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> If you get big enough, they swoop in and make you turn everything you've invented into an open standard? If Apple is the low bar, then MPEG-LA should be coun

> If you get big enough, they swoop in and make you turn everything you've invented into an open standard? If Apple is the low bar, then MPEG-LA should be counting their days. The technology to read (legally) a whole slew of formats is stuck behind patent encumberment, but these formats make up the de facto standard for their industries -- see also Qualcomm (who owns 95% or so of the 5G standard) and Broadcom (who for a long time was The Name in 802.11 since they owned so many patents). Yes, IMO when you hit some amount of market saturation your patents should be invalidated and your work made open. But each of these is just "Apple's Implementation" of stuff that has been around elsewhere: AirPlay (Miracast/Google Cast), Airdrop (Bluetooth OBEX transfer + BTLE peer discovery), notifications/smartwatch integrations (Android had it first with Pebble and such), headphone handoff (BTLE multidevice hand off), Proximity Pairing (BTLE, again), NFC emulation (Windows Mobile 10 had support before Android/iOS), background execution (this isn't even special, it's just something only Apple gets but others don't). > Anyone who's maintained a private vs. a public API knows that one is orders of magnitude more expensive than the other. And yet Microsoft manages to do it for the most part. Apple doesn't release the documentation for a large amount of their API. Think of it less like forcing Apple to open things up but making sure Apple and everyone else has to play by the same rules.

bri3d 2y ago
> Yes, IMO when you hit some amount of market saturation your patents should be invalidated and your work made open. I actually agree with this much more than I agree with the notion that if a company is able to vertically integrate a hardware and software stack, they are no longer allowed to differentiate by using software. I'd be way more in favor of a Qualcomm fair licensing settlement (and, if you look at countries in Asia with successful mobile chipset competition, sure enough, they all already did this...), and I think it would be significantly more meaningful, as well, given Apple's market share in the EU versus Qualcomm's patent-share on 4G/5G. > BTLE multidevice hand off What is this? I'm genuinely curious. I know that Bluetooth supports multipoint, but as far as I know there is no standard for a phone to send a BLE notification or advertisement that says "yo, swap streams, I got a phone call" in the way Apple do. > Proximity Pairing (BTLE, again) This isn't a standard, but rather a more-open Google thing (GFPS). > Miracast/Google Cast These are both almost as closed as AirPlay. The receiver side works basically the same way, you give the standards owner money and they give you a big binary blob and a device certificate. > NFC emulation (Windows Mobile 10 had support before Android/iOS) I remember using this, it was really cool and a surprisingly complete implementation. Windows Phone was so far ahead of its time in so many ways... > background execution (this isn't even special, it's just something only Apple gets but others don't) For this exact reason, I feel like this is one of the more difficult ones for Apple to give other people access to in a good way, honestly. Right now their in-house apps basically get to run in the background and operate on some combination of the honor system and internal QA to make sure they stay within power/timeslice budget (or don't, given Apple's recent quality woes). Now they have to come up with a way to regulate third-party timeslice and API consumption that doesn't also upset the regulators.
- indrora 2y ago
  BTLE Device Handoff is another name for the BTLE Audio multi-device stream control. Read a little about it at the Bluetooth LE website[0] -- you're looking at a combination of the Audio Stream Control Service and Telephony Bearer/Call Control working with the Coordinated Devices setup. One of the goals of BTLE Audio is that you could be listening to music at an airport from your laptop and an announcement can chime in over your music to tell you that your flight has been delayed once again, then hand off the audio stream to your phone when you get a phone call from your significant other asking if you're going to make it home in time for dinner (you aren't) Miracast is an open standard, and there's multiple open source libre DIY implementations of it -- you can even use it from Wayland now. AS for how to handle background execution, if it really is that hard to handle scheduling background tasks, how is it that Microsoft once again figured it out over a decade ago with Win10 mobile, which had a "get in, get out, and if you take too long, we might knock a few times before giving you the boot" [0] https://www.bluetooth.com/learn-about-bluetooth/feature-enhancements/le-audio/le-audio-specifications/ https://www.bluetooth.com/learn-about-bluetooth/feature-enha...
paradox460 2y ago
Android had NFC support in 2010, with the Nexus S. Windows 10 came out in 2015

bri3d 2y ago

> Yes, IMO when you hit some amount of market saturation your patents should be invalidated and your work made open. I actually agree with this much more than I agree with the notion that if a company is able to vertically integrate a hardware and software stack, they are no longer allowed to differentiate by using software. I'd be way more in favor of a Qualcomm fair licensing settlement (and, if you look at countries in Asia with successful mobile chipset competition, sure enough, they all already did this...), and I think it would be significantly more meaningful, as well, given Apple's market share in the EU versus Qualcomm's patent-share on 4G/5G. > BTLE multidevice hand off What is this? I'm genuinely curious. I know that Bluetooth supports multipoint, but as far as I know there is no standard for a phone to send a BLE notification or advertisement that says "yo, swap streams, I got a phone call" in the way Apple do. > Proximity Pairing (BTLE, again) This isn't a standard, but rather a more-open Google thing (GFPS). > Miracast/Google Cast These are both almost as closed as AirPlay. The receiver side works basically the same way, you give the standards owner money and they give you a big binary blob and a device certificate. > NFC emulation (Windows Mobile 10 had support before Android/iOS) I remember using this, it was really cool and a surprisingly complete implementation. Windows Phone was so far ahead of its time in so many ways... > background execution (this isn't even special, it's just something only Apple gets but others don't) For this exact reason, I feel like this is one of the more difficult ones for Apple to give other people access to in a good way, honestly. Right now their in-house apps basically get to run in the background and operate on some combination of the honor system and internal QA to make sure they stay within power/timeslice budget (or don't, given Apple's recent quality woes). Now they have to come up with a way to regulate third-party timeslice and API consumption that doesn't also upset the regulators.

indrora 2y ago
BTLE Device Handoff is another name for the BTLE Audio multi-device stream control. Read a little about it at the Bluetooth LE website[0] -- you're looking at a combination of the Audio Stream Control Service and Telephony Bearer/Call Control working with the Coordinated Devices setup. One of the goals of BTLE Audio is that you could be listening to music at an airport from your laptop and an announcement can chime in over your music to tell you that your flight has been delayed once again, then hand off the audio stream to your phone when you get a phone call from your significant other asking if you're going to make it home in time for dinner (you aren't) Miracast is an open standard, and there's multiple open source libre DIY implementations of it -- you can even use it from Wayland now. AS for how to handle background execution, if it really is that hard to handle scheduling background tasks, how is it that Microsoft once again figured it out over a decade ago with Win10 mobile, which had a "get in, get out, and if you take too long, we might knock a few times before giving you the boot" [0] https://www.bluetooth.com/learn-about-bluetooth/feature-enhancements/le-audio/le-audio-specifications/ https://www.bluetooth.com/learn-about-bluetooth/feature-enha...

paradox460 2y ago

Android had NFC support in 2010, with the Nexus S. Windows 10 came out in 2015