Airpods Libreated From Apple's Ecosystem
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The GitHub project 'librepods' aims to liberate AirPods from Apple's ecosystem, sparking discussion around the potential benefits and limitations of modifying Apple's products, particularly for users with specific needs or frustrations with the current functionality.
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The issue can be resolved because an android bug can be debugged by a contributor. A similar issue can't even be analyzed from the apple side by anyone but an apple employee.
We are assuming there are bugs in iOS, but their closed sourceness can mislead people to believe there aren't. Then, yes, their vertical integration makes them rich, which in this case is bad for users, in the guise of being good.
They also Open Source the base OS layer pieces for macOS too:
* https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/
* https://opensource.apple.com/releases/
I don't keep any kind of close eye on this stuff though.
https://android-review.googlesource.com/q/status:open+-is:wi...
I tried back in the day.
Apple mercy-killed Adobe Flash, we should be asking they do the same to Bluetooth. I'm sick of living in a reality where no one thinks to make something better. It has to be possible.
It had a great number of CVEs, you mean?
_modern_ HTML and JS have eclipsed flash in all meaningful ways.
In truth, the Web has eclipsed Flash, the player, but not the product.
There were cool games, but there still are cool games. And the indie/hacker/homebrew gaming ecosystems are bigger, richer, and more accessible than ever (due in no small part to the web, both as a gaming platform and for learning/community).
Similarly, the only reason Flash had “bad performance” on low end devices is because people were using it to do stuff that web tech could not do. It took over a decade for web tech to catch up, and 20 years later we still don’t have tooling that’s as good as Flash was (other than Adobe Animate itself).
Calling it “terrible for video” is completely backwards! Flash became the standard for video on the web for years because everything else was terrible and Flash was the only thing that worked. There’s a reason that YouTube used Flash to play videos for the first ten years.
Apple begged Adobe to ship a working Flash mobile build at least four times and each time they rejected it for all sorts of various UX or performance issues. At one point Apple asked for and was delivered Flash Player source code, which they reportedly couldn't get to compile. Adobe tried to brand Flash as an open standard, and then went over Apple's head by just shipping an AIR runtime that could be packaged into an IPA and submitted to Apple. Jobs then wrote the infamous "Thoughts on Flash" letter, which was really there to justify going scorched-earth and banning all third-party development tools. This only lasted for about three months before the Obama DOJ threatened to sue[0].
Also, Steve Jobs was probably pissed off that he couldn't get the CEO of Adobe on speed-dial. At that point in time everyone involved with shipping iPhone software was in his contacts and in regular contact with him. Google logo looks weird on the phone screen? Have Jobs call Page and get it fixed in 10 minutes.
As it stood after that moment, Flash was a viable development platform for iPhone apps and remained so for many years. This is entirely separate from its use in the browser. Practically speaking, you have probably played plenty of Flash games on iOS without even knowing it, because all the hard work of building touch-friendly UX and a performant UI was shunted over to the developers of individual games rather than trying to make, say, the core Flash rendering model GPU capable[1].
Adobe then shipped Flash Player for Android to huge fanfare, and it sucked just as hard as it did on Apple's dev iPhones and was unceremoniously canned a year later.
At this point it was obvious Flash Player needed a rewrite, even within Adobe, so they announced "FP Next" along with an AS4 language for new movies to run in. Except the Adobe execs were angry about the cost so they tried to shake down their customers for the funds. They wanted any cross-compiled 3D engine code to have to pay a revshare to Adobe. Everyone jumped ship to Unity, so Adobe canned the revshare requirement... and FP Next/AS4, the thing that was supposed to modernize Flash's aging codebase.
And then right after Adobe starts disinvesting from Flash, a bunch of CVEs land and all the browser vendors pushed hard to actually, once and for all, excise plugins from the browser. That was the actual mercy kill, but it was preceded by almost a decade in which all the people who knew how Flash actually worked didn't have the budget to fix it, and all the people who wanted it fixed didn't have the expertise to do it.
[0] For the record, Obama was the guy who saw Zuckerberg illegally buying Instagram to keep people from moving off of Facebook and said "sure thing, wave it through".
[1] There's an AS3 project called Starling that gives you hardware rendering by pre-rendering a bunch of assets in advance into bitmaps, which kind of betrays the whole point of Flash. But I also can't imagine Adobe doing it any other way as the Flash renderer was both highly optimized and bespoke.
I wonder why they didn't just go and open-source the entire damn thing, all its commercial value has been lost anyway.
If you're wondering what would actually block a FOSS release of the Flash Player runtime, here you go:
- Sorenson Spark, a half-finished H.263 implementation.
- On2 VP6
- Likewise, their H.264 or MP3 decoders, which were almost certainly third-party libraries as well.
- The "advanced text rendering engine" added in SWFv8 to replace legacy font rendering, which I know was licensed but I forgot which company.
- Adobe DRM
The media codecs would be replaceable with any number of FOSS implementations. I've[1] personally written a clean-room decoder for Sorenson-flavor H.263 in Rust, and the APIs for these libraries tend to be pretty simple and easy to wire up. Font rendering would potentially be more invasive to the codebase. And DRM is basically high-grade radioactive waste to FOSS projects. The main problem is that this wouldn't be "just compile Flash from source" anymore, you'd be making an "OpenFlash" fork with at least some compatibility breaks involved.
And to be clear, Adobe actually had some interest in opening Flash Player. They released a bunch of technical specifications for the SWF format - albeit, hilariously inadequate and inaccurate ones. AS3 in particular was supposed to be a web standard, in the form of ES4, or "JavaScript 2.0". Adobe actually released their AVM2 implementation, avmplus, specifically with the goal of it replacing SpiderMonkey in Firefox. This never worked out[2], but they kept updating the avmplus GitHub right up until the death of Flash.
The underlying problem with both "opening up Flash Player" and "porting Flash to iPhone" is that Adobe management was not terribly interested in doing things that did not have a direct connection to bottom-line revenue. If they were willing to open Flash, they would have also invested into their platform instead of trying to find a way to bilk money out of people cross-compiling Unity to Flash.
I think the best goodwill move Adobe could make now, in 2025, would be to specifically release the renderer component of Flash. They own it completely, the copyright pedigree goes all the way back to Jonathan Gay, and it does a lot of specific things that no other SWF runtime implementation gets quite right. It would be an absolutely amazing object of study.
[0] https://www.theregister.com/2018/03/14/a_dolby_sues_adobe_fo...
[1] To be clear, several other interested Ruffle contributors helped me actually get it decoding video (especially some broken files) and doing so efficiently.
[2] I'm not a fan of him but I hear Brendan Eich stalks these forums. He probably has better insights on the backlash to ES4 than I do.
I agree that some of the content produced in that era was great and it was nice to have tools available, but using Flash and doing the whole browser plugin thing was not great at all.
It’s actually great now that we have actual standards compliant ways of doing animations and other things in the browser without restricting it to one company’s little domain that must be used as a plugin for browsers.
Flash the player was insecure unoptimized laggy garbage
Flash had an awesome ecosystem. But it was too fragile, and Adobe is too incompetent of a company to be a good steward of that kind of tech.
Mind you that the first iPhone cake with 128MB RAM with a 400Mhz processor.
An iPhone with the theoretical specs didn’t come out until 2011.
Also see the first “iPad Killer” the Motorola Xoom’s marquee feature was suppose to be that it could run Flash. But Adobe was late releasing the Xoom in the unenviable problem of that you couldn’t view its home page on the device.
If there's ever a project for an alternative OSS Flash authoring tool, something intended to be as accessible as Flash 5 or so, I'd love to contribute somehow
They won't, because it turns out Bluetooth is the best thing we have at "discover nearby devices". Guess how Apple TV/screen sharing detection, iPhone hotspot detection and configuration, AirDrop and a whole host of other features work without communicating via some cloud mothership? They are all using Bluetooth to do detection and negotiation to a high-bandwidth link!
Amongst widespread radio communication mechanisms, there are only NFC, Bluetooth and WiFi. NFC is sometimes used to provision wifi passwords, but it's short-range to the tune of a few cm tops. WiFi has discovery, but nothing in the protocol to make sure initial conversations cannot be eavesdropped, and low-power wifi stacks are hard to do, in contrast to Bluetooth with BTLE.
Appletooth being a from-scratch all-new, cleanly-designed protocol that makes actual sense and is easy to implement by vendors without inherent security flaws.
I won't lie, it would be a horrifically painful transition. But it would be worth it. Apple should have some courage when it's actually called for (...not killing hardware ports, which no consumer was asking for).
I've never used iPhones and have stuck by Google Pixel. I still feel all of the above in my heart. Apple's the only one who can possibly fulfill my dream of Bluetooth's bitter end.
Because they needed a way to get audio to the AirPods wirelessly and to work with their devices? That’s a pretty good reason to use Bluetooth.
I doubt they got together and tried to scheme a way to break Bluetooth in this one tiny little way for vendor lock in. You can use the basic AirPod features with other Bluetooth devices. It’s just these extended features that were never developed for other platforms.
HN comments lean heavily conspiratorial but I think the obvious explanation is that the devs built and tested it against iPhone and Mac targets and optimized for that. This minor discrepancy wasn’t worked around because it isn’t triggered on Apple platforms and it’s not a target for them.
Some pictures here: https://www.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/b1u08k/this_...
But you can have an extension cord which accepts USB on one end but doesn't accept USB on the other.
So the keyboard has a superset connector so that it can go in regular USB and notched USB, because it is verified to work right when using the extension cord.
This design also means you can't plug one extension cord into another to get an even longer distance (which the keyboard wouldn't expect). Pretty clever solution.
No conspiracy needed, surely it would be unilateral? It seems exactly the sort of thing Apple Computers would do to protect their ecosystem.
Truth is, no one has the full facts so any reasons as to why this was made the way it was is pure speculation. Only a fool would move to condemn or endorse what is not yet fully understood.
And what do you mean by "conspiracy"? I would be shocked to find out this was done by some lone wolf and wasn't built with broad (even if grumbly) consensus in the relevant teams. That's how corporate software is built.
Support is very expensive. Say what you want about Apple, but they provide absolutely stellar support, especially with the stupidly inexpensive Apple Care insurance. This is only cost effective if they can make reasonable predictions about how their devices will behave in any given scenario. Interfacing Apple hardware with non-certified (MFi, BLE, etc) third party hardware has a non-trivial risk of unpredictability high support costs, either from excessive Apple Care claims, customer support communications, or just overloading the Genius Bar.
Reducing support cost could easily explain the motivation of the entire walled garden if they are sufficiently high.
I haven’t used non apple earphones for awhile but the seamless connectivity performance of AirPods would suggest this was done for performance, not to deliberately lock in devices.
This 2020 paper is great at breaking down some of the extensions: https://www.usenix.org/system/files/woot20-paper-heinze.pdf
In their defence, they went with Lightning shortly before the USB-C spec was finalized. Then, to avoid their customers being screwed over by constantly changing the connector, they kind of had to stick with it for a decade.
People will complain if they push features that are ahead of the spec, and they'll complain if they let the spec be finalized before they use it. Being guided by "What's the best we can do for UX, assuming out users are our users in every product category we enter" seems to be their reasonable middle ground.
It seems like every other message gets downgraded to SMS.
Then it has to accomodate every other intersted party, many of which hate each other. Apple has always been a bit of an odd duck ("Think Different" has been internalized for some time), but Verizon actively hates OTT messaging as they can't charge for it. Samsung would rather run their own RCS implementation to create and advertise "Samsung RCS", and Google can't push too hard without getting EU attention for antitrust (again).
RCS has been stuck in limbo-hell for years for multiple reasons, none of which are easy.
That's not Apple's fault per se, but of course, they contribute to it. They should open up the iMessage protocol.
In my country (India), Apple still doesn't sell charger and cable along with its new iDevices, even though those gadgets are exorbitantly expensive. And Apple doesn't allow custom repair here, even though my country mandated the Right to Repair, like EU did so. My old Mac Mini 2012 is gathering dust in a cupboard, because Apple service center refused to upgrade it to new RAM and new SATA SSD, citing Apple policies.
Like within minutes, with no big changes?
I didn't think it's rare that a company refuses to do any work on devices they no longer support. Their employees will no longer be trained to do this work, hence they'd have a nontrivial chance of causing damages. That's exactly why a right to repair is so important, so that other people can pick up their slack
The SSD is a bit more fiddly, but can also be done at home. Check iFixit.
https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Mac+mini+Late+2012+Hard+Drive+R...
But you've inspired me to gather courage and do the DIY upgrade myself next month during the holidays. No use having a working PC lying unused, merely because it is very sluggish due to old hardware. Wish me luck (for the upgrade), I think I'll need it.
They seem to work just fine, yeah.
Apple MFI certifies USB-C cables also, so I'm not sure if it is throttling its iDevices to be finicky with non-MFI USB-C cables.
I know for a fact that Apple did software updates to older iPhones to make them sluggish and drain battery quickly. I realised this when I went to Apple Genius Bar to get my iPhone 7 Plus battery replaced after it started draining too quickly daily, but even with new battery same problem persisted. The friendly staff member unofficially told me it is because of the recent software updates by Apple for older iPhones, and advised not to hold out hope that any future software update will fix the problem. Even a year later, his warning remained true. I gave away the iPhone to my nephew as a backup device for his studies, but he sold it soon, as it was a nightmare to keep charging it frequently.
Apple has faced multiple fines for deliberately slowing down older iPhones without informing users, including a €25 million fine in France and a $41 million fine for deceptive marketing practices. The company admitted to slowing down devices to prevent unexpected shutdowns due to aging batteries, but critics argued it was misleading.
These days, I wouldn't trust Apple with a barge pole, let alone the money from my wallet.
These cases are much less convincing than they may seem if you just take a moment to read about them. iDevices would throttle the cpu to make the battery last longer as it's capacity falls, this kind of throttling is not uncommon and not malicious.
This wasn't misleading, and isn't something that warrants any genuine criticism.
You will not find this quick battery drain problem in Motorola, Nokia, Oppo, Sony, etc. Their phones last several years even with ageing batteries. An 10+ years old Oppo phone I have, still holds almost full charge at idle, throughout the day.
As batteries get older, their capacity to hold charge reduces, but if a phone battery is draining too fast even in idle mode, it is likely due to software, not hardware. And if it is due to software, then the manufacturer company is to blame.
Less friction for devices like passkeys, external hard drives, etc.
It doesn't seem like they were keen on moving that down the product line since they had to be dragged kicking and screaming to do so.
Though I wonder why it works with Linux, which I assume doesn't have code for a special handshake specific to AirPods
I do rather hope perhaps perhaps perhaps the EU & DMA or other may perhaps bend Apple off their rotten course of making non-standard bespoke systems. It seems like very recently the EU is getting ready to cave & abandon all their demands for trying to use standards, that their fear of the US is about to make them fold on insisting upon better. Demanding Apple stop doing everything in bespoke incompatible ways is something that should have happened a long time ago, imo, and it's so horrifying to see one of the only stands in my lifetime against the propeietarization & domination of systems by a bespoke corporate lord abandoned.
There's some rays of hope here & there. Seemoo Lab has a ton of amazing reverse engineering efforts, figuring out how many many many undocumented locked down Apple systems & protocols work & trying to give control back. This is the highest virtue, the best hacker nature. Here's Open Wireless Link, but they have so many other amazing projects they've similarly figured out out to pry open. Amazing best human spirit. https://github.com/seemoo-lab/owl
I use wired headphones to study with Anki (AnkiDroid) because I've found most (inexpensive) Bluetooth headphones require a second or two to begin playing. As I'm dealing with short audio clips, this use case necessitates restarting the "audio playing" situation every few seconds.
Maybe the app developers could "play" quiet audio between these short clips. But barring such a development, I'd like to know if higher quality headphones might suffer from less latency in this regard.
1-2 seconds is an eon for audio latency so I guess something else is going on than anything BT related in the headphones. Unless you have particularly bad luck in what headphones you use.
FWIW, I use a variety of cheap and not so cheap BT headphones across multiple devices and apps including AnkiDroid and have not perceived any latency.
If switching to wired removes the latency then it does seem to indicate something in the BT stack of your device. I wonder if you experience the lag when using AnkiDroid + BT on another device.
I will suggest to the app developers to add optional silence. Thank you.
> Need fix please
> original engineers got laid off thats why
Did you have to do anything special?
Edit: I noticed that the article's page title is also misspelled this way.
You're right that the text you're thinking of used to be in that space, if you mean the "About" blurb.
But you're not right about the page contents. The "About" is github metadata, just like the partial commit message "android: multidevice capabilites and accessiblit..." that you can also find. And just like that message, it was full of typos because it's not public-facing.
But there is an actual page talking about the project, which is what we're all commenting on here, and which never contained the typo.
Still baffles me why the first gen airpod "button" wasn't the winner, but unfortunately Steve's no longer with us.
Something needs to make it very expensive and feel exclusive… Yes, you can have AirPods with noise cancellation, but you need a 1k€ iPhone to go with that.
AirPods noise cancellation can be controlled by holding the AirPod stalk.
And that’s not an excuse or a workaround: That’s how I always do it. I’ve never bothered doing it through software on my iDevices, because that’s much more cumbersome.
This thread is full of weird misinformation.
Swift is OSS, but it's not a great example to illustrate your point.
Darwin’s underlying code was BSD license and didn’t require releasing source code.
Darwin is also a bad example:
"On July 25, 2006, the OpenDarwin team announced that the project was shutting down, as they felt OpenDarwin had "become a mere hosting facility for Mac OS X related projects", and that the efforts to create a standalone Darwin operating system had failed.[40] They also state: "Availability of sources, interaction with Apple representatives, difficulty building and tracking sources, and a lack of interest from the community have all contributed to this."[41]"
"PureDarwin is a project to create a bootable operating system image from Apple's released source code for Darwin.[43] Since the halt of OpenDarwin and the release of bootable images since Darwin 8.x, it has been increasingly difficult to create a full operating system as many components became closed source."
Just like Microsoft there are parts of the company who are hostile to open source, and there parts of the company whose success is attributable to open source.
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