Sunday, August 23, 2015

Marketing: make something look like what is intended, not what it is

Well, this has been a depressing past couple of days. This was the time to re-integrate the AWS SDK back into the application in preparation for sending data to Kinesis. I had basic Cognito and Kinesis hello world working back in June on WatchOS 1.0. I'd mistakenly assumed that some sort of compatibility over time would be in order. Not to be the case. Summary:
Yes, it is possible to disable the enforcement of the TLS1.2 requirement. And this I did, I am able to get a set of temporary keys for calls to AWS services. How many applications are going to have to do this? All of them?

Worse, it doesn't look possible to use the current AWS SDK with a Watch application. This looks like a pretty ugly show stopper:
  • 3rd party library doesn't have bitcode support. While you can disable this on the iPhone,
  • Watch and iPhone have to have the same bitcode support level. And the Watch requires bitcode enabled.
Think about what this means!  7-8 years worth of iPhone 3rd party library support out there and probably used by a few applications. And these libraries will NOT work with any application that wants to bundle with WatchOS 2.0. The proverbial 'what were they thinking?' comes to mind.

So, I'm stuck: can't integrate with 3rd party library until rebuilt...

The calendar looks rough for Apple:
  • September 9th announcements; WatchOS2 and some new hardware
  • Then they turn on the holiday season marketing; "buy our watch, it has apps"
  • In the mean time, a mountain of developers are trying to figure out how to ship anything on the Watch
  • New message "trust us, our developers will eventually catch up"


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