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It is not intrinsically difficult, it's made difficult by the fact that the companies themselves specifically want to have their infrastructure in the mix to ha

It is not intrinsically difficult, it's made difficult by the fact that the companies themselves specifically want to have their infrastructure in the mix to have access to valuable user data. There's no particularly difficult challenge to sync the phone and watch directly, offline. A good chunk of revenue comes from services which rely on the data being in the cloud.

prennert 6y ago
I agree that gathering user data might be a significant factor why even products of large companies do not support cloudless communication and sync. I just wanted to point out that since cloud based communication is so easy nowadays, doing sync without cloud support is a significantly larger effort. Not unachievable though.
com2kid 6y ago
I worked on a competitor. It was 100% about user expectations, the data was never mined for anything. People use multiple phones, replace their phone, delete apps to free up space, and still expect their data to be there. Running a cloud infrastructure for PII isn't exactly low cost, and bundling a life time subscription with a one time device purchase is horrible economics. It isn't done for no reason.
- buran77 6y ago
  > the data was never mined for anything Oh I wasn't implying what's generally seen as "data mining". But for such a company to offer many of the features in the paid services they need that data. They don't have to sell it to others, they only have to sell it back to the users as added services even included in the price of the hardware itself. Those added services can be as simple as sync between multiple phones or sharing on social media, or premium features like advanced analytics. On the other hand this kind of data can be also sold entirely anonymized. Strava does this and many cities' urban planners buy the data to understand better how the city infrastructure is used by the people (running, cycling, etc.) and how to develop it. I'm not saying there's no value in it, just that without it the value of the product decreases significantly. So it's in the manufacturer's best interest to have it as part of the basis of their offering.

prennert 6y ago

I agree that gathering user data might be a significant factor why even products of large companies do not support cloudless communication and sync. I just wanted to point out that since cloud based communication is so easy nowadays, doing sync without cloud support is a significantly larger effort. Not unachievable though.

com2kid 6y ago

I worked on a competitor. It was 100% about user expectations, the data was never mined for anything. People use multiple phones, replace their phone, delete apps to free up space, and still expect their data to be there. Running a cloud infrastructure for PII isn't exactly low cost, and bundling a life time subscription with a one time device purchase is horrible economics. It isn't done for no reason.

buran77 6y ago
> the data was never mined for anything Oh I wasn't implying what's generally seen as "data mining". But for such a company to offer many of the features in the paid services they need that data. They don't have to sell it to others, they only have to sell it back to the users as added services even included in the price of the hardware itself. Those added services can be as simple as sync between multiple phones or sharing on social media, or premium features like advanced analytics. On the other hand this kind of data can be also sold entirely anonymized. Strava does this and many cities' urban planners buy the data to understand better how the city infrastructure is used by the people (running, cycling, etc.) and how to develop it. I'm not saying there's no value in it, just that without it the value of the product decreases significantly. So it's in the manufacturer's best interest to have it as part of the basis of their offering.