How is it eliminating market competition? Uber, etc don’t compete with google voice and similar services.

And its a valid reason for preventing scammers. I am literally tired of scammers on every single app. I still want an open internet but I think ALL phone numbers should be tied to real human identity and geolocation. Yes, it seems dystopian but it’s no different than the time when we only had landlines with verified callers. Democracy is as fine back then, maybe even better.

Some structure and verification around telecommunications will go a long way towards improving the experience for everyone even if it hurts the libertarian part of my brain.

I was going to say the same thing. I've been using it close to a decade and I've yet to encounter a circumstance where anything I've used has even seemed aware of the fact that I'm using it rather than a more "traditional" carrier. Conflating both of those would be like saying you need to watch your blood and sugar if you consume a lot of Nestles Crunch bars or Nestle bottled water.

Same, they must mean Google Voice. I've used Google Fi for gosh, 8-9+ years (honestly don't remember, but a good long while) and I've had ZERO problems with anything relating to using it as my cell provider.

Me neither, but I moved a T Mobile number to Fi. It could be different with numbers originally designated to Fi.

Try WISE With Google FI

Yes, they solve the problem that you called the company.

The main way is that literally zero of these watches actually meet the standards that the cell networks require of a cell phone. Every single one of them has a carrier exemption or a lower standard to adhere to, because it turns out that putting a cell phone's RF package into a watch is super hard, both because of size and the various negative effects of the human body on radio signals. This affects cell phones too of course, but less so (remember the iPhone 4 and how we were "holding it wrong"?).

Another way is that watch chipsets are distinct from cell phone chipsets in that they make a variety of compromises unique to wearable requirements. Apple may be an exception here, you can't get a spec sheet for their chip, but for the other providers their wearable chipsets are generations behind anything they sell for a cell phone and are compromised in terms of power. Interestingly even watches (Apple, Samsung soon) that support 5G are running a dumbed down version of 5G that was created specifically to support the wearables and IoT market.

It gets even stranger in software. A text showing up on your watch might have arrived two completely different ways depending on whether it's an iMessage or a regular text and you can't tell which. The watch often doesn't even have its own number -- it's borrowing your phone's. IOW, it's not a tiny phone doing phone things, it's a companion device trying to fake it.

As others have said, but also the Apple "watch shares your phone number but not really" where you have a second "real" phone number that actually communicates - reminiscent of how Republic Wireless worked on the Sprint network.

Stuff like this seems like it might happen in any low-quality identity system (possibly aided by customer support who can't possibly be blamed for just trying shit and seeing if it works) regardless of whether it's based on some hacky version of telephony. I often pick up prescriptions for my wife at CVS, so we had her account linked to mine, but after we moved for some reason they had trouble filling one of my prescriptions, and I had to spend a while on the phone with them. They had filled it at the CVS near our old address but for whatever reason their computer system was not able to cancel that like usual and fill it at the one we had switched to, and eventually whatever "fix" they did somehow made my wife's phone number start receiving all of our notifications. Even more confusingly, a prescription I started on later didn't show up in either of our accounts, but it was still getting filled somehow and would be ready when I went there. After around a year of this something changed in their kiosks for putting in your info to get your prescriptions listed, and suddenly I couldn't get it to show up there either and would need to spend an extra 20 minutes hashing it out with them for a couple months. The most recent time I went there, they finally told me that apparently I had two separate accounts: one at our old address (which I hadn't lived at for over a year) with my phone number, and one at our current address with my wife's phone number but the common prefix nickname version of my first name (think like "Will" for William or "Ben" for Benjamin). Because it was somehow on an account with my name, my phone number, my old address, and literally no email address at all, I couldn't log in and view it in the app, and because it would "standardize" my name to the account that had my current address, I couldn't access it on the kiosk. It seems that whichever customer service rep I talked to literally duplicated my account, put my wife's phone number on it, moved all of the prescriptions we had at the time over, and associated my email address with it, but then left the old account otherwise intact and just waiting for some database quirk to unexpectedly end up assigning a new prescription to. The part that surprised me the most was that the person I talked to at CVS was entirely unfazed by this and had a standard process for merging the two accounts, which means that this apparently happens a lot.

which network?

I didn't realize Apple had a kid mode. Of course I see Apple watches everywhere, but I haven't talked to any parents about them. When we got the gizmo 3ish years ago, it was popular with a lot of kids around here. I wasn't hearing of kids using the apple watch. The gizmo is nice in that they can call us and that their contacts are limited. I really don't want to have more features than that. I'm just surprised that it feels like an "unpolished" set of features.

Not an option, unfortunately, since my wife and I are both on Android.

Any Apple kit for your kids is completely useless if you yourself don't use Apple crap.

Well, they are providing a valuable service to society. How much money should they be allowed to profit for providing this service?

So what happened to FTC in 2025 that it’s not doing anymore consumer protection?

Are you serious?

Only in the last week we have Sony deleting paid-for movies. That is pretty anti-consumer.

I realize all of this is empirical, but the term enshitification just didn’t form out of thin air.

Well… since then but also before then.

Definitely! But the form factor is really important: since it's strapped to their wrist they don't lose it. Classmates with phone-shaped phones seem to loose theirs a lot.

>like you are getting caught up on the watch form-factor.

I'm getting caught up by the full fledged surveillance kit. Give them some independence and freedom instead of this a watch with an SOS button, we survived before ~2010

Don’t be ridiculous. They could easily use premade products, exclusively, and avoid the inter-provider compatibility problems by deploying meshtastic nodes anywhere they expected their kids to be, and getting them certified as ham radio operators as a backup.

you only need a few llm subscriptions i suppose?

The victim is complaining that they were hurt. I seek to empower them to not be hurt further. What are you bringing to the table? Snide comments?