During Pebble v1, I learned how much harder it is to build a great smartwatch experience on iPhone than it is on Android. It sounds like things have actually gotten worse over the last 8 years.

I want to set expectations accordingly. We will build a good app for iOS, but be prepared – there is no way for us to support all the functionality that Apple Watch has access to. It’s impossible for a 3rd party smartwatch to send text messages, or perform actions on notifications (like dismissing, muting, replying) and many, many other things.

Throwback to 2015

Here are the things that are harder or impossible for 3rd party smartwatches (ie non Apple Watches) to do on iPhone:

• There’s no way for a smartwatch to send text messages or iMessages.
• You can’t reply to notifications or take ‘actions’ like marking something as done.
• It’s very difficult to enable other iOS apps to work with Pebble. Basically iOS does not have the concept of ‘interprocess communication’(IPC) like on Android. What we did before was publish an SDK that other apps (like Strava) could integrate to make their own BLE connection to Pebble. It was a clunky quasi-solution that other apps didn’t like, because it was hard to test (among other things)
• If you (accidentally) close our iOS app, then your watch can’t talk to app or internet
• Impossible for watch to detect if you are using your phone, so your watch will buzz and display a notification even if you are staring at your iPhone
• You can’t easily side load apps onto an iPhone. That means we have to publish the app on the iPhone appstore. This is a gigantic pain because Apple. Every update comes with the risk that a random app reviewer could make up some BS excuse and block the update.
• Because of iOS Appstore rules, it would be hard for us to enable 3rd party watchface/app developers to charge for their work (ie we can’t easily make an appstore within our app)
• Getting a Javascript engine to run in PebbleOS forced us to go through many hoops due to iOS — creating a compiler inside the Pebble iPhone app that in itself needed to be written in (cross-compiled to) JS to work with Apple’s restriction on downloadable code can only be JS
• As a Pebble watch/app developer, using the iOS app as relay to the watch sucks since the “developer mode” terminates every few minutes

As an aside, back at Pebble, we went to crazy lengths to find a way to let Pebble users to send text messages from Pebble. Our bizdev team did an impressive custom SMS-over-IP deal with AT&T to enable this, but the end result was a pretty rough user experience (messages sent from Pebble didn’t appear in the Messages app on iPhone).

Here’s the kicker – it sounds like the situation has actually gotten worse. This 2024 class action lawsuit against Apple states that:

• You must set notifications to display full content previews on your lockscreen for them to also be sent to a 3rd party watch (new restriction added in iOS 13).
• Apple closed off the ability of smartwatches after Pebble to negotiate with carriers to
  provide messaging services, and now requires users to turn off iMessage (disabling iOS’s core messaging platform) if they want to take advantage of such contracts between a third-party smartwatch maker and cellular carriers.

Why are things so much harder on iOS?

Well, mostly because Apple systematically makes it nearly impossible for 3rd party wearable developers to build a smartwatch experience comparable to Apple Watch experience.

Apple claims their restrictions on competitors are only about security, privacy, crafting a better experience etc etc. At least that’s what they tell you as they tuck you into bed. I personally don’t agree – they’re clearly using their market power to lock consumers into their walled ecosystem. This causes there to be less competition, which increases prices and reduces innovation. DOJ seems to agree. For now at least…Tim Apple paid $1m to sit near Trump at the inauguration, so who knows how long until Trump tells DOJ to drop the case. There’s also an Apple Watch class-action lawsuit working its way through the system.

But we’re going to try anyways

The problem is that 40% of everyone who signed up on rePebble.com still uses an iPhone. So we’re going to make a damn iOS app. I guess we’re gluttons for punishment. Just understand a few things:

• Our watch will always appear to have less developed functionality on iOS than Android. This is Apple’s fault, not ours.
• Some features will appear first on our Android app, and then eventually we’ll add them to the iOS app. This is because the majority of our development team uses Android phones, and generally we’re building things for ourselves, so naturally Android comes first.
• I don’t want to see any tweets or blog posts or complaints or whatever later on about this. I’m publishing this now so you can make an informed decision about whether to buy a new watch or not. If you’re worried about this, the easiest solution is to buy an Android phone.

You can help

Apple will never change their ways unless you, the Pebble-curious iPhone user, complain loudly or switch to Android. Which is also hard because Apple tries it’s best to lock you into their platform.

Are you an iPhone user who wants to use our watches? Start by posting a comment below this post. Hopefully there will be a lot – let’s show them that people actually want this to improve.

If you live in the US, tell your elected representatives to support legislation like ACCESS Act and AICO.

If you live in Europe, thank you for voting for representatives who passed the DMA. We will be petitioning Apple under DMA Article 6 to request interoperability with Apple Watch APIs.