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...
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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.
stepsvsstepCount
God, 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!?
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.
Because of Google’s limitations (and rightfully so, on Google’s part to limit it). Any app can call the weather API on Android if they want, assuming the user has given them permission, and the app is running. Since Apple doesn’t control the Andriod OS, they have to conform to the rules of any other app on the app store, meaning they are subject to the OS stopping their watch companion app if the user never opens it (and honestly as a daily smartwatch user, no one ever opens the companion app after setup). On iOS, Apple can waive these limitations for select Apps, like their watch app, but on Andriod, they have no such ability.
In short, they can call the weather API, but it’ll only work if the app is running, which by all accounts on Andriod, as a third party app, it shouldn’t be.
EDIT: I’ll also note that having used both platforms (WatchOS and Andriod Watch), Google and Apple have taken fundamentally different approaches to their watches, in a way that makes cross compatibility difficult.
Andriod Watches are fundamentally, an extension of the phone they are running alongside, they primarily exist to give you notifications, and the vast majority of apps are calling home to the phone to have their companion app perform tasks.
Apple Watches on the other hand are fundamentally “their own device”. They receive notifications just like Andriod watches do, but they can also function entirely on their own, they even have cell radios built in. They are essentially, their own small phone, only using the companion phone as a data connection, if you don’t have a sim for the built in radio. This is not really something Andriod is designed to accommodate. They only work well on iOS because Apple can exempt them from a lot of the restrictions third party apps have, they are built in from the OS level, where Andriod watches just aren’t.
Like Airdrop (using wifi) could never possibly work like normal Bluetooth sharing (using Bluetooth)
Yep, a multi-billion dollar tech company, known for the "innovation", was stumped by cross-platform support. I totally believe that. 🤣
