Apple says it spent three years trying to bring Apple Watch to Android - 9to5Mac
Apple says it spent three years trying to bring Apple Watch to Android - 9to5Mac
As part of its response to the United States DOJ lawsuit today, Apple confirmed that it at one point considered...
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.
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)
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?
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.
Yep, a multi-billion dollar tech company, known for the "innovation", was stumped by cross-platform support. I totally believe that. 🤣
…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:
Which is exactly why they are getting sued, for creating vendor lock-in and monopoly.
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
I love the ending here:
9to5Mac’s Take It’s not Apple’s fault that there’s no Apple Watch equivalent on Android. Google bought Fitbit and still hasn’t created something that is good enough to entice Apple Watch users to switch.
Sure thing buddy, keep drinking that cool aid. In reality Apple probably realized that they would have to face stiff competition without their walled garden to protect them and that would have been a lot less lucrative.
I'm not entirely sure what Kool-Aid you were implying they're drinking...?
"Apple makes apple products in the apple ecosystem. Non-apple ecosystem fails to entice apple users over"
That's essentially what you quoted. What part of that is controversial? It's practically just a dry statement of fact.
Apple's anti-competitive practices ensuring that it's successful within his own ecosystem isn't a controversial part of that. We know that's what they do.
Or maybe I'm just missing something here.
Apple watch not being on Android only means Apple doesn't support Android. No one else can support Apple's hardware, especially considering their litigious nature and suing for rectangles and logos. Technical capability exists, it's only a matter of money and whether they want to do it. Either way you turn it it's Apple's decision, and therefore their fault if something is not on Android.
What 9to5mac is doing is deflecting the guilt and rambling on about how Google bought Fitbit as if that has anything to do with their own support of Android. Samsung, Huawei, Honor and bunch of others have absolutely no issues making and supporting their watches on Android.
Apple’s anti-competitive practices ensuring that it’s successful within his own ecosystem isn’t a controversial part of that. We know that’s what they do.
That's exactly it. But it's Apple's decision. Google didn't go and decide Apple can't have applications on Play store. So it's absolutely Apple's fault.
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/
Is the answer to their failure incompetence or greed? I'm sure Apple's engineers are smart enough to make something compatible with Android, so I can only assume their failure is due to not being able to get by with real competition.
Apple says it spent three years trying to bring Apple Watch to Android …
… without customers realising their watches offers nothing more than the competition, and the primary reason their watches were successful was the lack of such competition within their walled garden.
I have a vision of the Apple Watch Android port team sitting in an internal office, frisbee throwing business cards into a bin for three years.
🤣