Re:U.S. sues Apple, accusing it of maintaining an iPhone mon...
by gnicholas on Friday March 22, 2024 @01:49PM
(#39793070)
The Garmin solution is not great. I didn't mind the Pebble/Fossil solution. Basically, if an app sends notifications a lot, you can pretty quickly set the setting for it. And if an app rarely sends notifications (like the United app, if you travel rarely) then it will show up by default the first time and you can change the preference if you want. I didn't really mind this process, and in some ways it's better than having to scroll through every app that could conceivably send a notification. I wore my Pebble for almost 5 years — until the battery was down to 1 day — and this was never something that I minded or even thought about. I would slap my Pebble back on if the battery were fixed, for sure!
It’s pretty obvious what Apple’s argument would be for why third party smartwatches can’t access the notification settings of all apps - security. It’s totally feasible for them have iOS manage those notification settings and send the desired notifications to the smartwatch. They just don’t because… why would they? It makes the Apple Watch enticing. I love my Forerunner enough that this only slightly annoys me.
Both the notification center workaround Garmin created and the “wait for a notification from the app before you can start filtering them” workaround suck. Apple should be providing the APIs to implement the same notification options on a third party smartwatch.