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.
this post was submitted on 22 Mar 2024
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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.
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.
Yep, a multi-billion dollar tech company, known for the "innovation", was stumped by cross-platform support. I totally believe that. 🤣
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.
…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.
🤣
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.
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.
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.