> The feature, announced at last week’s iPhone 16 event, will arrive as part of the imminent watchOS 11 release.
how exactly was Apple able to preannounce approval for this before the, yknow, approval?
like exactly no other agencies work this way, precommiting them to a decision they havent formally taken, even if informally it was already taken they would frown very strongly on leaking their stuff
Having been next to the people working with the FDA at one point, they do tend to give a lot of feedback, especially when they don't like something. And there were a lot of hoops to jump though where the feedback was "you are on track" for a while before the actual official approval of that step came through.
Very likely all of the core approvals were done, and they were just waiting on things like approval of software testing methodology (yes, they have to approve your software testing system), or something of the like.
The announcement said that the feature was pending FDA approval.