Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

As a user, I'm not certain I completely agree.

Yes, I don't want apps accessing my messages surreptitiously. Points there.

However, what's wrong with allowing another app to post messages to my messages?

If I don't want it, let me turn them off. Maybe, as a UI expert company, it's easy "block app from sending me messages" when I get a message. Seems like something that should be fairly transparent to the (potentially misbehaving) app.

I use a Garmin, and Android, and I use it for messages all the time, it's great. I can't imagine not taking them. It's easy for me to block stuff I don't want, could it be easier, maybe...

But my point is this isn't something unreasonable for a user to want.

As a general aside, it seems when I hear about Apple products anymore, they are locked down, unintuitive, and generally just unpleasant. I even tried an Apple device again recently...eugh.

Apple is only "nice" for a certain, narrow segment of the population.

You can thank Apple for the Lightning connector and App Store too, for all the good it does everyone in the EU. If a company uses their power to prevent competition with their own products or services, the market's jurisdiction reserves the right to restore competition to their market and prevent the harms inherent to monopoly abuse.

As a user you should be fine with the ability to restrict access to iMessage. Not locked out of it with hardware you own and interoperability dictated by the vendor who also wants you to buy their watch.

It's absolutely wild seeing comments like this on a supposed hacker community.

It's tricky. As a long time Apple user, I appreciate that they are privacy focused, but I also get a lot of spam text messages, calls, and notifications. It's become more and more annoying to deal with these on my Garmin watch and on my phone. I wish I had some sort of AI filter. For example, I want to get a notification if my Uber is running late, but I don't want one if Uber is offering me 20% off if I subscribe to whatever their monthly service is.

"Apple knows best for us" is something I've gotten very tired of over the years.

This example might be apples-and-oranges when it comes to the protecting Apple protecting iMessage, but they often rob the user of the choice that other manufacturers offer.

For example: Hotspot. Android hotspot can be perma-on. iPhone hotspot cannot. It will always switch itself off after some time of non-use. When I asked an Apple employee about this (This was not his dept), his understanding was that it was for not-clogging up Wifi at-scale, and for users who forget to turn it off. But what about the users who want it on always, who pay their cell provider for the biggest pacakge? My computer goes to sleep, and the hotspot turns off and I have to go manually switching it back on because "Apple knows better". I want those choices.

But the Apple Watch has access to iMessage right? :-)

I’m with you on this one. I’d be fine with Apple opening up their ecosystem in a safe and careful way to other companies but only if the security stays, at least, at the same level - and if I’m able to turn off these options in the settings.

You could say the same about software and app stores. If safety were the top priority, then the safest option is to say no apps, but that isn't competitive or lucrative. Apple's approach is to create safe frameworks and a review process that allows the App Store to exist.

You could argue for only allowing communication through selected carriers, or connections to selected brand computers, and connecting to selected manufacturer Wi-Fi hotspots too

Yeah, but while Apple might consider the hardware to be "untrusted", at some point I trust the hardware I bought. Apple telling me I cannot decide what devices are trusted or not is annoying.

You do realize this is a very infantilizing attitude? Why can't the end user choose its own level of security vs usability? Letting a corporation decide this for all users is just creating a nanny state in different clothing.

I'm just guessing, but notification suggests you could respond to an incoming message but maybe you can't initiate an outgoing message?

The framework that lets you collect messages and ship them god-knows-where but not send them?

I don’t think Apple would ever expose the encryption keys to your messages. Nobody would want it anyway: why reimplement the protocol when you actually just want to send and receive messages? And I fail to see why it would be frictionless for law enforcement, as they’d need to have access to your device.

Imagine a bug where the Apple Passwords app leaks over HTTP. Bring this to an airport and you can steal hundreds/thousands of Passwords from a wide range of people.

https://www.theverge.com/news/632108/apple-ios-passwords-app...

>The lack of encryption meant an attacker on the same Wi-Fi network as you, like at an airport or coffee shop, could redirect your browser to a look-a-like phishing site to steal your login credentials.

Bluetooth is encrypted.

Ok but that strong trust lets them do exactly what was mentioned above.

What is ‘blind’ about sending it to a paired device whitelisted by the user?

Ah, but you see, they need to go to the Apple store and buy an Apple product, then with no clicking at all the app will work.

If they go to a different store, and buy a non-Apple product, that's insecure. What they need to do is return it and go to the Apple store and buy an Apple product. That's secure. Give the money to Apple.

Android handles a couple permissions it doesn't want people turning on accidentally by requiring that the user open the settings app and manually pick which apps to allow from a list. I wonder if that reduces the rate of people enabling things unwisely.

>We have decades of experience that users will blindly click whatever prompts they need to make the app work.

Really, how is Apple protecting you from clicking Allow on a webbrowser if it asks permissions for WebCam and Microphone? I am asking since I do not have a Mac and really want to know how well are Apple users protected compared to Linxu users from web and microphone on browsers.

Where do you draw the line between allowing functioning adults to make their own choices (even if they are mistakes) and tech paternalism?

Currently we seem stuck in a positive feedback loop where tech becomes more and more paternalistic which creates more and more tech illiterate users which is used to justify even more tech paternalism.

It is convenient that this tech paternalism also happens to align with the profit incentive: Easy to trap people in closed ecosystems this way.

You're getting dumped on here but you're absolutely right. Anyone who has been in software for any amount of time knows this, too. HN is full of software developers--downvoters should know better.

You can put a button in your app that says "Tapping this will drain your bank account and give you cancer" but if it also enables functionality that the user wants, they will tap it.

Why let users send messages in the first place? Tell me how you can get any more secure than that.

What are you proposing exactly? What can be simpler than a single Yes/No prompt?

Okay then let me grant "Full Notification Access permissions" on iPhone and we're good.

But remember, the whole premise of this discussion is that fools can be duped into clicking yes to anything, so scammers can talk your grandmother into granting an application that permission. In one case iPhones must not permit it because Apple cares very much, but in another MacOS permits it because it doesn't matter or something? Either way, Apple can do no wrong!

It doesn't need to be a plugin ecosystem - no third party code needs to run within the iMessage processes/sandboxes/containers. In fact, no third-party code needs to run at all on the phone - all that's needed is to expose an API over BLE that allows previously authorized external devices to query/send messages.

> People’s phones got compromised by NSO sending images to them via whatsapp

Has this happened on iOS via WhatsApp?

I know Apple's had a view problems with this happening with iMessage, but always been unsure whether third party app sandbox does a good job of containing this?

No, that’s not true. NSO Group already has the means to send people spicy JPEGs all they want. Adding this would not significantly change their capabilities.

World in which I've paired my two devices?

Doesn't the boundary get broken asking messages be read to me into a BT audio device?

The post you're replying to meant that it boosts Apple Watch sales because they hobble the functionality of competitors. I think your statement is simply saying that any competitor is insecure. I'd be surprised if that were a widely held view.

As a customer I would like to be able to make that decision. I don't need apple to hold my hand. They could inform me in the app store or when I install the app. Here apple is making that decision for me.

Why doesn't Apple openly market that it's doing stuff in its financial interest? Is it too embarrassed to point that out?

This is (I guess) not what OP meant. Apple obviously also gains financially from blokcing everything outside of there ecosystem, mainly because the majority of Apple users will only buy Apple hardware. Obviously, yeah, keeping the hardware a bit more safe also helps, but the main financial gain is definitely not coming from this.

Your argumentation itself is nefarious, because you're implicitly equating third-party with insecure.

Something I learned a while ago is that there's a particular brand of very vocal person online who has a bone to pick with Apple. Sometimes it's for a good reason, sometimes less so, but the point is that they come to discussions of any Apple topic with a conclusion ready in hand and then work backwards from that. In this case the conclusion is, "Apple is wicked, perfidious, and monopolistic."

Truthfully there isn't much you can say to people in that mindset.

No, it's like saying that you can only buy Toyota aftermarket accessories at a steep markup, and other accessories are locked out via cryptography.

Be careful what you wish for! Apple doesn't let you modify apps to remove tracking the way you can on Android.

If the sender or recipient has iCloud backup enabled then by default (i.e. without ADP) Apple can read the entire iMessage conversation. And they routinely do, at the request of law enforcement. Since Apple does not allow default-secure alternative cloud backup solutions to exist, it is almost certain that a large majority of iMessage conversations are compromised in this way (with no notification to sender or recipient).

Apple deliberately makes this non-obvious, but it is disclosed here: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102651

> Messages in iCloud is end-to-end encrypted when iCloud Backup is disabled. When iCloud Backup is enabled, your backup includes a copy of the Messages in iCloud encryption key to help you recover your data. If you turn off iCloud Backup, a new key is generated on your device to protect future Messages in iCloud. This key is end-to-end encrypted between your devices and isnʼt stored by Apple

And is the backup end-to-end encrypted? No, not by default, as disclosed on the same page. It is encrypted "In transit & on server" with keys stored by Apple, which means Apple can decrypt it. And they do, as mentioned earlier, for purposes other than "to help you recover your data". The non-default Advanced Data Protection feature is required to get end-to-end encryption of the backup.

Note that Google's equivalent Android backup feature has been end-to-end encrypted by default for many, many years. Plus, alternative backup solutions are allowed to exist on Android.

The Garmin experience on iOS is noticeably inferior for me.

On android, you can turn off forwarding notifications to the watch on a per-app basis, so for example I can have youtube put notifications into the android notification center, but not the watch.

On iOS, you can't configure which apps forward notifications to a garmin watch. You only get all or nothing. Apple watch can do this just fine.

Is that not an issue for you? Do you not feel hobbled by that?

Conveniently, Apple's App Store Review Guidelines also include several rules that restrict apps from duplicating features that the OS already provides.

So if they detect a trend early enough, they implement it as first-party feature, dry out the existing competitors while restricting new competitors to enter based on the App Store Review...

Then they will hit you with, "We do this for safety of your data, we don't want bad actors getting health info from your watch".

I enjoy apple devices but hate the walled garden.

I've never understood this Apple criticism (scherlocking). Someone built a search for your files, so it's not right for Apple to build a pretty key feature into the OS?

There's a lot of fair criticisms of Apple, but they don't have to be absolutely first at everything or never enter the market.

If necessary, you can even retroactively ban the competitor's app from the App Store that you control.

As pretext, you can say the competitor's app is doing something now considered insecure or not privacy-respecting, or is not compliant with some new user experience or quality curation that you do.

> I am aware that apple blocks certain functionality to maintain a cohesive and secure experience.

The argument is that they don't do it to maintain a secure experience but to stop competitors having feature parity with their products.

Personally, I find it annoying that my Garmin watch cannot reply to text messages on my iPhone.

I also find it annoying that my iPhone nags me to cut access to my watch to stop it getting weather updates. It doesn't even nag me the once but repeatedly.

It would be one thing if Apple even competed on features with Garmin but they don't.

That's their justification. I never had security problems on Android, and I actually find Android to be more cohesive. Just a few things where iOS is uncohesive to me: You can customize the keyboard, but it will not work everywhere the same. Apps will send you randomly through hoops to click some permissions things in settings. App settings are sometimes centralized, sometimes in the app. There is no single way to "back" to the previous screen.

I actually switched to an iPhone some time ago and was expecting it to be like you said. But I was shocked that iOS is actually less coherent and a mess in some places, and the App store could be curated better. To be honest the reason I still use it is because the hardware is really good and because it is pretty.

That's all well and good. Opting into that knowingly is a reasonable decision. Hopefully knowing you've opted into that you aren't then cursing Google when they don't support some functionality blocked by Apple, or when RCS is poorly supported, but instead recognizing this as a trade-off you made opting into the Apple closed garden.

My personal stance on this is that while I’m open to making iOS, etc more flexible, it needs to be done in a way that cleanly avoids the whole “grandma accidentally installed a pile of browser toolbars yet again” problem. I’m confident I can manage added flexibility myself but there’s a very real need for a truly foolproof, social-engineering-resistant option to point friends and family without such aptitudes toward.

the thing i hear most frequently is naming group chats with mixed device users

The E2EE situation will hopefully change soon: https://www.theverge.com/news/629620/apple-iphone-e2ee-encry...

Interoperability is a commons; the market won't protect it on its own, because each individual consumer's best action is to just get an iPhone and an Apple Watch.

But the market (and society at large) is ultimately worse off when Pebble and FitBit and Garmin can't compete on a level playing field with Apple Watch— particularly when Pebble is targeting a completely different feature set, price point, and battery profile from what Apple Watch does.

I don't, and I won't, but that doesn't really address the points in that post. There is nothing any individual can do about massive corporate cartels controlling entire industries and strangling all potential competition in the cradle, like they said anti-trust enforcement is the only way. But apparently it'll be difficult to garner support for that when people perceive it as an attack on their 'consumer preferences'

Apple and iPhone are a gravitational singularity distorting every single market in the world.

Software companies bend the knee to Apple.

Global payments companies bend the knee to Apple.

Entertainment companies bend the knee to Apple.

On and on and on...

You cannot find a corner of the world that iPhone does not distort, tax, shape, or control in some shape or fashion. Some companies and industries to such an extreme that Apple becomes not just their landlord, but their master.

Desktop computing could never do this. Microsoft never had such draconian rules.

The automotive market doesn't resemble this. Dozens of countries have five or six major automakers. There's something for every budget and niche.

Gaming could never do this. There are three major consoles, six major PC distribution channels, mobile gaming, indie gaming, web gaming, tabletop/physical gaming - that market is huge. Honestly, this is what mobile computing should look like.

Only mobile computing and the web have become so perverted and encumbered. These markets are beyond Standard Oil levels of distortion. And the worst part is how massive, important, and all-encompassing these markets are. Everything in life is touched by these markets.

Your preference is limited interoperability?

Why? Can't you just not take advantage of it is it's there? Why demand it to not be here? What ill consequences do you suffer from having the option for additional interoperability?

IMO it makes sense to nationalize things that lend themselves to natural monopolies, or sectors where innovation has mostly dried up on account of maturity, where continued progress is largely driven by tax-funded research grants already. I'm not convinced that "computing" is such an industry, innovation seems dead there because of monopoly. In that case, they should be broken up to drive competition-fueled innovation, with careful supervision to monitor for and punish anti-consumer behavior, abuse of negative externalities, etc.

If it turns out that even then, 10-20 years from now the market is still making mostly glass/metal rectangles with the same feature set of today, then we can consider consolidating that productive capacity for the sake of efficiency.

The Soviet Union had everything nationalized and it always accountable only to the Politburo. This idea that governments are “accountable” is cute. Government shouldn’t be running businesses.

Building and maintaining a functional marketplace (e.g. through common-sense anti-trust enforcement) is about more than just optimizing for a specific outcome...

Microsoft of that era is a tiny bug compared to the trillion dollar giants of today.

You could install whatever you wanted on Windows. Any software, any browser. Microsoft was incredibly open with both software and hardware compatibility.

You didn't have to use IIS or C# or Microsoft technology to develop software. You could develop and deploy PHP, Apache, Perl, C, anything. And about that time, Linux servers and distribution were massively growing in popularity. There were so many options.

It was even easy to pirate Windows and other software if you really wanted to. Basically, it was a complete Wild West with lots of latitude and room to navigate for everyone. Microsoft really only pursued enterprise contracts.

And the market back then was incredibly small. The number of desktop broadband and dialup users pales in comparison to the total number of smartphone users we have today.

The situation today is wholly different on every level. Two companies own how society stays connected, how it conducts commerce, and how it shares information. It's gross how much power they have. And how they choose to enforce it and tax it.

> What we need is a law that requires companies like Apple to allow their customers to install and run the software they wish, and provide external developers with the same OS features their internal teams have access to.

So major government intervention.

Oh whatever :P Don’t be condescending about a mindset you don’t experience yourself.

I ran debian as my daily driver for like half my life; now I’m on mac and never have to worry about my friggin wifi driver.

If you want to do and fight, use Linux. Apple made their intentions clear decades ago.

The "hackers" grew up and made money. Don't rock the boat!

If you want an alternative, android exists. I actively want a tightly integrated system that I know works well together. I don’t want to worry “does this device really work with this other device, even if it says it’s compatible” which was a constant source of issues I had on Android.

Your desire for Apple to become an open system removes my choice to opt into a closed ecosystem, when you already have an open ecosystem to play in.

> Courts do not require a literal monopoly before applying rules for single firm conduct; that term is used as shorthand for a firm with significant and durable market power — that is, the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors.

https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...

Presumably the DoJ wouldn't have sued Apple for being a monopoly if it was impossible for them to legally qualify as one?

https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/gallery/justice-departm...

At which point does a monopoly becomes a monopoly?

There is no need to have a "clear" monopoly like Windows in 1990's to abuse your power and presence in the market.

If it's not a duopoly, then why there's no competition between the play store and the app store to get developers or users from each other?

The only tariff change ever made on the appstore was as a reaction to an antitrust lawsuit and copied straight to Google. Just that is enough of a proof.

Isn't the WebKit the only allowed browser engine on iOS?

> The real problem was that they intentionally broke web standards to push websites to "work best on Internet Explorer," so even those who chose not to use Windows were caught up in it.

Microsoft tried to build their own extensions to the internet standards, like activex and proprietary DOM/JScript extensions, explicitly designed to lock devs into IE’s ecosystem. It's quite impressive that they managed to miss this opportunity to Adobe. And how Adobe then just... squandered it. I would expect that "being the necessary proprietary piece in significant chunk of internet" would have some deep strategic advantage, but both tech giants couldn't be bothered to do a good job.

Apple do this too with their products - but in more subtle ways.

For instance, try to play a video game on MacOS. While Vulkan is available on every playform, it's not available on MacOS or iOS despite the fact that it would take an engineer at Apple a weekend to implement (figuritively speaking). Apple are also killing off OpenGL support for MacOS.

Generally, Apple deliberately build a "dependence ecosystem" for their consumers on the product side while also actively preventing engineers from using portable technologies on their platforms.

The fact that MacOS is as open as it currently is is a miracle and I am sure executives hate that.

They create the fastest and most ergonomic mobile hardware on Earth but, outside of web browsing, video editing and some engineering workloads, there's very little you can actually do on it.

Source? What data do you have that "prohits unsafe choices" is the only or #1 reason that people buy an iPhone over an Android?

I mean the security model for both is pretty similar, you have a provider which gets your audio and then decides what they want to do with it.

Microsoft absolutely got in trouble for purposefully making other Office suites not work correctly on Windows, for using private Windows APIs in Office that other companies didn't have access to, etc.

If Apple makes a watch that can receive and send iMessages then there is no reason any other device shouldn't be able to use the same APIs that Apple uses.

It absolutely creates a system where competitors literally cannot compete with the same features.

> people can simply switch to an Android phone

Giving all your data to Google (an adtech company) is not an acceptable solution. Not to mention that it's incredibly difficult to leave the Apple ecosystem, by design.

What I had in mind wasn’t iMessage, but the fact that banking and digital ID systems such as Danish MitID are increasingly being built with the assumption that everyone owns a smartphone.

https://www.mitid.dk/en-gb/

The HN comments are for our discussion. If you choose to latch on to portions of initial posts or comments like the latter for swipes than that's the kind of discussion we get to have. If you choose to focus most of the discussion on other lines like:

> 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.

instead then the quality of discussion here will match.

Plenty of choice... so long as that choice has been approved by Apple. It's a very convenient position for a company with a competing product.

If you followed the Apple Security scene for a bit, you'll notice that a lot of exploits make use of special permissions granted to Apples own apps and services. If you find a way to run your code in Quicktime Player, or to control Quicktime Player, you can circumvent the privacy dialog.

Do you trust Quicktime Player to be free of exploitable bugs or behaviors?

It's not very trivial to manage an Apple device and Apple would shut down those ABM tenants real quick. Not to mention, supervision requires enrollment pre-setup, which is really difficult.

So "just replace x with y" does not really work in this context, MDM is vastly more effort than you think and OP-s point still stands.

I sure didn't know QuickTime Player could read my screen or listen to my microphone...

> Apple knows exactly how Quicktime behaves, that it doesn't act maliciously, and can't be updated to do so.

Yes, it's physically impossible for an Apple developer to accidentally or maliciously introduce an exploit into QT and for it to elude security or code review...

I've never heard a security posture that is "well, we know what your tool does, so it doesn't need any security controls".

> it's fine from a security context

No, it’s not. For example, even if you know every device on your network you STILL need network segmentation.

Running your card readers and corporate computers on the same subnet is asking for trouble - regardless of if you control both.

> Apple technology is "great" as long as you you're rich enough to afford it

I don’t know what point you’re trying to make with this sentence. It comes across as missing the fact that high quality goods… cost more than low quality ones?

Not to mention they have plenty of affordable tech. Their phones have always been roughly the same cost when adjusted for inflation - something pretty commendable. The iPods back in the day came in a huge range of affordable shapes and sizes for the quality.

>Apple technology is "great" as long as you you're rich enough to afford it, and buy into the whole ecosystem. And, most crucially: contort yourself yourself enough. (="If it's not working for you, you're not holding it right.")

1) Apple's lack of success in various categories over the years shows that their success isn't "magical" marketing.

2) So if we're ruling out mindless drones of hypnotised people handing over their hard earned cash hand-over-fist, then we might look to more realistic reasons why some of their products sell very well. When we do we see a much more rational picture, closely tied to the basic economics of product and price.

3) At this point one needs to concede that consumers are majority highly rational buyers, hand waving away others as sheep-like with too much money is a risible position to take.

4) In the markets Apple sell well: phones, laptops, wearables: There's plenty of products that cost more than the Apple equivalent and don't work nearly as well.

5) While you may categorise a person with a $700 phone as rich, consider that the lifestyle improvements gained over the typical 4 year ownership lifecycle works out to be ~48c a day. Depending where you are, that's the equivalent of buying one basic starbucks coffee a week. Sure there's more expensive iPhones, there's more expensive coffees too.

6) When it comes to price discussions there's also a lot of bad faith comparisons. Bad faith = where the author of the comment should, or clearly does know that the comparison they're making is excluding pertinent details, but doesn't include them intentionally to deceive, usually because they value "winning" an internet discussion rather than the value of exchanging ideas.

7) Consumers are rational: If such price comparisons held water then certain the Apple products wouldn't be doing so well. We can already see the ones that don't do well with the mass markets because they're priced to very specific audiences (MacPro, VisionPro, etc.)

>"If it's not working for you, you're not holding it right."

1) I'm not sure about the merit of misquoting a dead guy, talking about a product that hasn't been sold in over a decade. I think if you're trying to convey that Apple has a certain arrogant attitude towards their customers then you should revisit the points above.

2) If you're going to quote this, then you should take the time to read what Jobs actually wrote, since the tone doesn't meet the level of arrogance in your portrayal. The email is here: https://wccftech.com/images/news/iPhone4G/jobs.jpg

3) Despite the mixed views on whether the problem even existed in a meaningful way, Apple gave away free cases, no questions asked, to people who felt they experienced this problem. As a barometer to the actual problem: Not even the land of the lawsuit was able to muster a case, and they did appeal widely for injured parties.

What are you talking about? I can try all the competing products compatible with Android and Windows. I'm not locked into anything Apple because they're not a monopoly. I am very much in a position to "make that call".

Restriction is an odd term to describe: "They don't proactively build a suite of tools and APIs to facilitate third party watch development."

How many users do you think call Apple everyday to complain about issues with their third party, knockoff AirPods lookalikes? Could you imagine why Apple could be protective of the user experience of their hardware and sensitive to that user experience being compromised by poorly implemented or nonfunctional peripherals? For every Pebble user, how many people might buy ripoff Apple Watches?

It's constantly getting better. If it wasn't then competitors would surpass it, but they never have.

Allowing support for a rich ecosystem of mediocre smart watches does not move the needle on making it better for me personally. And Apple probably has done the market research to confirm most of their customers are like me and not like Pebble users.

Microsoft changing default programs with an update is a violation of privacy but at least it's easy to change.

There should be a "+" button you can click and select any app. The Music app is located in the /Applications folder.

The issue is, suppose you want a phone with A, B, C, D and E.

In a competitive market, there are a hundred phone OEMs providing every combination of those things for various prices with various trade offs etc.

In a duopoly, there is one company providing A, another providing B and C, and nobody providing D or E. If you chose the company providing B and C, but you still want A, D and E, what are you supposed to do? Reward the company providing even less of what you want?

What you need is more competition.

Regulation?

When a market is stuck in a local maximum, an external force would be beneficial to push it out of it.

I'm saying that even without those restrictions, the existing stable of Android Wear devices would still be less appealing than an Apple Watch. There's a reason they aren't even all that popular with actual Android users where those restrictions don't exist.

Pennywise pound foolish and harming UX at the same time. They could just require that Spotify logs the plays and uploads them on the next connection. Resulting in more plays and more money. But instead they block it for the 0.1% of the time that the watch is lost, destroyed or reinstalled before that sync happens.

And people wonder why piracy happens.

Garmin watches can start Spotify playback offline just fine. You need to have synced your playlist within last 30 days, IIRC, and that's it.

Authentic user activity is Apple’s greatest asset to its partners.

Spotify has offline mode in their iPhone app