the weather app triggers that same location pop up.
I would bet most people already know using an Apple product and agreeing to the Find My and other terms in intial setup means Apple is always tracking you. So a pop up from Apple saying that Apple is tracking you makes no sense, it is already known, and accepted by the device user.
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.
I would bet most people buying tracking devices know those tracking devices are tracking location.
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).
But, some Apple apps do in fact tell you that. This actually does make sense, too. When you collect information for one specific reason, it doesn't mean the user has granted you consent to use it for other purposes carte blanche.
One might retort "Fine, but then granting that permission once is enough." Apparently, that is only true sometimes, and only for Apple.
Why? Because a user allowed them to track them when using one app, it doesn't mean should extend automatically that to every app they ever develop.
This is clearly Apple apps being treated differently.
3 replies →
Not the parent, but just a few things I’d guess would be Apple Watch specific:
- 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.
Not the original poster but for me it means not having to look at my phone for many tasks. I can see who texted or messaged me and the message without opening my phone. I can take or ignore a call. Basically anything that hits your message alerts can be displayed on the watch in most cases.
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.
When setting up my Windows machine I was given the opportunity to pair it with my iPhone via Phone Link. In doing so, my Windows machine was able to get all of the notifications that I saw on the Lock Screen of my iPhone, and call history (make and receive calls too).
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.
It’s a poor subset of the functionality available to the Apple Watch. One obvious example is that you can reply to a message on an Apple Watch, not so over the API Windows uses.
1 reply →
Yep. That's exactly right.
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.
Does a Garmin watch not do that? I often see people looking at notifications on their non-Apple watch.
I can do all of that with my Garmin watch though?
It's been years, but IIRC the main disparity was with responding to notifications.
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.
For example, the Apple Health App automatically talks to my dieting app, so when I walk, I get credit for the calories.
A Garmin watch can’t track heart rate during an Apple Fitness Plus workout, an example.
Yeah but that’s a separate paid service tied to specific hardware, not so much an iPhone feature as an Apple TV and Watch feature. Garmin can integrate into HealthKit as well as any other fitness tracker.
Apple's main fitness competitor Peloton supports non-peloton fitness bands, cadence meters, etc.
1 reply →
That is to say, they communicate directly with each other and not through the iPhone?
1 reply →
Most Garmin users wouldn't ever be using Apple Fitness+ to workout.
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.