But, gone are the fun days people spam airdropping funny "This is the captain" pictures to everyone while waiting for takeoff in an airplane.
This is correct, as in some countries, you use your phone to authenticate access to banking applications and payments (e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart-ID). However, I find it a bit of a stretch to claim that having iMessage access on a smartwatch is essential for being a functional member of society.
Corporations will always take steps to ensure their profitability. Apple, for example, is incentivized to keep its systems locked down to maintain its ecosystem. There are likely other justifiable considerations behind these decisions. While laws exist to regulate what corporations can and cannot do, there should be a reasonable balance. That said, I don’t think this is a battle worth fighting - people can simply switch to an Android phone, which offers better support for a wider range of smartwatches.
Giving all your data to Google (an adtech company) is not an acceptable solution. Not to mention that it's incredibly difficult to leave the Apple ecosystem, by design.
So what is the solution here for the common non-tech savvy smartphone user?
So honestly I think that legislation such as what's happening in the EU is the only solution. This includes investigating Google as well as Apple. I'm not a huge fan of legislation in general but the current state of mobile computing is depressingly bad right now.
> However, I find it a bit of a stretch to claim that having iMessage access on a smartwatch is essential for being a functional member of society.
Btw I agree here. Perhaps the EU is being a little too overbearing in some aspects, but most of it is good. I think in this case Pebble is trying to take advantage of the existing interoperability provisions, which are a general framework allowing devs to request access to certain functions. However the EU has said that they want to target smartwatches in particular which sounds like misplaced priority to me...
Agreed.
What I originally meant was that I don’t see Apple’s reluctance to open up the iMessage ecosystem as an indication that they wouldn’t support a banking or government authentication system. I just don't understand the concern here.
To give one example, Apple has removed an option for Airdrop file sharing between iPhones that are not on one another’s contact lists after the pressure from the Chinese government to stop it from being used for protests coordination. And yet this change was silently rolled out globally as a part of an iOS update.
So, no, “Good enough for most people” is not actually good enough.