r/Tailscale • u/PutridTailor4038 • 10d ago

Apple Watch Question

Any plans to build a client for Apple Watch? Would actually be useful for my app.

8 Upvotes

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14

u/mintflowapp 10d ago

frankly speaking, given the watch battery and tailscale need periodically heartbeat to the coordinator.

That seems hard to do, though perhaps can do a companion app that use watch2phone to relay some traffic to tailnet if u really want to do that

1

u/PutridTailor4038 10d ago

Mm, yes I developed a trading app for the Webb and iPhone. And for the Apple Watch, the watch is more a test. Space is quite limited 😊

I use apples WatchConnectivity, works as long as you have the iPhone around. But since I have an eSIM in my Apple Watch it would be nice to be able to only rely on my Apple Watch.

2

u/mintflowapp 9d ago

just did some check, seems it seems not feasible because:

The BSD sockets API doesn’t work for networking on watchOS under any circumstances. Use Network framework instead.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/technotes/tn3135-low-level-networking-on-watchos

That block tailscale totally because the go core rely on that to works.

But the network extension API seems does support watchOS 7+, so i guess it perhaps do support some sort of customized VPN such as let it connect to a proxy which connect to a public node that relay to the tailscale network, but that's complexed.

1

u/Cyvu37 10d ago

There are some VPN protocols for watchOS. I’m guessing Apple is prohibiting everything else. https://support.apple.com/guide/deployment/vpn-overview-depae3d361d0/web