• akilou@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    8 months ago

    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.

    • abhibeckert@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      edit-2
      8 months ago

      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?

      • metaldream@sopuli.xyz
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        0
        ·
        edit-2
        8 months ago

        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.

        • bloopernova@programming.dev
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          0
          ·
          8 months ago

          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.

    • Pantherina@feddit.de
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      8 months ago

      Like Airdrop (using wifi) could never possibly work like normal Bluetooth sharing (using Bluetooth)