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.
The technical limitation of not running iOS I guess.
stepsvsstepCountGod, 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)
…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:
https://kbin.melroy.org/m/technology@lemmy.world/t/169337/-/comment/1533639 Pretty much.
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
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
