Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

[ 2025-03-17 ] 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. 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 di ... Read full article.