As a European, I have to say I am generally impressed with the EU in these cases. I'm from a country that's rich and capable, but with a GDP a fraction of Apple's market cap. There is no chance that national laws and entities would be sufficient to protect my consumer rights from corporations this size.
The EU is fundamentally a centre-right, liberalist, pro-business coalition, but what that means is that it is pro-competition. What's really impressive is that it seems to mostly refrain from devolving into protectionist policies, giving no preferential treatment to European businesses against international (intercontinental?) competitors, despite strong populist tendencies in certain member states.
I would argue the opposite: It actually makes European businesses worth off by continuing to make its regulatory environment so complex only massive companies like big tech or Europe's legacy players have the resources to comply.
Add to that feel-good green initiatives like a packaging initiative that might lower packaging waste from European companies, but more likely will just make European goods more expensive and cause Europeans to buy from Temu instead.
The EU has basically said that it's better to have a handful medium-sized companies in competition for customers than one or two mega-corps owning and dictating the market. And to resolve that they employ two things, one is the DMA/DSA and similar laws which mostly takes effect when your company reaches a certain large market penetration, the other is standardisations such as the Radio Equipment Directive (think "USB-C law" and similar ones) that make it easier for consumers to avoid vendor lock-in.
> just make European goods more expensive and cause Europeans to buy from Temu instead
> The EU has basically said that it's better to have a handful medium-sized companies in competition for customers than one or two mega-corps owning and dictating the market. And to resolve that they employ two things, one is the DMA/DSA and similar laws which mostly takes effect when your company reaches a certain large market penetration, the other is standardisations such as the Radio Equipment Directive (think "USB-C law" and similar ones) that make it easier for consumers to avoid vendor lock-in.
Then show me the handful of European, medium-sized companies competing for customers. The problem is that you pass DMA, DSA, GDPR, etc. which Google, Apple etc. can fight for years in court and if they have to pay a few billion, so be it.
Instead what's happening is that European alternatives (the kind that's actually good, not the kind that's European and half as good) don't exist and the incentives to build one shrink because any scaling company is instantly hamstrung.
No it wasn't. The question was that if regulation creates more competition with Apple what are the markets with this competition?
European companies compete with US companies, including Apple, in areas where there is competition. In music software, music streaming, engineering and finance software, services and so on.
Apple has around 33% smartphone market share in Europe. Where is the US competition? Google at 3%. The actual competition is non-US in Samsung and Xiaomi. You can argue that Google competes with the Play Store, but then there is no competition with the Play Store on Android from the US.
Big US tech companies don't compete with each other as much as one might think. Most of their revenue comes from dominating one area or platform, with little competition from the rest.
So therefor the common conclusion that Europe should be more like the US to have competition also doesn't make sense as the big US tech companies don't have serious direct competition in the US in their core businesses.
You can't compete with the big tech companies by creating a Google with 3% market share in smartphones to compete with Apple, a Walmart with 6% online retail market share to compete with Amazon, or a Microsoft with 4% search engine market share to compete with Google.
Significant about your list is that most of them are businesses who sell to other businesses, not to consumers. That's what is propping up the European economy, since European companies don't seem to be able to make an export that foreign customers are interested in. With some exceptions of course, mostly food and luxury goods. Nokia could have been a forerunner for lots of other European companies taking on the world, but sadly it fizzled out.
In addition to them there are also countless small to medium sized companies that nobody's ever heard of, that don't experience hypergrowth but have slow and steady growth - especially in the B2B sector. I've worked at some such companies.
I agree actually, my use of "medium-sized" was not best, in my personal view a medium-sized company is in the 200-500 employee range. These are definitively larger than that, however I assumed the person I replied to took "medium sized" to mean "significantly smaller than Apple/Google/Amazon/… …but not unknown". Because if I were to pull up a list of thirty unknown actually medium-sized companies pretty much nobody would recognise the names.
These companies may be smaller than FAANG, but I also feel that if BASF disappeared overnight it would have a larger impact on the world than if Facebook disappeared.
HN is sometimes incredibly biased towards consumer tech.
All of this seems reasonable, and I see the value in keeping things competitive.
I do have one concern though.
Established markets are more entrenched, and hearing that smaller companies may have "slow and steady growth" here seems excellent.
Yet emerging markets move incredibly fast, and the goal is to discover those trenches and occupy them. Being held back in such a market can be troublesome.
> Yet emerging markets move incredibly fast, and the goal is to discover those trenches and occupy them.
Well, only if you make it a goal to occupy all the trenches. The EU has realized that it does not want all possible trenches occupied. For example: There is a lot of market share to be had in waste disposal by dumping it in the rivers and oceans. Regulation generally prohibits this, because we don't want our rivers and oceans full of waste.
Capitalist market self-regulation wouldn't have done this without external pressure (regulation, litigation, etc.) because the capitalist market would externalize all costs if it would increase profits.
Bad example. Dumping waste cheaply illegally is a trench that is continuously filled with really bad stuff. Regulations needs more Oumph, it is just too cheap to do in an dishonest way.
Since when is Airbus a small company and not part of the large state supported corp monopoly gang? Same with SAP, Roche and Bayer. These are all masive corporations that swallowed entire sectors. Same with Spotify having used its monopoly status to screw over smaller artists. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills when I read such comments.
Let me ask you guys something else, if EU hates large monopolist companies so much as you claim, then why are all its car companies monopolistic mega conglomerates that rule the world like Volkswagen, Stellantis, Daimler Benz, BMW, and Renault? Where's EU's equivalent of Tesla if they supposedly hate all these big companies?
I'll tell you why: Just like the US, the capital controlled EU also supports its domestic monopolies and only bitches about foreign monopolies in sectors they don't control and threaten their economic hegemony. That's the cold hard truth, everything else is just political hot air and virtue signaling for brownie points, and I'm pissed people are not only buying it but also parroting it when the goal to monopolize business sectors is as strong in EU corporations as it is in US and Chinese ones.
Europe is just more stricter now with
controlling large (mostly foreign) corporations since its own economy lost a lot of ground to the US and Chinese ones (it has now half the real GDP it had 2 decades ago), and since it can't create new large companies, all it can do now is protecting what it has left from foreign companies taking over their turf. The upshot being that a lot of those rules are congruent with the consumer protections which also end up globally favoring consumers abroad.
Like, Tesla are very small (in terms of cars sold) but very large in terms of valuation. Seems like a once-off, not something that would be replicable (anywhere).
Really? Because look up on the history of VW, BMW, Porsche, Fiat, etc and their founding families, some of who still own a large part of the shares of those companies today. Most of them worked with fascists no problem, some by force of the era some by opportunity but none of them opposed them.
You see this is the typical European hypocrisy that I dislike. Pointing fingers that Elon is somehow a fascist cause he raised his arm once, but Porsche or BMW who used slave labor from work camps is somehow not fascist now because ... reasons I guess.
Explain me that with logic and reason, and not with the "Elon is a fascist because reddit told me he is".
The fact that Elon openly supports and speaks at events of a German party that has been officially labeled far right extremist by the domestic intelligence agency is a stronger signal than even the Hitlerite hand gestures.
How is Tesla an example of your point? It’s the biggest EV manufacturer owned by one of the world’s richest men.
Perhaps the problem here isn’t that smaller brands don’t exist, it’s that if we give examples of smaller brands then you’ll argue
“Never heard of them. Thus proof that the EU is holding them back”
And if we mention household names then you’d argue
“Those aren’t small companies”
You’ve basically crafted an impossible to satisfy condition. A question that would be equally impossible for you to satisfy with US firms as it is for EU firms.
It doesn't surprise me at all. BYD invests heavily into R&D. I don't know how much Tesla invests into R&D but if their latest product is an ugly Homercar for incels, then they should probably think a bit about their strategy.
Yes. As someone who has worked with 100+ funded start-ups, roughly 85 in USA and 15 in EU - the EU ones have such a harder, trudging climb due to regulations.
> Good. I would hate for my country to become like the USA.
Yeah, there's a whole lot of American exceptionalism going on in this thread, assuming the way things are done over here in the states is the best and only way. I live here and let me tell you, it's not. Just the fact that we have gigantic tech monopolies with more money than several nations combined is proof of that - that's not a thing that should ever happen.
> The problem is that you pass DMA, DSA, GDPR, etc. which Google, Apple etc. can fight for years in court and if they have to pay a few billion, so be it.
And how do you compete with the big tech companies without it? It's been decades without anyone being able to do it. Not in Europe and not in the US. OpenAI might have a chance, but they also have billions.
The days where someone could drop out of school and start a company in the garage is over. Cost of living is up, so is competition. Companies need to expand and regulation like GDPR makes it easier to do so instead of having to deal with multiple countries regulation. The US always had an advantage in regulation like the DMCA.
To spell it out, before regulation European companies had to...
Deal with privacy regulation of each country. Which in the EU was supposed to be similar, but wasn't entirely. With GDPR not only is it the same in the EU, but other countries are now following the same model.
Register for VAT in every EU country it sold (enough) products in. Making many not sell to other countries at all until Amazon ate their business. With VAT MOSS you only register in you own country.
Accept many form of payments with many different fees since credit card adoption and cost could vary wildly. With interchange fees capped you increasingly only need to accept common credit cards.
Pay large roaming charges when traveling, making starting services like Uber or Airbnb less relevant since you couldn't assume someone had data in another country.
Try to compete with big tech companies that were charging for access to their platforms while minimizing their taxes through royalty payments, VAT deals and offshore holdings. Giving them a huge advantage. This is still the case, but lesser so.
For actually running a company it is a lot better now.
There are other problems with EU regulations. Some things are natural monopolies or in other ways doesn't do well as markets. Privatization and state-aid rules prevent European countries from effectively managing these areas. Any advantage Europe had over the US in cost of living and public services is rapidly diminishing.
> regulatory environment so complex only massive companies like big tech or Europe's legacy players have the resources to comply
This is a very inaccurate view. I’ve worked with multiple SMEs and no such “complexities” ever become operational challenges. Even as a indie developer, my compliance is a default provided I’m not trying to do something shady.
Looking into the EU regulations, in most cases what they want you to do (or not do) is common sense.
Same experience, from startup to large multinational EU companies.
The biggest headaches/issues are normally local regulations (country specific or even more local). The EU directives are more frameworks with a lot of flexibility and well grounded on common sense + expertise. How the different countries implement them in their own laws (with their own historical laws) is a different story.
In IT it may be the case. In foodtech it is a problem. This may sound reassuring, as we don’t really want much of the stuff being sold in the US here in the EU. But, for new approaches regarding food production the EU regulatory environment is unfortunately a morass. There are lots of regulation which is neither fact or experience based, for example around insects, or ecological labelling.
DMA is applicable only to "gatekeepers" who markets with X amount of users. This is designed not to burden smaller businesses, but to limit monopoly of the large few corporations.
> It actually makes European businesses worth off by continuing to make its regulatory environment so complex only massive companies like big tech or Europe's legacy players have the resources to comply.
The DMA (that this article is about) applies to gatekeepers (massive companies like big tech), not mom and pop startups
It doesn’t even apply to megacorps generally. The DMA applies to Core Platform Services – meaning app stores, browsers, etc – that are evaluated as gatekeepers individually.
The same company can have provide CPSs, with different status. For instance, Google is a designated gatekeeper of Android (OS) and Google Maps (Intermediation), but not Gmail. So the DMA won’t dictate anything related to Gmail, even if Google is a gatekeeper in other areas.
Massive companies typically smother small players anyway, especially in unregulated environments.
> Add to that feel-good green initiatives like a packaging initiative that might lower packaging waste from European companies, but more likely will just make European goods more expensive and cause Europeans to buy from Temu instead.
Does this actually happen or are you just making shit up?
That is the western European way though. It's supposed to be a nice place to live, not a nice place to do business. If that leads to Chaebolification of the economy then so be it. There are other parts of the world that specialise in deregulation at the expense of living standards.
True! And I generally empathize with this. The core point of the EU and its member states' governments should be to enable high quality of life.
But that model you describe is cracking: Cost of living is going through the roof in Europe, taxes/social contributions going up every year, etc.
The problem is that Europe is like an old, rich person who now lives off of the principal of their wealth. For a person that's fine because they'll eventually die. For a government, you should strive for an environment that lets you keep growing wealth.
> But that model you describe is cracking: Cost of living is going through the roof in Europe, taxes/social contributions going up every year, etc.
Cost of living is increasing in the US too (in large part due to geopolitical reasons), and social contributions are rising because of demographic factors. I'm not sure how market liberalism is magically going to fix that latter issue.
Fair point re: US! Though that doesn't mean it's not a problem.
Re: demographics. It's relatively straightforward: To keep contributions constant while supporting more people, you need either:
-more people via immigration (which is extremely tricky to get right) who are net contributors, not beneficiaries of social systems
-massively increased productivity through innovation/technology
-cut benefits from social programs
If you do none of those things, the systems will either collapse or you need to raise taxes/mandatory contributions which are de-facto taxes.
> I would argue the opposite: It actually makes European businesses worth off by continuing to make its regulatory environment so complex only massive companies like big tech or Europe's legacy players have the resources to comply.
Are you arguing that 27 different sets of laws was a better approach? That these countries would just gladly lie down and never regulate the societal-level harms, systemic lawbreaking, and massive infringement of privacy across the board? I don't think so.
For a moment the political system in the US seemed to get to the same conclusions as the EU under Bidens FTC and anti-trust cases. But the conclusions of that remain to be seen.
The problem is that those 27 sets of laws basically still exist. Regulation is certainly not the only reason. Fragmentation is another massive problem.
There's the EU-Inc initiative that the EU has basically made pointless (by wanting to introduce 27 new standards, not one, just making things more complex).
There are no 27 sets of laws to do business in Europe. It's not perfect, but it's a SINGLE MARKET, if you comply to the EU regulation you are allowed to sell everywhere.
It does however not absolve you from additional local market demands to be competitive, i.e. local language support, service infrastructure, etc.
For example: Miele is one of the largest washing machine manufacturers in Europe. They have their front panel translated to local languages for most of its markets. You can sell a washing machine with a English front panel, but you won't be able to compete in e.g. the German/Italian/French market
> continuing to make its regulatory environment so complex
To be fair, the regulations are there because companies are out-of-control paperclip maximisers. For example, the cookie banner didn't have to be obnoxious - companies choose to comply maliciously to adhere to the text and shit over the spirit of the regulations, which have to become more and more verbose and explicit.
... where is it easy to do business anyway? sure, there are degrees, levels, grades of this, the size of the barriers to entry matters, there are metrics about how easy it is to start a business for example, but that's just one aspect, and I'd argue mostly an unimportant one (if it takes 2 hours or 2 days or 1 weeks it's fine, what matters is how much does it cost to do it and how much does it cost to maintain the legal entity, and to do the filings, etc.)
The DMA really isn't particularly complex though. And what complexity it has only becomes complex once you're a manager of a whole consumer platform (a "gatekeeper" in its jargon).
To wit: your point is backwards, the DMA is structured such that the only companies that need to bear its burdens are "big tech or Europe's legacy players". If you're a little company wanting to add a paid app store to your Tiny AI Robot Virtual Experience or whatever, go nuts. The DMA absolutely won't stop you.
I'd argue that it doesn't go far enough at this point. There are imaginable scenarios now where the US uses AWS/Microsoft like China currently uses rare earth exports or even further and AWS/Microsoft + Android/iOS are critical infrastructure. Having some "sovereign cloud" etc. won't help since this needs continuous monitoring and improvements from the mothership.
Merely doing monopoly regulation won't help. We have to actually destroy the monopolies.
As a former European, I agree with your first statement. I love that the EU is taking this seriously, and I like how they introduced the "gatekeeper" term to apply regulations only to the "big ones" and not small businesses (even though I don't agree with many of the individual laws in the DMA).
That said, you can't argue that this isn't protectionist - we simply don't have any gatekeepers here, so if we're fair the DMA is only hitting international competitors (except Spotify maybe?)
Wow, I did not know that, thanks for making me aware of this. I guess the tech press only covers the big cases? I didn't even know there were so many cases already.
edit: I looked it up - you are talking about the DSA (digital services act) while I was talking about the DMA (the one including the gatekeeper specification) - so that's not really what I meant....
No, this is under the DSA (digital services act), not the DMA.
The DSA tells platforms how they must keep users safe and transparent, the DMA tells the largest gatekeepers how they must behave toward competitors and business users.
Center right is spot on if you know anything about the EU's member states. Here left means some flavour of socialism. Running state monopolies to the ground and adding markets for essential services like electricity is not exactly that.
I don't think you know what you are actually talking about, you are confusing the EU with Europe, if talking about Europe you are giving a blanket statement over 40+ countries with quite different cultures, societies, etc. If talking about the EU then you have no clue what the EU actually is.
I recommend using more precise language about what you are talking, at the moment you just sound very confused.
Is this a joke? The EU is the product of large industrialists institutionalising their liberalist, capitalist values as an international bureaucracy.
It hardly cares about unions beyond what the ECHR and ILO treaties demands, i.e. it's obviously not left wing. If it was inherently left wing it wouldn't have the kind of parliament it has, but rather something like Yugoslavia or the DDR did.
It's also not conservative, hence why that movement has had to bolt on militarisation and stuff like Frontex.
It is quite unfortunate what happened when ethnic nationalism won out over brotherhood and unity, but to be clear, I don't think that has anything to do with the economic model
It's funny, as the EU is normally bashed by left people for being too right, and right people for being too left.
Like, lots of the Treaties are pretty neo-liberal (private services, competition is always good, privatise stuff) but lots more are more left wring (the anti-monoploy stuff, the social charter etc).
Really though the EU is 27 governments in a trenchcoat, so it tends to reflect those governments (which change over time).
Anti-monopoly is left wing and doesn't fit the neo-liberalist compartment?
The social charter is firmly liberalist, though not distinctly of the neo- flavour.
Due to the institutional structures and processes EU rule making tends to be quite resistant to immediate political fashion. For one the power of framing from interest and lobby groups is quite strong, hence the influence from expert groups and lawyer like people. It's why conservatives are pushing towards a kind of United States of Europe direction, they'd prefer a centralisation of power in areas currently governed by the founding agreements.
The Soviet Union had large industrialists and so does China. Large companies and large industry is the defining aspect of both socialism and capitalism.
Yes, the EU as an institution is centre-right, its main purpose is to regulate a common market, it's a economic liberal institution, and liberal in this sense is a right-wing political philosophy, not the bastardised "liberal" usage in American politics meaning "progressive".
I basically stopped buying "apps" almost a decade ago when Apple unceremoniously removed an app i paid for with no refund because the in app browser defaulted to a certain website. Btw I have always hated their "app" branding. But the benefit of it, at least for me, is it's a strong reminder that it's a childish analog to an application.
The only exception to this is I bought the game, Vampire
Survivors, no wait. It was free. (because of clones in the app store) Anyway.
The funny thing is I do actually have like 100 (free) apps installed. I just never use any of them except for Brave. I basically immediately forget about them the second I install them because just using them is so awkward. They know they have a usability problem but they can't really square it with their massive app ecosystem except in the most slowest, methodical way possible. In the meantime, more UI annoyances are popping up twice as fast.
iPhone used to compete well a decade ago in usability for things like copying text from a webpage into an email. Despite the phone being much larger, I find it much more difficult to do today, perhaps because selecting text is just so unpredictable with the way web standards have become a pile of cruft. Despite whose fault it is, ultimately it's much worse now. I would only bother trying that on a desktop today unless absolutely necessary.
Sometimes text just becomes impossible to edit in certain circumstances. There's like three different things that can happen on a tap and hold and none of them are consistent. It feels absolutely random which one it does. I used to be able to select text from images, now I have to go through two to three cycles of "hold tap menu" -> "select text from image" until it works. It actually still works fine on my old iPad. How is the regression this bad?
I also find editing on an iPhone to be an exercise in futility. Is it no longer possible to place a cursor in the middle of a word? I end up having to go to a word boundary and erase from there and retype everything.
The keyboard touch areas also seem offset from Android and I end up one row off too much of the time.
Yes, the UI is so overloaded you can never tell what it's going to do. It might do two or three totally different things. Obviously you want to have the magnifying glass with a cursor. But then the cursor might just decide to jump to the end of the word. Sometimes it's impossible to get the cursor in front of the first letter if the UI is cramped. Maybe it will copy the text into a floating clipboard if your finger drifts a few pixels south. Maybe it will bring up a context menu? If you're using Safari, maybe it won't even let you select any text at all. Then you can take a screenshot and select text from an image to work around that.
Yes but sometimes it doesn't work, weirdly. The cursor just doesn't go where you put it, jumping to the end of the line or next line entirely, where it gets lost in limbo because it's a single line text box. It's ridiculously broken sometimes.
Now that's not a big deal until it happens 3 times in a row randomly and now something that would take less than half a second on a keyboard is taking over 20 seconds. Not only that the random behavior is extremely frustrating which just makes you avoid it in the future.
I use that on Android all the time. But I feel I've only gotten it to work once or twice on iPhone. And even then the word boundaries were very "sticky" (IIRC) and precision placement still very difficult.
> "They managed to convince the courts that iPadOS is a separate operating system to iOS (it's not), which delayed iPadOS being designated as a gatekeeper for almost a year. They are currently challenging all of the rest: the iOS, Safari, and App Store designations, and successfully managed to avoid iMessage being designated at all. They have taken the DMA law to court for an apparently ambiguous comma in article 5(4) - the payment one, and for somehow infringing on human rights law in article 6(7) - the interoperability one."
Looking at the actual filing[1], Apple says:
> "First plea in law, alleging that Article 6(7) of Regulation (EU) 2022/1925 is inconsistent with the requirements of the European Charter of Fundamental Rights and the principle of proportionality, and that Article 2(b) of the European Commission Decision of 5 September 2023 is unlawful insofar as it imposes the obligations under Article 6(7) of Regulation (EU) 2022/1925 on Apple in relation to iOS."
For context, here are the full contents of Article 6(7):
"The gatekeeper shall allow business users and alternative providers of services provided together with, or in support of, core platform services, free of charge, effective interoperability with, and access for the purposes of interoperability to, the same operating system, hardware or software features, regardless of whether those features are part of the operating system, as are available to, or used by, that gatekeeper when providing such services."
Big companies like that have a vested interest in paying their legal team A Lot Of Money to find stupid details like this and to argue the toss over them because a ruling can cost them billions. If arguing over a comma means they don't have to, or that it pushes the point where they have to pay forwards, it's worth the expense to them.
This happens in the confines of legal (EU, California, ...) institutions and courts with the occasional boring news reporting the average consumer doesn't read, like this article.
More people are getting annoyed with Apple over these issues, and they are bleeding into the mainstream media more frequently. I have a few die hard Apple friends (Non-professionals) that have recently got so frustrated with being pushed into corners that they have given up the fruity ecosystem altogether.
In no way am I suggesting that Apple are on the way out, but they have definitely started to turn the same corner that IBM and Microsoft have in the past. They are becoming seen as 'big business' instead of 'challenging underdog'.
Not super digging with Apple’s push back on EU laws nowadays, will probably not get another Apple phone… but, the competition is not very good so far. Currently on an iPhone 12. So, hopefully by like 2030 the Linux phone ecosystem will really be there for day-to-day use (maybe it already is there, I haven’t checked lately).
And I must admit, this phone has already had a good run. If it lasts that long, I’ll be impressed for sure.
“Challenging underdog” isn’t a term I’d have applied to Apple since the early days of the iPhone. They’ve been very big and very “big business” for a long time now, and I’ve called myself an Apple fan since the 1990s. They are a very different company today (mostly due to means; they’ve always had the ambition).
Yeah, couldn’t really call them the underdog post-iPhone. But they were a top-dog for a while after that.
The decline takes a long time to set in though. MS had lost the plot by 2012 (the release of Windows 8), but they’ve been shambling on for more than a decade since then.
Exactly my point, in the days of the first colourful iMac G3, ads with Jeff Goldblum in it, and the massively popular iPod, Apple was known as the challenging underdog. Even when they first launched the iPhone they were thought of as challenging the existing mobile device space dominated by Windows Mobile and CE, and PalmOS. They were exciting, moving fast, and disrupting markets.
That early built up reputation has got them far, and I would say has continued on for about another decade or so after the iPhone launch. Since that, their coninued lawsuits and anti competitive practices have been more and more prevalent in mainstream media, and that previous reputation is now begining to tarnish amonst normal consumers. When the standard user sees them as big business and not the challenging underdog anymore, it paves the way for a new cooler small tech company to come and steal their bacon.
Not in the view of the general public. The 'colourful era' of Mac G3s, and fancy iPod ads went a long way into making the average consumer see them as trendy, cool, and disrupting the normal boring tech industry we were used to. That reputation got them really far by riding the wave into the launch of the iPhone.
Since then their reputation has been slowly eroding with the average consumer with the combined stagnation of product design, and the string of high profile anti consumer and anti competitive moves highlighted in the media. We have seen this before in big tech, and I look forward to the next cool disruptor taking their place.
That was exactly during the humble phase when the possible bankruptcy was still not yet fully sorted out.
They were also doing visits to universities showing how great it was the BSD / NeXTSTEP foundations of OS X, for doing UNIX related stuff.
Similar to how NeXT used to position itself against Sun, and other UNIX workstation vendors.
During my CERN stay at 2003 - 2004, they did visits to our IT telling more or less the same.
Had the coloured Macs with OS X Aqua or the iPod failed the market, that was it, yet another footnote of remarkable computing history company now gone.
Yep, as I keep saying. They built a bit of good reputation by breaking the mold, so the average consumer thought they were the greatest tech company ever. As time has gone on the mask has started to slip and the general population are starting to see them for the big business they are.
We techies always saw it, but the average consumers are only just begining to catch up.
As long as MS keeps making Windows worse and worse each release (and no one willing to develop decent ARM SoCs) and Android smartphone manufacturers keep releasing utter dogshit, Apple will have customers. They already market themselves as the privacy-friendly, "just works" alternative - and that's legitimately hard to fight.
Apple isn't in the position it is just because they make factually good hardware or because of their business practices - they are where they are because the competition constantly shoots itself with a sawn off shotgun.
IMO Apple have started to do the same. Their software is consistently getting buggier with worse user experiences, along with their reputation.
Tech savy windows users that are trying out Apple are finding that it very much doesnt 'Just Work' anymore, and that sentiment is starting to creep out more and more.
Take a look at Linuses recent evaluation of macOS by using only a Mac for a solid 2 months. His conclusion is that it is no better or worse than windows, and definitely doesnt 'Just Work'.
I am certainly not surprised that Apple is employing a lot of legal tricky to work around judgments. But what does surprise me is that there’s a very common attitude in forums that somehow Apple is the only company doing this, or they’re doing it worse than any other company.
For me personally they seem to be more expensive than competitors and have a more aggressive stance on openness (ex: compare PWA support on Android vs iOS, not to mention the multiple other things like no multiple stores, the browser engine discussion, etc). So, I am not amazed that people think "on top of all the other things that you annoy us with you also try to avoid the law?!".
While I hate Apple's anti-consumer practices as much as anyone, the PWA platform is a system set up by Google first and foremost. Take-up has been limited outside of Google Chrome. I wouldn't say Apple's PWA approach is necessarily an example of Apple's fuckery.
This wouldn't be much of an issue, of course, if Chrome would just run on iOS like it does on any other OS, so Google can implement PWAs themselves.
I don’t think that’s true. Apple said web sites were the way to add functionality to the first iPhone, but “can be installed on device”?
Jobs framed it that way, but IIRC, all you could do is create bookmarks. Creating an icon on the Home Screen? Impossible. Reliably storing data on-device? Impossible. Backing up your on-device data? Impossible. Accessing your on-device contacts, photos? Impossible.
Also, Jobs made a vision statement about web apps in June 2007, but Apple announced a SDK only four months later (in October 2007) and shipped it in March 2008.
⇒ I’m fairly sure he knew about that SDK when he made that statement.
The ability to install web apps that open as standalone apps, and not in Safari, was introduced by Apple with iOS 2.1 in 2008. Well before this ability was added to Android.
IMHO. Apple were the first to make it useful. Because the iPhone was always online and the browser window was limited. Active Desktop aimed for the technological stars and was just buggy and slow as a result, it was cool but too flaky to be used.
Symbian I just never had an Phone expensive enough to use like that.
In the end none of them really worked out I guess.
Of course, Apple is sabotaging Chrome and has been for years, and that's a much bigger problem than PWAs. The Safari team shouldn't need to implement PWAs against their will, Apple should instead let Google bring out a browser that does PWAs and then let the users decide if they want to use PWAs or not.
Google does something quite similar, though; Chrome can install applications into Android's app drawer, but that requires privileges other browsers can't attain, needing to resort to things like widgets instead. Firefox doesn't care about PWAs and Apple doesn't care about any platform but their own, so it's not as obvious a problem, but Android is full of "you must be the manufacturer or Google to compete" permissions. Android is just a lot better at fair competition than iOS, to the point you'd barely notice.
The consumer doesn't care which method is used to serve an application. PWAs could easily be presented to the end user like a native App.
The problem is rather that PWAs would prove a viable path for universal cross-platform applications, taking away the gatekeeper role the OS-vendors have.
Paradoxically PWA-support is also part of the "we're no gatekeeper" narrative, so it's in the OS-vendor interest to keep it maintained as a hampered alternative to native apps.
PWAs are the primary way for small busineses to have internal private apps for running staff services on local devices. Apples App Store has way too many hoops to jump through and has far too high a wait time to publish for businesses to move fast and update internal apps with bugfixes and new services etc.
Android accomplishes this by allowing devices to connect to private app stores and repos, which enable companies to issue their own apps on their own terms.
As Apple plays hard ball on this front, the only way is to use a PWA.
Custom apps published for internal use by companies with fewer than 100 employees who aren't eligible for enterprise app distribution sounds like a niche of a niche use case, so it's pretty consistent with my view that they're more developer catnip and not a serious technology.
Certainly in theory, almost never in practice. The enterprise slop shop that chooses web technologies because the consultants are cheaper is not trying to make anything lasting or delightful.
Apple already implement everything needed. They just decided that they can clear client-side storage for PWAs whenever they like (deleting user data), making them useless for anything that needs to store data and isn't synced to the cloud.
The goalposts move every time Apple resolves some bug that PWA advocates promise is the one issue holding them back from taking over the world with crappy web apps.
Openness is not a concern for the people who buy Apple devices, and probably not for the public at large. It certainly is no concern to me, I need a machine which works so I can get stuff done. For a MacBook that means opening the lid. For a Windows laptop that means plugging it in, opening the lid, waiting for half an hour for the system to update while it is unusable and hogging all the bandwidth at this time, etc.
Smart phones took over from personal computers, because people want something which works and they hate having to fiddle with their device, trouble shoot and fix things. They don't care that they can't install an Arch Linux terminal on it or download torrents. And if they need something more pro, they go for an iPad or a Macbook when they can choose. Openness is only important for programmers and people who love to mess with their device, not for the public at large.
> But what does surprise me is that there’s a very common attitude in forums that somehow Apple is the only company doing this, or they’re doing it worse than any other company.
Apart from being irrelevant and whataboutism, this is the narrative Apple is playing, particularly towards its userbase.
The EU regulation doesn't focus on Apple in any way, the purpose of the DMA is to have objective criteria to identify a scaled market of digital goods with an uneven playing field for all players.
The EU DMA has identified that Apple created a closed market of significant size, made themselves the gatekeeper and invited companies to compete there. But Apple participates in the market also as a player, and skews the playing field in their favor.
So it's an unjust market where forces are unable to flow freely, and the EU is attempting to rectify that.
The reasons why Apple is in such public focus on this are #1 because they operate an unusual amount of closed markets and #2 because they WANT this: it is part of Apple's strategy to rally publicly against the regulation and shape a different perception of it.
I wouldn’t argue that Apple is worse than any other company. They’re just the tip of the spear in the fight against EU competition regulation. Other companies would fight just as hard if they had as much to lose by following the rules.
> But what does surprise me is that there’s a very common attitude in forums that somehow Apple is the only company doing this, or they’re doing it worse than any other company.
Apple creates vertically integrated devices. For many people, Apple dictates their entire digital life - far more so than any megacorporation on the mere level of, say Google, could ever hope to, considering Apple owns the hardware, software, and everything in between. So they are in a position shared by no other company - they are entirely unique in this. You cannot buy a device with entirely Google-designed hardware and software - Pixels with Android come close, Chromebooks come close, but nothing reaches Apple, even without custom silicon. I would say the closest company that exists in terms of vertical integration is Oxide Computer, but those aren't consumer devices.
So it's not that Apple is the only company doing this. It's also not that they're "doing it worse than any other company". It's that when they do this it affects people on a level not shared by any other company. It has a much larger impact than anybody else ever could.
For the record, I don't mind Apple's vertical integration, in fact that's one of their main selling points for me. It just gives them the greatest possible leverage to implement these sorts of practices.
> You cannot buy a device with entirely Google-designed hardware and software - Pixels with Android come close
I don’t really understand this distinction. How is eg a Pixel 9 Pro running Android with GMS on a Tensor any less entirely Google-designed than an iPhone 16 is entirely Apple-designed?
> How is eg a Pixel 9 Pro running Android with GMS on a Tensor any less entirely Google-designed than an iPhone 16 is entirely Apple-designed?
Android is developed by the Open Handset Alliance[0], which is not just Google:
Its member firms included HTC, Sony, Dell, Intel, Motorola, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, Samsung Electronics, LG Electronics(formerly), T-Mobile, Nvidia, and Wind River Systems.
Android is more of a collaboration than Apple's entirely in-house. (Technically Apple's current generation of operating systems traces back to NeXTSTEP, which itself traced from some other things, but it's still had much cleaner provenance and been much more tightly controlled than Google's continuous conglomeration.)
I will say though I'd never heard of the Tensor until now, that's very interesting. I guess I am out of date on Pixels.
Apple owns manufacturing and patents for most of the tech they use in their phones (e.g. batteries, biometric sensors, and so on). Google Pixels use third-party suppliers (e.g. their fingerprint sensors are usually from FPC, Goodix or Qualcomm), they follow the same sets of protocols as other Android devices, and they use many of the same drivers provided by the third-party component vendors. For this reason I also wouldn't say the Microsoft Surface is vertically integrated. At best it's designed to work well with the software that's on it, and the software has had some features added for the device. Maybe that's some measure of vertical integration, but not quite to the level of Apple.
Apple certainly doesn't own everything; for example the actual display panel in an iPhone usually is manufactured by Samsung or LG Display. In my opinion though they still own enough to be far more integrated than Pixels are.
Apple is a very stylish kind of company. Their public perception matters more because when you use an Apple product, it creates an image of you.
If I buy a Google phone, no one is going to comment on it. If I buy an Apple, or a Tesla, or luxury vehicle, people are going to comment on it.
If Apple is known to be scummy and you buy it, it makes you look bad. I think we are seeing that with Tesla now, I doubt too many liberals are buying a cybertruck.
As a developer for apple platforms, it's extremely difficult to keep a positive mindset to all this. Year after year, Apple finds ways to continue unbounded fuckery. Making apps for iPhones is not that profitable anymore either, at this point is more about addressing a painful necessity - Apple is the phone company and you have to make it work if you want access to that "unmovable" infrastructure.
I'm seriously at a loss about why people would support this increasingly developer-hostile ecosystem and essentially work towards their own demise and perhaps even the rest of their profession. I'd suggest switching to a different source of income while you still can, even if only out of self-respect.
Because as a developer, you often don't get that choice, for example, if your product is an online service. Either you have an iOS app and play by Apple's stupid rules, or you don't, and your iPhone users go to a competitor that does have an iOS app, or at the very least complain quite loudly.
It’s a good start. But then people want push notifications, Sign in with Apple, to pay with card but they have an iPhone etc - so many points Apple makes a lot harder than they should be. Eventually, it’s economically better to just suck it up and make an app.
Do you know why QRCodes are by far the most popular banking system? Because, Apple didn’t like it if apps use NFC for payments that’s not Apple Pay. There was a time BLE beacons had to be iBeacons too etc. it’s really decades of pressure in all kinds of ways.
Because most people are not developers?
Between ad-infested Google, enshittified Microsoft and still not ready for the desktop Linux the Apple ecosystem might be the most accessible and easy to use platform for most non-technical users.
As a developer it's an annoyance but I have to admire the elegance in the way Apple uses their core software and hardware technologies over their entire stack.
As a user I don't care about what developers feel about it. Apple's market share is big enough to draw lots of them.
This has been a myth for the last decade. I'm even using GNU/Linux on my smartphone, which is arguably not ready for the average consumer but can be good enough for the HN audience.
Proving my point. “Linux on the desktop” implied that you don't need to be a DIY hacker to get it working. Probably the reason why the poster you originally replied to called it “still not ready”.
All iOS and Android developers I know don't write app that they sell themselves. They work for customers that more often than not give away their apps for free because they make money from the service the app gives access to. And they don't sell the service on the app store.
Think about banks, insurance companies, TV broadcasters, train timetables and services, cars management, etc.
Making quality software is usually a business, and if you distribute it in walled gardens even more so. That said, I have a number of iOS apps installed that I know are developed and sold by specific individuals or small businesses: myNoise, NetNewsWire, The Iconfactory (Bitcam, Tapestry), Sun Seeker, Rarevision VHS are some examples. I am sure there are plenty more, but there are reasons someone would not want to publish an app under own name—same as why you would create an LLC: liability, not having people stalk you personally if they did not like what you make (especially true if you distribute it for free or for a very low price), appearing more professional, etc.
I believe iOS App Store has been groundbreaking specifically in how it allowed a solo developer to start distributing work to millions of people across the entire globe with very little friction, taking care of things that are not just boring but actually not in reach of an individual—pricing in different currencies, accounting under different legal and tax systems, zero friction installation, discovery (at least before it, thanks to the aforementioned qualities, became ultra competitive and overwhelmed by businesses who outsource development and/or by less than scrupulous people wanting to earn a quick dollar), etc.—and just getting you paid. If there was a comparable precursor that I am not aware of, I would be keen to know.
I dream of an alternate reality where Steve Jobs makes snide remarks about politics, sets things right with the App Store (worldwide), Siri, Ai and the lackluster UI and quality control of software lately. Steve would get on top of things and speak his mind and we were all better off for it.
There's a severe lack of character in Tim Cook, I think the best thing to come out under his reign is the M-series hardware and return to sane computer design. He's timid, and his penny pinching fuckery is costing Apple a lot of goodwill that's a lot more precious and harder to gain back.
Maybe it's a shareholder problem, whatever—the early 2000's spirit of Apple was splendid.
I admire Steve Jobs as a visionary as much as everyone else, but I never thought it was fair for people to keep discounting Tim Cook as the “lesser” man between the two. He was the one who took the company to a trillion dollar valuation. He took on the operations and supply chain work that no computer nerd or product visionary ever wants to take. He did the hard, unsexy work that no one wanted to do and yet people see him as worse for it.
> He was the one who took the company to a trillion dollar valuation.
Are you comparing Cook to Jobs as an Apple investor or as an Apple customer? As an Apple customer, not an investor, I don't care at all about the company's stock market valuation.
Investors seem to love Tim Cook. Warren Buffett recently said that Tim Cook made more money for Berkshire Hathaway than Buffett himself did. But as an Apple customer, I don't give a crap about Buffett or Berkshire either.
The difference between Cook and Jobs is that Cook is a money person and not a product person. According to his biographer, Jobs lamented that Cook was not a product person. And IMO the products have suffered under Cook: not in terms of profit, but in terms of design and functionality, the things a discerning customer cares about.
I think what's special about Jobs was that, ironically, he had no special training. Of course he was smart, ambitious, and charismatic, but he wasn't an engineer (before Apple, Jobs outsourced some of his work to Woz and took credit for it), wasn't even a professional designer, and he certainly wasn't an MBA. He had no qualifications whatsoever to start a tech company. Jobs was simply a computer enthusiast who had the great luck of meeting a computer genius, Steve Wozniak. Since Jobs was ordinary in many respects, he was able to empathize with ordinary computer users; that was one of his primary roles within Apple. Jobs cared deeply about the user experience, from a first-person perspective. Few if any other massive tech companies have been built by such a founder.
It's easy to assume that Apple is where it is today because of Jobs. But when you look back, there are actually a number of key decisions made by Tim Cook since Job's death that led Apple here.
Cook has plenty of leadership vision. He's led Apple into the VR space with Vision Pro, and has pushed into services/content (Apple Music, Apple TV+, Apple Fitness+), and wearables (Beats acquisition, Apple Watch, AirPods). He's defined Apple as a company that cares about privacy, and it's because of him that Apple is so stubbornly fighting regulation in the EU and US.
If anything, you could criticize Cook for being too ambitious, if you thought that his attention to these areas came at the expense of iPhone & Mac quality.
Timid? Dude seems pretty ruthless by all anecdotes and how his company has operated. But he has a quiet demeanor and Southern accent, so many will assume he is weak and stupid. He seems to use it to his advantage.
Steve Jobs was an asshat and the restrictions Apple puts on their software are exactly in line with what he would've done. He was firmly against third party apps on the iPhone in the first place and had to be convinced to permit it. Everything Apple is doing right now is in line with what Apple was doing when Jobs was still around. He would've had plenty to talk about, but none of it would be about no longer infringing users' rights.
Back in the early 2000's when Apple was still the cool, alternative, underdog computer company, it did things very differently, but for the same reason as it always did: make a profit.
I agree that Apple's answer is of very little value and realism but I disagree on two count;
One of surface, it's a lot LOT more work than that, the very obvious is "it's probably not if, but assumptions made everywhere, so it's not remove a condition but add a lot of check and rethink the whole process to ensure it's still consistent and safe";
Two, that's not what the issue is. It doesn't matter if it takes a lot of work or not. Nobody would accept something like "unfortunately, it's impossible to do all the complex engineering to comply with the YourCarCannotHaveA50PercentChanceOfExplodingWhenStarted regulation", which is an exagerated exemple on purpose; whether it's hard or not has nothing to do with anything being discussed, it's only a PR cop out.
That sounds way too hard to accomplish. Remember, Apple is a company with limited means, only bringing in the GDP of a small country. There's no way they can afford to pay programmers to check all of those if-statements! Those kinds of complex operations are only possible if a third party app manages to interact with iMessage's servers, or if someone figures out a way to replace a screen on their phone without Apple's express permission.
> Apple is a company with limited means, only bringing in the GDP of a small country
For reference, in 2023, Apple produced a little less than Romania or Hong Kong, and a little more than Egypt or the Czech Republic.
Hong Kong is small (though not a lot smaller than the Czech Republic); Egypt is big.
--- edit ---
I accidentally compared Apple's revenue in 2023 to the IMF forecast of GDP for 2025. For 2023: Apple produced very slightly more than Hong Kong or Nigeria, and a little less than Malaysia or Iran.
Nigeria is even bigger than Egypt. It still produced less than Hong Kong.
Ah, yes - tiny numbers like "Slightly less than the total GDP produced by 91 million people in Iran" or "Slightly more than the 6th most productive metro of the most populous country on the planet".
I agree - such a small player like checks notes "the 3rd most valuable company in the history of humanity" has no chance at implementing these troublesome rules.
If they stand behind that statement, surely they are ready to stop doing business in the EU then? I don't see how they could continue given they are unable to follow the law here? And if it by some miracle turns out to be possible in a month or two, what consequences will Apple face for lying about this?
I suspect it goes a lot deeper than just a single if-statement somewhere, and hundreds of thousands of lines of code and various interfaces and all the rest are built on the core assumption of the signatures being there and the packages etc being signed.
These sort of things can be tricky to refactor and more complex than they first seem. For example I recently spent the past 12 weeks or so just moving some fields around on a CRUD app (not adding or removing - just changing their order!) because there were assumptions built on assumptions built on assumptions about what order things are in and what comes first and what has already been done or not and so on. What ostensibly seemed trivial, actually required almost a complete rewrite of whole parts of the CRUD app to overcome the assumptions and implied behavior of what happens when and how.
They share a lot of "AMFI" infrastructure between iOS and macOS, with macOS having a much more permissive security model (you can run self-signed code) while still retaining "private" entitlements for sensitive private APIs, only available to Apple-signed apps. Unless you disable SIP, then you can just do whatever.
(Disclaimer: I may be wrong, I haven't done much of my own research, it's just things I read in various articles over the years)
While signature verification could be disabled with a few code changes, the real challenge is maintaining security boundaries when opening up previously controlled interfaces - it requires rebuilding permission models, API stability guarantees, and sandboxing mechanisms that were designed with closed-system assumptions.
I am generally positive towards Apple, but this is the most outrageous point to maintain.
You made the iPhone, the Apple Watch, and the VisionPro. You create chipsets that smoke any other competitor. But sure, you can't fix some software processes because the engineering of that is too hard!
When a rule is vaguely defined, deliberately so that a regulator can take different interpretations depending on whether they are having any effect and who is doing it, even trivial things become complex. Eg: Meta is asked to withdraw monthly subscription for no ads offer when EU GDPR courts approved it, all EU publishers offer the same service, but the DMA interpretation of regulators for Meta keep saying No.
On the surface, it's easy to do. But that is also based on the assumptions where they had to maintain some first party apis vs now having to create and maintain them so that third parties could use it. If they are committed to security which apparently DSA mandates, they have to devote many resources on it to ensure there are no threat vectors. Plus, there is no set guidelines on how much the APIs need to offer, it will be another session where competition asks for more and they will be asked to do that too.
I didn't follow the case with Meta, but isn't it different ? Because you talk about both the GDPR and DMA, which are different regulations.
I agree that a lot of websites (mostly news websites) have the "ad tracking or subscription" model, and I'm not sure if there has been a clear ruling in it yet, but maybe the DMA makes this stricter for Meta since it is a Gatekeeper
Meta offered Pay-or-consent model (nov 23) at 10 euros or so to placate the then GDPR regulators, as the court found contractual necessity as an invalid argument. CJEU stance seems like its valid for meta and they had a long opinion on that.
But DMA regulators dont agree calling it a false choice and asking meta to monetize by non personalized ads. The thing as you mentioned is how other publishers have the same model, which was never objected by any authority under GDPR either (so they clearly seem to think the model is valid). Its obviously a sticky situation where rules are different for different companies in the same jurisdiction when they are offering the same thing.
A counter could be whether if Meta isn't allowed, would no one else be allowed, but you already know the answer to that question.
That is exactly why the EU offers consultation workshops like the one mentioned in the article - so that companies can discuss this sort of thing and figure out a way that is workable for both them and the legislator.
It's unfortunate that Apple thinks of these as opportunities to lecture them on their own laws instead and unsurprising that approach doesn't work.
Consultation workshops should not be needed. The rule should be clear enough that there is a clear interpretation for everyone. If you need these kind of consultations, you already signal it will be a moving target. Why not just publish clearly what they want Apple to do. In any case, if this was about reaching what works for both regulator and Apple, don't you think these would have happened before DMA went into effect. The timelines are that DMA went into effect in 2023, the first changes in March 2024, and then first set of workshops last year, and second set this year. Is this a novel way to first do the changes and only then discuss them?
I understand a situation where what they want is literally impossible via tech, but then if EU is already talking to others in the space, they would have the same understanding. Otherwise, why keep the regulations vague?
Based on various accounts it does not seem these workshops are looking at arriving at a consensus either. Morever, it seems Apple did consult with EU regulators while rolling out their changes.
That is how EU law works - the intent matters, not any written down version. Not only is that the only workable way when 24 different language versions of any law are valid at the same time, it also prevents rules-lawyering on technicalities that is oh-too-common in law systems like the one in the US.
Apple knows the intent of the law and thus they know what to do. They just don't want to and so try to but-actually their way around it with bad-faith interpretations like they would in other systems. What they don't get is that that's just not how things work here.
> When interpreting EU law, the CJEU pays particular attention to the aim and purpose of EU law (teleological interpretation), rather than focusing exclusively on the wording of the provisions (linguistic interpretation).
> This is explained by numerous factors, in particular the open-ended and policy-oriented rules of the EU Treaties, as well as by EU legal multilingualism.
> Under the latter principle, all EU law is equally authentic in all language versions. Hence, the Court cannot rely on the wording of a single version, as a national court can, in order to give an interpretation of the legal provision under consideration. Therefore, in order to decode the meaning of a legal rule, the Court analyses it especially in the light of its purpose (teleological interpretation) as well as its context (systemic interpretation).
It’s extremely complex. I’m not debating whether they should comply - they should. But it’s gonna cost them years of engineering effort, and maintenance far into the future. See, for example, BrowserEngineKit
They needed to engineer, maintain, document and support a whole class of APIs so that third parties can create their own competitive browser engines (that offer JIT, etc) while still maintaining iOS sandbox security. There are going to be hundreds of frameworks, thousands of APIs, that will need to come to ensure compliance with the DMA
Or, they could just let their pocket computers run the software users download and install, like every single other computer ever made and sold, rather than special-case engineer padded cells for every use-case, application class, or bit of interoperability.
Apple has a significant engineering challenge to turn their current operating system into something that allows side-loading similar to what Google offers. It's not a matter of "commenting out an if statement"
The current developer SDKs Apple offers are strongly tied to their services, which cost them money to run. So first thing is, they have to decouple that so developers can implement applications using a baseline SDK that does not use Apple services (no iCloud, no Maps, no HealthKit and so on)
I think it would be great for users if they did do this. It would be akin to what Google does by shipping and updating Play Services separately from the base Android install
The reason I linked BrowserEngineKit is because if you want to do this properly, you have to build something like Apple has built with that framework (which was built to comply with these policies). Take for example, implementing your own JIT: because arm64e uses pointer authentication, the system uses PACs to ensure that pointers into executable code have not been tampered with. Apple now develops and supports a whole slew of APIs like `be_memory_inline_jit_restrict_rwx_to_rw_with_witness()` in order for developers to manage this themselves.
You saying "just let their pocket computers run software users download and install" is not like every single other computer ever made and sold. This is a gross oversimplification of the modern state of computing, both on mobile and on desktop. There are reasons you don't want random developers loading code into your OS kernel, and Windows and macOS both have protections for this (though the CrowdStrike crashes recently shows what happens when those protections are lax!)
If Apple gave the users root and let them run arbitrary software and just didn't sign certificates for their infrastructure (for push for example) this wouldn't be a problem. Supposedly they've already even developed a VTE for iOS. All they need to do is have a toggle under settings to disable signature checking and ship the VTE so people have an escape hatch and everyone would probably calm way down.
Sure, I'd be into that. But that would not comply with the DMA I think? As in, Apple still has a ton of work to do, engineering wise, if they are to make their platform available to all in the way specified by the DMA
For example, I don't think it would fly that they could say to the EU: users who want a third-party browser just have to enable root access and lose access to all Apple services and authentication
Ah I forgot Apple advertises managing SSO as a feature of iOS and not an external service like sane people would.
Well. I guess they'll have to choose between opening it up like every other company does or acknowledge that it's a separate pay for service then.
They do a lot of that kind of thing and my answer for all of it is the same: Open it up to everyone or acknowledge it's a pay-for cloud service that has nothing to do with the actual phone OS. If people have root they can (and will) develop their own services that won't need that which would comply with the DMA.
You mean those users that don't even know what an application is?
And you mean that software that only has the users best interests in mind and is not spying on them, trying to scam or confuse them into buying unnecessary stuff?
I think Apple has done a great job of protecting non-technical people from a lot of the possible harms of malware. There's a lot of incentive for them to make sure security is handled right. I'm convinced going back to the 90s and giving every software developer full access to users phones would create a lot more problems than it would solve.
Maybe let's not optimize everything around people being tech-illiterate? We live in a society. You are expected to have some baseline knowledge to live in one. So let's instead educate people about that stuff instead of encouraging ignorance and punishing power users.
Would be nice if everything instantly became better with a bit of explanation, but I'm just a bit to cynical to trust that.
Most people using tech need guard rails.
Yes, guard rails are good. I'm not denying that. They are an important part of user education.
But only when they can be overridden. MacOS around 10 years ago is a good example. It came out of the box in a foolproof state — only apps from the app store or registered developers would run, and SIP is enabled. But if you know what you're doing, you could disable both those things without any loss of functionality.
You can see the problem by browsing old help forums and see how often people suggest 'disable SIP' as a solution to some problem instead of really fixing the problem.
Also, the clueless user will -at best- just follow instructions and disable all kinds of security features making them more vulnerable to malware.
If someone is trying to help themselves by participating in forums and following instructions, that's already very much an above-average user. They'll be fine anyway. I'm talking more about the kinds of people who would download a .jpg.exe and run it. Or transfer their savings to a "safe account" because someone called them out of the blue and told them to do so. Or fall for scammy ads. You get the idea.
I'm more concerned about the 'good with computers' type people helping the average users. Those are the people who use google and forums and leave other peoples phone and/or computer in a less than optimal state which makes the .jpg.exe attack more likely to succeed.
An iPhone isn’t a pocket computer. It needs to be really secure because someone gaining full access to it through a badly written browser would cost you your life savings if not your life for some.
How and why is that somehow fundamentally different from someone gaining complete access to your computer, which allows you to run anything freely? Both are your personal devices that store your sensitive personal information.
That’s a very good and valid question but did they sell the device with the premise that anyone can run any app they want or only the apps Apple approved can run?
We believe in the same thing, our devices should be free like speech. But the whole thing turned into a show because some rich software companies don’t want to pay Apple 30% while they have no problem with other platforms like gaming consoles.
Apple does market the iPhone as a general-purpose communication and computing device. Not an appliance like a game console. Most iPhone users don't know what making an app is like, how asinine the app store review process is, and what kinds of bonkers rules developers have to follow.
Apple initially did that to protect the ecosystem from malware and make sure all apps meet their quality standards. Also to make distribution easy for indie developers. All commendable goals. But as the iOS market share grew, this turned into a very convenient revenue source that they can't let go now.
And Android apps can be installed from apk files without any Google involvement whatsoever. All apks are self-signed anyway and signing identity only comes into play for updates, not initial installation. As in, when you first install an app, it doesn't matter who signed it, but installing an update over an existing app requires the new apk to be signed with the same certificate as the initial one. This is to protect the potentially sensitive data in app's private storage (under /data/data).
But iOS requires that everything be signed by Apple in one form or another. Even debug builds of your own apps you run on your own device from Xcode. IMO, it is absolutely unacceptable to market your devices as general-purpose ones, make the SDK public, but still be an intermediary in app distribution for no good reason whatsoever. I'm surprised the EU is so seemingly patient with Apple's clearly contemptuous conduct.
Google engineered and maintains the system that allows you to install APK files. This is my point. The fact that they have developed a security model around APK updates is exactly what I'm talking about.
If Apple wants to offer something similar, now, they are going to have a lot of work cut out for them.
You're not thinking this through, it's not a magic button Apple presses. They are going to have to develop a ton of frameworks just to get something like installable APKs.
Apple allows developers to use iCloud and Maps for free. Presumably because you distribute through the App Store. So if they allow for side-loading they're going to have to lock down and split their App Store "services" into a separate framework — hey, sounds familiar? Just like Google Play services.
Separating out all of Apple's authentication layers, paid and cloud services, and ensuring apps can be cleanly distributed without dependencies on those things it not a trivial engineering exercise.
I'm not trying to imply that Apple should not comply with the DMA. I believe they should. I also believe that it would be a seriously complicated thing to extract their App Store services from their developer APIs in such a way that people could develop against a baseline SDK sans Apple services.
How so? As of late, Android FCZC exploits pay out more than iOS ones do at the moment[1]. And anecdotally from what I hear from friends involved in security, Android is very well hardened at this point and is equal to iOS despite having a much wider surface area for attacks.
Would you say that's primarily due to JIT, or maybe due to the budget for security patches for most Android devices being a tiny fraction of what Apple has?
You missed my point. My point is that if Apple wants to add this now, it's going to cost them engineering resources.
You think side loading on Android cost Google "nothing" to implement and maintain? No, it costs them engineering resources to support that feature. It's a good feature to support and it's beneficial to users. But it's not free, it doesn't magically insert itself into the Android codebase if they "comment out an `if` statement" as the GP suggested.
Also, Android is gradually adopting many iOS-like permissions and security models. We recently updated our Android apps related to reading and writing to the file system. Why is that? Because the free-for-all they shipped with was heavily abused by developers.
I attended the workshop remotely (one of my questions is in the recording, if you watched it) and IMO it was mostly a waste of time. I didn't even stick around past the App Store section. Partly because it was daytime CEST but mostly because the format was awful. Apple would spend half the time talking about how the EU was forcing them to make their OS worse and then the EC thought it was a good idea to make Q&A a batched thing so Apple could just talk for five minutes about none of the questions instead of actually being forced to answer anything. I was thinking the EC would ask questions like why nobody actually used the provisions that Apple so generously provided third party developers (obviously, because Apple designed them to be unworkable) but they mostly just stayed silent and let the Apple lawyers talk the entire time :(
I'm interested to see what this will all be in ~20 years time.
Policies with protectionist side effects (even if they're not marketed as such) have historically led to local businesses being less capable and less competitive over time. Whereby there is no need to compete or innovate as the business is insulated from genuine competition.
My assumption is that the EU believes this will lead to local businesses having the breathing space to grow to a critical mass where they could compete more robustly.
Looking back to historical examples we saw that businesses that benefitted from artificial protections were less competitive than ones that did not receive a benefit. We also saw that favoured businesses tended to be trapped inside the market where they receive those protections, i.e. they were optimised for those conditions. We see this more contemporarily with protected Russian and Chinese firms.
I am also curious if state-sponsored competitors will engineer a way around being labelled a gatekeeper. Such as by having a range of products with shared intellectual property spread across a number of legally discrete entities, effectively using a distributed form of anti-competitive practices.
We are seeing this, kinda real time, with autos. Americans manufacturers were shielded from Chinese competition and in the last couple years had nothing to show for it. Meanwhile Toyota, in this very short time, came up with the BZ3X (cost around $15.000) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_bZ3X
All of that being said, the EU rules can be good (ie: usb-c); the problem is that often they get co-mingled with bad protectionist policies.
I don't understand what you feel is "protectionist" about this? I would say that the US pressuring the EU on behalf of big corporations is arguably "protectionist", but I don't think that's what you mean.
But even if policies make companies less "capable" and less "competitive": that completely ignores what effect they have on society. I bet that a company that was given a free pass to use slavery would be very capable and very competitive -- but is that what we want for our society?
I’m a bit conflicted: when I used to care more about this freedom stuff say 10 years ago, I would have been more in favour of these regulations. Today I care less about that and more about security and I mostly think that Apple’s preferred approach is better for security than what the EU proposes. That said, I am not super happy about the rate of scams or junk in the App Store.
I think even for Americans who like the anti-gatekeeper regulations, you might worry about the precedent for the powers European governments get over these tech companies as the other thing they want is removing as much encryption as reasonably possible, which you may not want. Those changes seem quite unavoidable though so maybe it’s not worth thinking about them together.
The more damning thing IMO is the whole ‘America innovates Europe regulates’ trend. I think it seems pretty important that the EU (and U.K.) work out how to escape the anti-innovation troughs they have found themselves in. Or perhaps by 2050 the EU will largely be a tourist destination where citizens watch ads for the American tech companies to make profits to be highly taxed by the EU to fund subsidies for the German auto industry to sell cars to Americans and Chinese.
Today I care less about that and more about security and I mostly think that Apple’s preferred approach is better for security than what the EU proposes.
This is mostly a false dichotomy that Apple likes to push. macOS has strong security with sandboxing, code signing, malware scanning, etc. I have never encountered someone among my direct acquaintances who had their Mac compromised. Yet, it's perfectly possible to make an alternative app store, circumvent code singing, etc. on a Mac.
Even with the freedom of an EU iPhone, you can still choose to completely stay in the Apple ecosystem and pretend that the extra freedoms that you have gained aren not there.
The thing is that Apple knows that people will purchase from an alternative reputable store if the prices are lower because the margins are lower. Or that developers will move there because they can increase their margins. And then Apple will actually have to compete on price (app store fee) and features.
It has very little to do with security and mostly with Apple wanting to keep their 15%/30% because it's hugely profitable.
the precedent for the powers European governments get over these tech companies as the other thing they want is removing as much encryption as reasonably possible
This does not make any sense at all. Why would you remove encryption, you could just accept an additional root certificate as a user and be protected by the same encryption.
I think it seems pretty important that the EU (and U.K.) work out how to escape the anti-innovation troughs they have found themselves in.
We are doing fine, we just don't believe in profit over everything. Moreover, the current US tech feudalism makes it harder to innovate and develop competitors, because you only get to do what the feudalist overlord permits you to do. Regulation is necessary to make it a fair marketplace again.
I think you are seeing it slightly skewed: in the past, for a variety of reasons, the US got at the forefront of tech and got even richer in some pockets of the country.
The EU and other countries had some pretty compelling competitors which got more or less slowly crushed by the US.
After over 30 years of this, a handful of the remaining US megacorps turned around and started fencing their own little profitable field, disallowing anyone else to even try to get in.
EU is the only non-purely adversarial entity to uphold laws also to these seemingly untouchable megacorps.
What I find weird is that there is a selective memory in people who are either from the US or pro-big businesses where on one side they are openly against these claims the EU makes (calling them anti-innovation) while also being a fervent supporter of "liberal" policies like medicaid, right to repair, warranties and such. As if they do not realise that they stem from the exact same place, and often they do come directly from Europe.
I'm at a point where I believe that if someone is against what the EU is doing against these megacorps (not saying everything the EU does is gold btw) has either A) vested interest in such companies, B) hates the concept of EU and anything it touches, C) they are rich and don't really care about anything, D) not very bright.
The saddest part of this whole fiasco is that Apple itself is suffering from the lack of competition.
Apple Watch for example gets a huge boost from being the only wearable that integrates with iOS. But it has a lot of quality issues, and is by far the worst Apple product in my opinion. Apple would have a lot more incentive to improve it if they had to compete with other smart watches on a level playing field.
Yeah. I recently got a Garmin Watch after years of using an Apple Watch. On Android you can enable/disable notifications per app. On iOS you are stuck with all or nothing because Apple does not permit the same amount of integration as they permit their own products.
Apple’s DMA “compliance” feels less like opening the walled garden and more like planting hedges around the new gate. The irony is, for a company obsessed with seamless user experience, they’re making interoperability as convoluted as possible, unless, of course, you’re using Safari.
I think at this point we should change the law so that Gatekeepers aren't just required to enable competition, but are somehow forced to actually support competition.
I'm not sure how we could enforce that, but maybe the law could stipulate that a certain minimum percentage of users must use 3rd party app stores, or use web apps. They should pay a fine if less than say 5% of apps are distributed outside the app store, or if less than 5% of people use a 3rd party browser engine.
First they have to enable competition, you're saying they have to support it but seemingly you want to enforce it.
Where does it stop? Should Apple just pay out a part of their profits to their competitors?
If a competitor wants market share they have to build a better service. Forcing users to go with a bad deal gets the incentives all wrong and is actually bad for consumer choice.
> If a competitor wants market share they have to build a better service.
Except when Apple ensures that it always comes out ahead when competing. It's not a level playing field.
Look at Apple Music vs Spotify - ignoring the self-preferencing iOS does to Appke Music, the App Store ensures that Spotify will always make less money than Apple Music. Spotify either has to hand over 30% to its competitor, raise its prices (and lose customers, while still paying its competitor), or just not offer in-app signups. Do you reckon Apple Music has to give away 30% of it's subscriptions?
It seems bonkers that the only option to have a competitive music streaming service is to make your own operating system or mobile phone. That's unhealthy.
Not offering in-app signups doesn't seem to make Spotify less dominant. I'm in the Netherlands, almost everybody I know has a Spotify subscription, I know just one guy using Apple music.
The 30% fee also drops to 15% after one year, and there are companies that negotiated lower fees. Also, 'doing it yourself' won't be free, you still need some party to do payment processing, customer service and returns which also can come close to that 15%.
The argument you need to make your own phone seems a bit far-fetched. There are multiple music apps making money on iOS.
The problem here is that Apple have a competing service that doesn't have to pay the money. That's the issue, and it needs to be resolved for Apple to be compliant with EU law.
Or they can leave, if they think that makes more sense for their business.
I think the EU started with the correct intentions. They saw a need to increase the competition in the digital marketplace and reduce the power iOS-Android duopoly has.
However, instead of defining the market rules, the process has been more about competitors and companies (who’re not happy with Apple’s success) trying to take a chunk of their business.
An iPhone is not a general computation device, it’s not an open ecosystem. Neither PlayStation, but there’s enough competition in the gaming console sector so nobody comes up with complains about not being able to install any app they want.
> An iPhone is not a general computation device, it’s not an open ecosystem.
And yet it's many people's primary computing device. That's exactly the problem.
As a historical example, consider telecommunications. Phone networks were "natural monopolies" for many decades, and people must have found it hard to imagine any other way back then. Without regulatory intervention enforcing competition, we'd probably still be paying double-digit cent amounts for long-distance calls.
> Forcing users to go with a bad deal gets the incentives all wrong and is actually bad for consumer choice.
Nice bad faith strawman, where'd you buy it ?
Apple is trying to have its cake and eat it too, selling off their devices as general computing devices and opening it partly to external developers, taking away a massive portion of profits and threatening them when it's not advantageous to them. The entire point is that you _cannot_ build a better service because Apple is blocking you.
Sony isn't getting this treatment for the PS5, despite qualifying well for being a gatekeeper, because there's no pretenses of being an open market.
If Apple wants out of this, then let them close down the App Store.
This is fascinating and troubling. Apple’s presentation felt more like a marketing defense than a compliance discussion. Their claim that meeting the DMA “current interpretation” is “impossible” really stood out, it’s almost like they’re banking on legal ambiguity to stall real change.
I’m curious: if Apple and Google are using workshops as delay tactics, what’s the EC’s real enforcement power here? Are small fines enough leverage or do we need tougher mechanisms, like mandatory timelines or public transparency on third-party integrations?
Rule of law also means, that fair process is given. which takes time. It is a problem, 100% agree, but I prefer a slow enforcement because of this than a unjust enforcement.
All arguments invoking privacy and security coming from Apple when faced with loss of control over the iDevice software aftermarket should be discarded as nothing more than bad faith excuses.
Why am I being so absolutist? Well, because we know this to be the case thanks to the Epic injunction compliance brouhaha. Employee slack chats show quite clearly that the "scare screens" were deliberately worded in a way that would deter any users from pursuing the linkout payment option, while we now know that it was all a ruse to prevent that option from ever being competitive with Apple's 30% IAP, only for economic (monopolistic) reasons.
We now have court-affirmed precedent of Apple intentionally using privacy and security as a veneer for darker, anticompetitive motives. After that, there's not much more to honestly debate.
FWIW, I was speaking yesterday with a friend who works on Big Tech antitrust at the European Commission, and he surprised me by telling me he considers Apple the worst of a rum lot, followed by Meta, Amazon then Google.
Makes sense. Google's stranglehold on phone/browser have alternatives for consumers, who generally don't choose them). Apple and Meta enforce staying in walled-gargens - all or nothing.
I really hope the EU keeps up the pressure. The level of control the gatekeepers have is beyond ridiculous. Sure there’s the “take your money elsewhere” option but we’re at a point where that’s just not realistic to be a normal person. (My sons nursery for example requires an app that only exists on iOS/Android).
EU looks set to be the only big enough institution with any spine or willingness to take this on. Will probably take years if it ever happens due to all this legal dance bullshit, but I really hope they win eventually, even if it’s just for the benefit of EU citizens (of which I am, sadly, not).
The whole point of the gatekeeper designation is that they gatekeep access to things in such a way that you can’t simply take your money elsewhere. If you want to use a popular banking app, it’ll be available on exactly two platforms: iOS and Android.
Starting to feel like it'd be more sensible to just have the EU fund an independent phone OS/Hardware. Export the hardware specs so everyone can build the hardware for it, then come preinstalled just like Android is doing now.
I think there is enough very good competition on the phone side. Google, Samsung, many other asian brands. The DMA (to my understanding) is about what happens on top of the phone once you are a (golden caged) user of that product and cannot move out.
Ah, the title point at something I said in an earlier thread that was misunderstood or I probably explained it wrong : the way apple played it, it was not about the actual regulation anymore, and anyone who kept arguing "but it's a bad regulation bla bla" where missing the point.
By playing it the way they did, with their public statement against the regulator, and half implementation clearly done to be non cooperative on purpose and all, they put themselves in a very different fight, now the question has nothing to do with this or that regulation, it becomes does Apple need to respect EU law to sell product in the EU. That's all there is to it anymore, by making it about compliance and who has a stronger grip, they forced themselves there; and it's obviously a fight the EU is not going to back down from (nor is it going to lose it).
I compare that to many moves from Meta, Google, Microsoft, ... Who played the same but knew when to back down and either do it or argue in a more court and legalese oriented manner.
I'm not sure why Apple leadership played it that way, maybe they have a stronger belief in the US administration ability to strongarm the EU into accepting a loss there, but at the point it's at, it has very little to do with the content of the regulation.
Apple is very cunning when it comes to push back. In China they go along with no whining. In US and EU, they make a big deal citing "privacy" and the likes.
The only animating objective for Apple is money. Everything else is opportunistic
This is correct. Someone above commented this "Starting to feel like it'd be more sensible to just have the EU fund an independent phone OS/Hardware.". The sensible thing is much different; it's to start behaving like China, in the sense of "my way or the high way, and no you don't get to drag it out in our courts for years, we're not interested".
It would be a day of irony, if the CCP decides, that Apple in China should rather be owned by them, than a figure at Apple itself. A state owned company from now on. Imagine the outcry at Apple, when realizing they danced at too many parties at the same time.
> I'm not sure why Apple leadership played it that way, maybe they have a stronger belief in the US administration ability to strongarm the EU into accepting a loss there
Apple is playing it that way because they are rallying their USERS against the EU. They want to create pressure from EU citizens against these EU regulations, and amplify their narrative also to US Apple users in political positions.
Unfortunately this strategy seems to work, there are already a few voices on how the EU taking offense with Apple's sole purpose of doing the best for its users, and that lawmakers try to force Apple away from this path...
There should be a case against Apple intentionally misinforming people in the EU coming up next then. They must be taught a lesson that every step against the law costs them dearly.
Not just their users, the US government too. They've successfully turned it into a geopolitical issue. Apple not being viewed in the same light as Microsoft in the 90s is one of the best marketing ploys ever seen.
Towards the US government they surely play a different narrative and emphasize on revenues/profits as well as their leadership position as US company being threatened.
Towards the users the narrative is never about revenue/profit of Apple, and never acknowledge their leading market position.
But the end user narrative also works for US government members with influential position but low subject-matter knowledge.
" I called this article "Apple Vs The Law" primarily in reference to the rule of law, about how it should be applied equally and fairly against all, no matter the size and influence of your company. I think some of these gatekeepers - above all Apple, do a lot to undermine this process, in some places genuinely damaging trust in democracy. Going out of their way to paint the DMA law and the EU as overstepping and extreme hurts its reputation, as does the invented rhetoric about it being the "great risk to privacy ever imposed to government" (China?), or that they're "acting without experts in the field". Similarly for the number of covertly funded and supported lobbying groups that they bring to regulators all around the world."
> Normally when the EU regulates a given sector, it does so with ample lead time and works with industry to make sure that they understand their obligations.
> Apple instead thought that the regulatory contact from the EU during the lead time to the DMA was an opportunity for it to lecture the EU on its right to exist. Then its executives made up some fiction in their own minds as to what the regulation meant, announced their changes, only to discover later that they were full of bullshit.
> This was entirely Apple’s own fault. For months, we’ve been hearing leaks about Apple’s talks with the EU about the Digital Market Act. Those talks were not negotiations even though Apple seems to have thought they were. Talks like those are to help companies implement incoming regulations, with some leeway for interpretation on the EU’s side to accommodate business interests.
> Remember what I wrote about electrical plugs? The EU is pro-business – often criticised for being essentially a pro-business entity – and not in favour of regulation for regulation’s sake.
> If Apple had faced reality and tried to understand the facts as they are, they would have used the talks to clarify all of these issues and more well in advance of the DMA taking effect.
> But they didn’t because they have caught the tech industry management disease of demanding that reality bend to their ideas and wishes.
Companies and individuals should fight against bad laws. And a press campaign is a legitimate, and sometimes effective, tactic for doing so. Different people may disagree about which laws are good or bad; I fully expect, for instance, that more people support the DMA than would support crypto backdoors. But it seems shortsighted to suggest that those who think a law is wrong should simply accept it anyway, rather than fight tooth and nail against it.
They're happy to be quiet and comply with Chinese laws even if they're wrong[0]. How is a requirement to stop giving your own products an unfair competitive advantage a bad law? It's only bad when you see it from the perspective that you'll lose a lot of money.
I'm answering someone who said that the response to being "onboarded to new regulation" should be to "face reality", rather than fight it and try to stop it. Whatever level of tooth-and-nail fighting you'd expect someone to do in response to a law you do think is wrong, it's reasonable think someone would wish to do in response to a law they think is wrong.
You're missing the point. A law in the process of being voted is up for discussion and political involvement.
Once the law has been voted, you can still complain about it, but it is not wise to use the talks given to you by the regulator in order to help you adapt to new regulation as a soapbox for your complaints. That will burn goodwill with the regulator and make them discard any legitimate feedback you might have.
Or, in short, lobbying parliament is fine, trying to strong-arm regulatory bodies is not.
In that case, I would recommend you read the article.
It's not just fighting a bad law. It's fighting the very foundation the EU is built on and that has guaranteed peace in Western Europe since the end of WW2.
Apple might not get this, because they don't have an understanding of European history. But that lack of understanding is exactly why they keep getting their nose bloodied in Europe.
One is a law. The other is a doomed attempt at a law by a fraction of extremists - they have tried and failed to do this many a time and it does not deserve to be taken seriously.
Note: I know some folks working in big tech won't like this comment, but it's time we talk about the elephant in the room.
Tim Sweeney is the only billionaire and computer scientist who's actually fighting against inequality. The big difference between him and folks like Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Larry Page, and Marc Benioff, is that while those billionaires talk about universal basic income to make up for the mass layoffs their tech is going to cause, Tim's out there fighting monopolies, hiring people, building tools for developers, and making games. That's why his HQ isn't in San Francisco. He's the only one who hasn't been brainwashed by VCs or sold out to greed.
He speaks for millions of computer scientists who don't live in the Valley and are using their knowledge of maths and physics to build things that help people, not hurt them. Because let's be honest, a future where billionaires keep getting richer and computer scientists are out of work, scraping by on UBI, begging billionaires for $10 more bucks a month, is a feature no one wants. And when I say "we" I mean myself, my colleagues, and all my students.
Tim, thank you. You inspired a whole generation. Keep fighting against Apple, Google and corporate greed!
Tim doesn't want open platforms, all he wants is EGS to be able to exist within a walled garden. As long as he gets that, he's golden. If he wanted to support truly open platforms he'd be putting more money and time into helping develop Linux into a stronger contender for desktop and mobile and fighting against things like Play Integrity API, which are just another form of vendor lock-in.
That's your opinion, and I respect it. But let's look at the facts:
- He sued Apple and Google for monopolistic behaviour. He's been fighting for fair access and better deals for all developers, not just Epic Games Store.
- His fight's not about open source or open platforms, it's about fair access, lower fees, and giving developers more control.
- He speaks for millions of independent computer scientists who build games.
- He purchased 7,000-acre Box Creek Wilderness (about US$15 million), fought off a power company's attempt to run lines through it, and donated a conservation easement in 2016 so the land stays wild.
- He's actually walking the talk. While other billionaires post about saving the planet, he's out there buying forests to protect them.
> He sued Apple and Google for monopolistic behaviour.
Meanwhile he doesn't substantially support the one option for computing that doesn't result in vertical control. He uses the tools that enable that control, rather than criticize their existence.
> He speaks for millions of independent computer scientists who build games.
Epic's apparent support for indie developers is marketing to grow his business. This isn't intrinsically a bad thing, but he isn't some golden saint. It also comes at the cost of catering to consumers, which is in large part why EGS has failed to gain traction beyond throwing free games at people in order to try to entice customers to their store. Key word: try. It hasn't worked.
> He purchased 7,000-acre Box Creek Wilderness (about US$15 million), fought off a power company's attempt to run lines through it, and donated a conservation easement in 2016 so the land stays wild.
Whatever. This is just billionaire philanthropy and $15m is a drop in the bucket to these people.
I'm not sure what your expectations are when it comes to billionaires. Tim's definitely not Linus Torvalds, that's for sure. But he's one of the few actually pushing back.
Bill Gates said that as countries get wealthier and automation replaces workers, UBI might become a viable option.
This is the same person who told OpenAI he'd invest between 1 and 10 billion of his company's money if they focused on ChatGPT and speeding up the development of autonomous AI workers.
Yeah, this affects everyone who isn't rich. Some billionaires are even running UBI trials, fully aware that the tech they're building or funding is going to cause social chaos:
Why are billionaires doing this instead of governments? It doesn't make sense.
Governments are supposed to protect workers, regulate industries, and make sure technology benefits everyone. Looks like billionaires and VCs who love monopolies are building the future on their terms.
They don't want to get eaten. We already had symbolic real assassinations of CEOs. It's only a matter of time. You can call it savagery, but you also can call it economics.
If you need to mitigate the danger quickly it's only prudent to try to do it yourself than to delegate to politicians you bought. Especially if you neglected the problem for so long.
That's why billionaires are talking about basic income before politicians do. They know the window for their survival is closing fast.
>those billionaires talk about universal basic income
Because they don't expect that UBI money to come from their profits, but from the taxes paid by the working class.
They're just cosplaying socialists to score brownie points like they did with rainbow flags in the past, knowing it will be on other people's money, and it's all performative.
Edit: @pyman
>My biggest fear is that UBI can turn into a tool for control,
CAN?! It WILL be. The same way state pensions in Europe are used by the government for control of the population. "Vote for me and I increase your pensions. Step out of line and I cut off your pension and make you homeless like we did to that German woman protesting against the government."
EU isn't regulating AI for the good of the people, it's regulating it for control since they don't want to leave the freedom of speech and the freedom of opinion to entities they can't control that can tell people opinions that are not state approved.
My biggest fear is that UBI can turn into a tool for control, give people just enough to survive, to eat, keep the lights on, and afford some AI tokens to stay productive in the system.
> Unintentionally installing something from the app store is all good though, because App Store review absolutely ensures that nothing could go wrong, that there's no scam apps, and more than makes up for the web's "orders of magnitude" stronger sandboxing, more stringent permissions model, and better phishing prevention. And so, web apps logically require a convoluted 4-step process including "share" and "add to homescreen" to locate the install button, meaning that all but the most technical users can't find it.
Written with sarcasm.
I am sorry but the argument that an app store and browser are comparable in terms of amount of spam is a deluded take. The core argument seems to be that since app store allows installing anything, so should browsers. The kind of changes that would benefit a smaller % of smart population, to the detriment of anyone else who can be convinced by a text to download any kind of content on their phone. The ones who push it would want it, but these are the kind of "features" on android that prevents me from giving my parents an android phone.
I get the spirit of the DMA. I get the whole designation of gatekeepers and do agree Apple is a closed ecosystem. What I don't understand are the implementation details and I always hear "it is complex".
Let's stick with earbuds or watches, where the argument (e.g. Garmin) is that they can't create functionally equal devices to AirPod / Apple Watch, because not all APIs are open. I understand this point, since yes, Apple has a lot of internal implementation that only Apple can use for their devices. What I don't understand is the EU's standpoint of "just opening it up(!)". Let's say Apple would allow everyone to use all APIs to communicate with their AirPods/Apple Watches. Assume everything is open now - wouldn't that create chaos?
Another vendor could implement everything Apple does and release similar AirPods or Watch with whatever hardware quality - but what happens when Apple changes their internal implementation? Changes the implementation every week, because they optimize for THEIR devices. There is no official ISO standard, Bluetooth standard or whatever standard they are adhering to, they would just open up their implementation. I assume the EU would then say "this is against the spirit of the DMA, do not change your implementation so often", but this would seem like a very long cat and mouse game (it already is a very long process).
Why doesn't the EU define some interoperability requirements that gatekeepers need to adhere to in the EU market? This would make it easier for everyone. I don't get why it always is just the talk about "open it up" - that would be a start in terms of interoperability, no doubt, but that isn't the solution is it?
> Assume everything is open now - wouldn't that create chaos?
Yeah, but equal chaos to all. In the end the achievable experience for Samsung and Apple earbuds need to be the same. It does not need to be the best one.
If Apple wants to have the best experience, they should create for each improvement a new API version and tell it in reasonable advance to their competitors to allow them to equal the playing field.
And Apple is responding by not shipping features into the EU that it believes it will be forced to “standardize” and document for others’ use, like iPhone mirroring to Mac.
As a European, I have to say I am generally impressed with the EU in these cases. I'm from a country that's rich and capable, but with a GDP a fraction of Apple's market cap. There is no chance that national laws and entities would be sufficient to protect my consumer rights from corporations this size.
The EU is fundamentally a centre-right, liberalist, pro-business coalition, but what that means is that it is pro-competition. What's really impressive is that it seems to mostly refrain from devolving into protectionist policies, giving no preferential treatment to European businesses against international (intercontinental?) competitors, despite strong populist tendencies in certain member states.
I would argue the opposite: It actually makes European businesses worth off by continuing to make its regulatory environment so complex only massive companies like big tech or Europe's legacy players have the resources to comply.
Add to that feel-good green initiatives like a packaging initiative that might lower packaging waste from European companies, but more likely will just make European goods more expensive and cause Europeans to buy from Temu instead.
The EU has basically said that it's better to have a handful medium-sized companies in competition for customers than one or two mega-corps owning and dictating the market. And to resolve that they employ two things, one is the DMA/DSA and similar laws which mostly takes effect when your company reaches a certain large market penetration, the other is standardisations such as the Radio Equipment Directive (think "USB-C law" and similar ones) that make it easier for consumers to avoid vendor lock-in.
> just make European goods more expensive and cause Europeans to buy from Temu instead
Temu is under active investigation for breaching these laws, anyone operating within EU is subject to those laws, not just European companies (e.g. https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/news/commission-ope...)
> The EU has basically said that it's better to have a handful medium-sized companies in competition for customers than one or two mega-corps owning and dictating the market. And to resolve that they employ two things, one is the DMA/DSA and similar laws which mostly takes effect when your company reaches a certain large market penetration, the other is standardisations such as the Radio Equipment Directive (think "USB-C law" and similar ones) that make it easier for consumers to avoid vendor lock-in.
Then show me the handful of European, medium-sized companies competing for customers. The problem is that you pass DMA, DSA, GDPR, etc. which Google, Apple etc. can fight for years in court and if they have to pay a few billion, so be it.
Instead what's happening is that European alternatives (the kind that's actually good, not the kind that's European and half as good) don't exist and the incentives to build one shrink because any scaling company is instantly hamstrung.
> Then show me the handful of European, medium-sized companies competing for customers.
Competing in category chemicals:
BASF, Akzo Nobel, Lanxess, Air Liquide, and a bunch others
Competing in category engineering:
Siemens, Bosch, ABB, Alstom, ThyssenKrupp, Airbus and a bunch others
Competing in category metals:
Aurubis, Umicore, Norsk Hydro, Gruppo Riva, ThyssenKrupp, and a bunch others
Competing in category pharma:
Novartis, AstraZeneca, Novo Nordisk, Bayer, and others
Competing in category electronics:
Nokia, Ericsson, Alcatel-Lucent, Electrolux, Schneider Electric, and lots of others
> any scaling company is instantly hamstrung
You are assuming scaling this way is a long-term positive for consumers, investors, employees, and/or markets. I can find no such evidence.
Where are the software companies that compete with apple though? Wasn't that the question?
No it wasn't. The question was that if regulation creates more competition with Apple what are the markets with this competition?
European companies compete with US companies, including Apple, in areas where there is competition. In music software, music streaming, engineering and finance software, services and so on.
Apple has around 33% smartphone market share in Europe. Where is the US competition? Google at 3%. The actual competition is non-US in Samsung and Xiaomi. You can argue that Google competes with the Play Store, but then there is no competition with the Play Store on Android from the US.
Big US tech companies don't compete with each other as much as one might think. Most of their revenue comes from dominating one area or platform, with little competition from the rest.
So therefor the common conclusion that Europe should be more like the US to have competition also doesn't make sense as the big US tech companies don't have serious direct competition in the US in their core businesses.
You can't compete with the big tech companies by creating a Google with 3% market share in smartphones to compete with Apple, a Walmart with 6% online retail market share to compete with Amazon, or a Microsoft with 4% search engine market share to compete with Google.
Apple has <60% market share in the US. It's pretty dominant, but there are definitely still real competitors.
That's why the DMA exists.
Small nitpick but FYI Alcatel-Lucent and Nokia merged. Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise still exists but is just the bit nobody wanted.
Significant about your list is that most of them are businesses who sell to other businesses, not to consumers. That's what is propping up the European economy, since European companies don't seem to be able to make an export that foreign customers are interested in. With some exceptions of course, mostly food and luxury goods. Nokia could have been a forerunner for lots of other European companies taking on the world, but sadly it fizzled out.
These are all huge companies in my view.
In addition to them there are also countless small to medium sized companies that nobody's ever heard of, that don't experience hypergrowth but have slow and steady growth - especially in the B2B sector. I've worked at some such companies.
I agree actually, my use of "medium-sized" was not best, in my personal view a medium-sized company is in the 200-500 employee range. These are definitively larger than that, however I assumed the person I replied to took "medium sized" to mean "significantly smaller than Apple/Google/Amazon/… …but not unknown". Because if I were to pull up a list of thirty unknown actually medium-sized companies pretty much nobody would recognise the names.
These companies may be smaller than FAANG, but I also feel that if BASF disappeared overnight it would have a larger impact on the world than if Facebook disappeared.
HN is sometimes incredibly biased towards consumer tech.
Siemens has 330,000 employees. I'd always consider that huge.
All of this seems reasonable, and I see the value in keeping things competitive.
I do have one concern though.
Established markets are more entrenched, and hearing that smaller companies may have "slow and steady growth" here seems excellent.
Yet emerging markets move incredibly fast, and the goal is to discover those trenches and occupy them. Being held back in such a market can be troublesome.
So this is what I'd worry about.
> Yet emerging markets move incredibly fast, and the goal is to discover those trenches and occupy them.
Well, only if you make it a goal to occupy all the trenches. The EU has realized that it does not want all possible trenches occupied. For example: There is a lot of market share to be had in waste disposal by dumping it in the rivers and oceans. Regulation generally prohibits this, because we don't want our rivers and oceans full of waste.
Capitalist market self-regulation wouldn't have done this without external pressure (regulation, litigation, etc.) because the capitalist market would externalize all costs if it would increase profits.
Bad example. Dumping waste cheaply illegally is a trench that is continuously filled with really bad stuff. Regulations needs more Oumph, it is just too cheap to do in an dishonest way.
SAP, Spotify, Sitecore, Roche, Airbus, CERN (the ecosystem powers its research), CodePlay, SN Systems, BAYER, Roche,....
Spotify has never been consistently profitable and had Net income last year of a little over a billion. They are a nothingburger
Since when is Airbus a small company and not part of the large state supported corp monopoly gang? Same with SAP, Roche and Bayer. These are all masive corporations that swallowed entire sectors. Same with Spotify having used its monopoly status to screw over smaller artists. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills when I read such comments.
Let me ask you guys something else, if EU hates large monopolist companies so much as you claim, then why are all its car companies monopolistic mega conglomerates that rule the world like Volkswagen, Stellantis, Daimler Benz, BMW, and Renault? Where's EU's equivalent of Tesla if they supposedly hate all these big companies?
I'll tell you why: Just like the US, the capital controlled EU also supports its domestic monopolies and only bitches about foreign monopolies in sectors they don't control and threaten their economic hegemony. That's the cold hard truth, everything else is just political hot air and virtue signaling for brownie points, and I'm pissed people are not only buying it but also parroting it when the goal to monopolize business sectors is as strong in EU corporations as it is in US and Chinese ones.
Europe is just more stricter now with controlling large (mostly foreign) corporations since its own economy lost a lot of ground to the US and Chinese ones (it has now half the real GDP it had 2 decades ago), and since it can't create new large companies, all it can do now is protecting what it has left from foreign companies taking over their turf. The upshot being that a lot of those rules are congruent with the consumer protections which also end up globally favoring consumers abroad.
Easy, on the car companies that already exist with much better build quality.
We don't need cars from fascists.
> We don't need cars from fascists.
To be fair, that’s not what they said. I believe they’re asking where are the car companies of Tesla’s size and market position.
> Tesla’s size and market position.
Like, Tesla are very small (in terms of cars sold) but very large in terms of valuation. Seems like a once-off, not something that would be replicable (anywhere).
>We don't need cars from fascists.
Really? Because look up on the history of VW, BMW, Porsche, Fiat, etc and their founding families, some of who still own a large part of the shares of those companies today. Most of them worked with fascists no problem, some by force of the era some by opportunity but none of them opposed them.
You see this is the typical European hypocrisy that I dislike. Pointing fingers that Elon is somehow a fascist cause he raised his arm once, but Porsche or BMW who used slave labor from work camps is somehow not fascist now because ... reasons I guess.
Explain me that with logic and reason, and not with the "Elon is a fascist because reddit told me he is".
Yes, everyone played a role in WW 2, that is why we try to learn from history, instead of supporting those eager to repeating it.
The fact that Elon openly supports and speaks at events of a German party that has been officially labeled far right extremist by the domestic intelligence agency is a stronger signal than even the Hitlerite hand gestures.
How is Tesla an example of your point? It’s the biggest EV manufacturer owned by one of the world’s richest men.
Perhaps the problem here isn’t that smaller brands don’t exist, it’s that if we give examples of smaller brands then you’ll argue
“Never heard of them. Thus proof that the EU is holding them back”
And if we mention household names then you’d argue
“Those aren’t small companies”
You’ve basically crafted an impossible to satisfy condition. A question that would be equally impossible for you to satisfy with US firms as it is for EU firms.
———
By the way, there’s quite a few car manufacturers that are small listed here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automobile_manufactu...
A few of them are relatively big names despite their small company size, for example Noble Automotive.
BYD Q4 sales (only NEV): https://tridenstechnology.com/byd-sales-statistics/ approx 600k.
Tesla Q4 sales: https://ir.tesla.com/press-release/tesla-fourth-quarter-2024... approx 500k.
So Tesla are not the biggest anymore (which honestly surprised me).
It doesn't surprise me at all. BYD invests heavily into R&D. I don't know how much Tesla invests into R&D but if their latest product is an ugly Homercar for incels, then they should probably think a bit about their strategy.
Tesla is not one of the largest EV manufacturers and sales are rapidly declining.
Yes. As someone who has worked with 100+ funded start-ups, roughly 85 in USA and 15 in EU - the EU ones have such a harder, trudging climb due to regulations.
Good. I would hate for my country to become like the USA.
> Good. I would hate for my country to become like the USA.
Yeah, there's a whole lot of American exceptionalism going on in this thread, assuming the way things are done over here in the states is the best and only way. I live here and let me tell you, it's not. Just the fact that we have gigantic tech monopolies with more money than several nations combined is proof of that - that's not a thing that should ever happen.
Given the tidal wave of vibecoded startups were about to see - the US may want to take a look at what the EU is doing.
You say that like it's a bad thing. But it's not. It's a good thing.
I work at OVH, we're European, we're actually good.
I use our product, it's better than GCP for my use cases.
We've got Hetzner in Germany doing the same thing we are.
> The problem is that you pass DMA, DSA, GDPR, etc. which Google, Apple etc. can fight for years in court and if they have to pay a few billion, so be it.
And how do you compete with the big tech companies without it? It's been decades without anyone being able to do it. Not in Europe and not in the US. OpenAI might have a chance, but they also have billions.
The days where someone could drop out of school and start a company in the garage is over. Cost of living is up, so is competition. Companies need to expand and regulation like GDPR makes it easier to do so instead of having to deal with multiple countries regulation. The US always had an advantage in regulation like the DMCA.
To spell it out, before regulation European companies had to...
Deal with privacy regulation of each country. Which in the EU was supposed to be similar, but wasn't entirely. With GDPR not only is it the same in the EU, but other countries are now following the same model.
Register for VAT in every EU country it sold (enough) products in. Making many not sell to other countries at all until Amazon ate their business. With VAT MOSS you only register in you own country.
Accept many form of payments with many different fees since credit card adoption and cost could vary wildly. With interchange fees capped you increasingly only need to accept common credit cards.
Pay large roaming charges when traveling, making starting services like Uber or Airbnb less relevant since you couldn't assume someone had data in another country.
Try to compete with big tech companies that were charging for access to their platforms while minimizing their taxes through royalty payments, VAT deals and offshore holdings. Giving them a huge advantage. This is still the case, but lesser so.
For actually running a company it is a lot better now.
There are other problems with EU regulations. Some things are natural monopolies or in other ways doesn't do well as markets. Privatization and state-aid rules prevent European countries from effectively managing these areas. Any advantage Europe had over the US in cost of living and public services is rapidly diminishing.
> regulatory environment so complex only massive companies like big tech or Europe's legacy players have the resources to comply
This is a very inaccurate view. I’ve worked with multiple SMEs and no such “complexities” ever become operational challenges. Even as a indie developer, my compliance is a default provided I’m not trying to do something shady.
Looking into the EU regulations, in most cases what they want you to do (or not do) is common sense.
Same experience, from startup to large multinational EU companies.
The biggest headaches/issues are normally local regulations (country specific or even more local). The EU directives are more frameworks with a lot of flexibility and well grounded on common sense + expertise. How the different countries implement them in their own laws (with their own historical laws) is a different story.
In IT it may be the case. In foodtech it is a problem. This may sound reassuring, as we don’t really want much of the stuff being sold in the US here in the EU. But, for new approaches regarding food production the EU regulatory environment is unfortunately a morass. There are lots of regulation which is neither fact or experience based, for example around insects, or ecological labelling.
This indie dev begs to differ https://x.com/levelsio/status/1833126426142179653
That indie dev got contacted by the government for feedback. Not a bad sign, in my opinion.
There’s some definite nope’s in there — excluding small companies from GDPR, exempting them from corporation tax on profits etc
DMA is applicable only to "gatekeepers" who markets with X amount of users. This is designed not to burden smaller businesses, but to limit monopoly of the large few corporations.
> It actually makes European businesses worth off by continuing to make its regulatory environment so complex only massive companies like big tech or Europe's legacy players have the resources to comply.
The DMA (that this article is about) applies to gatekeepers (massive companies like big tech), not mom and pop startups
It doesn’t even apply to megacorps generally. The DMA applies to Core Platform Services – meaning app stores, browsers, etc – that are evaluated as gatekeepers individually.
The same company can have provide CPSs, with different status. For instance, Google is a designated gatekeeper of Android (OS) and Google Maps (Intermediation), but not Gmail. So the DMA won’t dictate anything related to Gmail, even if Google is a gatekeeper in other areas.
Massive companies typically smother small players anyway, especially in unregulated environments.
> Add to that feel-good green initiatives like a packaging initiative that might lower packaging waste from European companies, but more likely will just make European goods more expensive and cause Europeans to buy from Temu instead.
Does this actually happen or are you just making shit up?
Is Temu exempt of any packaging requirements?
That is the western European way though. It's supposed to be a nice place to live, not a nice place to do business. If that leads to Chaebolification of the economy then so be it. There are other parts of the world that specialise in deregulation at the expense of living standards.
True! And I generally empathize with this. The core point of the EU and its member states' governments should be to enable high quality of life.
But that model you describe is cracking: Cost of living is going through the roof in Europe, taxes/social contributions going up every year, etc.
The problem is that Europe is like an old, rich person who now lives off of the principal of their wealth. For a person that's fine because they'll eventually die. For a government, you should strive for an environment that lets you keep growing wealth.
> But that model you describe is cracking: Cost of living is going through the roof in Europe, taxes/social contributions going up every year, etc.
Cost of living is increasing in the US too (in large part due to geopolitical reasons), and social contributions are rising because of demographic factors. I'm not sure how market liberalism is magically going to fix that latter issue.
Fair point re: US! Though that doesn't mean it's not a problem.
Re: demographics. It's relatively straightforward: To keep contributions constant while supporting more people, you need either:
-more people via immigration (which is extremely tricky to get right) who are net contributors, not beneficiaries of social systems -massively increased productivity through innovation/technology -cut benefits from social programs
If you do none of those things, the systems will either collapse or you need to raise taxes/mandatory contributions which are de-facto taxes.
I'd argue that actions like the DMA regulation are actively working against "Chaebolification" though.
It's not national law that can be bent locally, it's EU law that applies to all companies of certain size.
I think the EU learned the hard way that they can't rely on its members to prioritize common interests
(see Ireland vs. Apple tax avoidance, Germany vs. Car evolution, Austria vs. Reduction of Russian influence, Hungary vs. everything)
> I would argue the opposite: It actually makes European businesses worth off by continuing to make its regulatory environment so complex only massive companies like big tech or Europe's legacy players have the resources to comply.
Are you arguing that 27 different sets of laws was a better approach? That these countries would just gladly lie down and never regulate the societal-level harms, systemic lawbreaking, and massive infringement of privacy across the board? I don't think so.
For a moment the political system in the US seemed to get to the same conclusions as the EU under Bidens FTC and anti-trust cases. But the conclusions of that remain to be seen.
The problem is that those 27 sets of laws basically still exist. Regulation is certainly not the only reason. Fragmentation is another massive problem.
There's the EU-Inc initiative that the EU has basically made pointless (by wanting to introduce 27 new standards, not one, just making things more complex).
Note that I'm not arguing for zero regulation.
This keeps coming up over and over on HN.
There are no 27 sets of laws to do business in Europe. It's not perfect, but it's a SINGLE MARKET, if you comply to the EU regulation you are allowed to sell everywhere.
It does however not absolve you from additional local market demands to be competitive, i.e. local language support, service infrastructure, etc.
For example: Miele is one of the largest washing machine manufacturers in Europe. They have their front panel translated to local languages for most of its markets. You can sell a washing machine with a English front panel, but you won't be able to compete in e.g. the German/Italian/French market
> continuing to make its regulatory environment so complex
To be fair, the regulations are there because companies are out-of-control paperclip maximisers. For example, the cookie banner didn't have to be obnoxious - companies choose to comply maliciously to adhere to the text and shit over the spirit of the regulations, which have to become more and more verbose and explicit.
... where is it easy to do business anyway? sure, there are degrees, levels, grades of this, the size of the barriers to entry matters, there are metrics about how easy it is to start a business for example, but that's just one aspect, and I'd argue mostly an unimportant one (if it takes 2 hours or 2 days or 1 weeks it's fine, what matters is how much does it cost to do it and how much does it cost to maintain the legal entity, and to do the filings, etc.)
> regulatory environment so complex
The DMA really isn't particularly complex though. And what complexity it has only becomes complex once you're a manager of a whole consumer platform (a "gatekeeper" in its jargon).
To wit: your point is backwards, the DMA is structured such that the only companies that need to bear its burdens are "big tech or Europe's legacy players". If you're a little company wanting to add a paid app store to your Tiny AI Robot Virtual Experience or whatever, go nuts. The DMA absolutely won't stop you.
I wish people would stop comparing a stock (market cap) with a flow (GDP).
Can you also expand on why? Especially in this case I do feel like it’s an (imperfect) proxy for power they wield.
The same reason you don't compare speed with distance. Distance is meters, speed is distance per the unit of time, meters / seconds, m/s.
Likewise, market cap is measured in monetary units, dollars, euros, etc., while GDP is measured in money per the unit of time: $XXXX / year.
Because one is annual, and the other is just total. The equivalent of GDP for corporations would be annual revenue.
I'd argue that it doesn't go far enough at this point. There are imaginable scenarios now where the US uses AWS/Microsoft like China currently uses rare earth exports or even further and AWS/Microsoft + Android/iOS are critical infrastructure. Having some "sovereign cloud" etc. won't help since this needs continuous monitoring and improvements from the mothership.
Merely doing monopoly regulation won't help. We have to actually destroy the monopolies.
As a former European, I agree with your first statement. I love that the EU is taking this seriously, and I like how they introduced the "gatekeeper" term to apply regulations only to the "big ones" and not small businesses (even though I don't agree with many of the individual laws in the DMA).
That said, you can't argue that this isn't protectionist - we simply don't have any gatekeepers here, so if we're fair the DMA is only hitting international competitors (except Spotify maybe?)
European companies I could find which the European Commission has taken action against with the Digital Services Act:
Zalando has three enforcement actions against them since June 2023
Booking.com has one
Technius (mainly streaming) has two
WebGroup CZ (Adult entertainment) has five
Wow, I did not know that, thanks for making me aware of this. I guess the tech press only covers the big cases? I didn't even know there were so many cases already.
edit: I looked it up - you are talking about the DSA (digital services act) while I was talking about the DMA (the one including the gatekeeper specification) - so that's not really what I meant....
> we simply don't have any gatekeepers here
Booking would love that to be the case. And last I heard, Zalando is currently fighting the EU over having to comply with the DMA.
No, this is under the DSA (digital services act), not the DMA.
The DSA tells platforms how they must keep users safe and transparent, the DMA tells the largest gatekeepers how they must behave toward competitors and business users.
Booking is on the DMA designated gatekeepers list: https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/gatekeepers_en
It looks like you're right that Zalando is on the DSA list, though.
Europe is centre right? That is an interesting claim. I guess someone’s right is someone else’s left.
Center right is spot on if you know anything about the EU's member states. Here left means some flavour of socialism. Running state monopolies to the ground and adding markets for essential services like electricity is not exactly that.
Where would you place it? I'm curious because centre-right is quite spot on.
Socially and economically left wing. Progressive socially and interventionist economically.
I don't think you know what you are actually talking about, you are confusing the EU with Europe, if talking about Europe you are giving a blanket statement over 40+ countries with quite different cultures, societies, etc. If talking about the EU then you have no clue what the EU actually is.
I recommend using more precise language about what you are talking, at the moment you just sound very confused.
Is this a joke? The EU is the product of large industrialists institutionalising their liberalist, capitalist values as an international bureaucracy.
It hardly cares about unions beyond what the ECHR and ILO treaties demands, i.e. it's obviously not left wing. If it was inherently left wing it wouldn't have the kind of parliament it has, but rather something like Yugoslavia or the DDR did.
It's also not conservative, hence why that movement has had to bolt on militarisation and stuff like Frontex.
It’s not the eighties anymore. The world has moved on. You have to look at things from the perspective of the present. Forget Yugoslavia.
Yugoslavia was the perfect economic model. Forgetting it would be doing the world a disservice.
Today is Srebrenica remembrance day so I'll sneak in a OT link to the BBC documentary The Death of Yugoslavia here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BsBTkAXnPZs
It is quite unfortunate what happened when ethnic nationalism won out over brotherhood and unity, but to be clear, I don't think that has anything to do with the economic model
You would have a hard time understanding the EU today if you knew nothing about Yugoslavia, since the fallout turned into portions of the EU.
If you know of some other institutionally left wing bureaucracy you consider more appropriate to use as an example, name it.
It's funny, as the EU is normally bashed by left people for being too right, and right people for being too left.
Like, lots of the Treaties are pretty neo-liberal (private services, competition is always good, privatise stuff) but lots more are more left wring (the anti-monoploy stuff, the social charter etc).
Really though the EU is 27 governments in a trenchcoat, so it tends to reflect those governments (which change over time).
Anti-monopoly is left wing and doesn't fit the neo-liberalist compartment?
The social charter is firmly liberalist, though not distinctly of the neo- flavour.
Due to the institutional structures and processes EU rule making tends to be quite resistant to immediate political fashion. For one the power of framing from interest and lobby groups is quite strong, hence the influence from expert groups and lawyer like people. It's why conservatives are pushing towards a kind of United States of Europe direction, they'd prefer a centralisation of power in areas currently governed by the founding agreements.
The Soviet Union had large industrialists and so does China. Large companies and large industry is the defining aspect of both socialism and capitalism.
Quite right, yeah. See the map:
https://www.foiaresearch.net/sites/default/files/styles/body...
I would consider ALDE center-right still, and S&D the first left coalition.
Yes, the EU as an institution is centre-right, its main purpose is to regulate a common market, it's a economic liberal institution, and liberal in this sense is a right-wing political philosophy, not the bastardised "liberal" usage in American politics meaning "progressive".
I basically stopped buying "apps" almost a decade ago when Apple unceremoniously removed an app i paid for with no refund because the in app browser defaulted to a certain website. Btw I have always hated their "app" branding. But the benefit of it, at least for me, is it's a strong reminder that it's a childish analog to an application.
The only exception to this is I bought the game, Vampire Survivors, no wait. It was free. (because of clones in the app store) Anyway.
The funny thing is I do actually have like 100 (free) apps installed. I just never use any of them except for Brave. I basically immediately forget about them the second I install them because just using them is so awkward. They know they have a usability problem but they can't really square it with their massive app ecosystem except in the most slowest, methodical way possible. In the meantime, more UI annoyances are popping up twice as fast.
iPhone used to compete well a decade ago in usability for things like copying text from a webpage into an email. Despite the phone being much larger, I find it much more difficult to do today, perhaps because selecting text is just so unpredictable with the way web standards have become a pile of cruft. Despite whose fault it is, ultimately it's much worse now. I would only bother trying that on a desktop today unless absolutely necessary.
Sometimes text just becomes impossible to edit in certain circumstances. There's like three different things that can happen on a tap and hold and none of them are consistent. It feels absolutely random which one it does. I used to be able to select text from images, now I have to go through two to three cycles of "hold tap menu" -> "select text from image" until it works. It actually still works fine on my old iPad. How is the regression this bad?
I also find editing on an iPhone to be an exercise in futility. Is it no longer possible to place a cursor in the middle of a word? I end up having to go to a word boundary and erase from there and retype everything.
The keyboard touch areas also seem offset from Android and I end up one row off too much of the time.
Yes, the UI is so overloaded you can never tell what it's going to do. It might do two or three totally different things. Obviously you want to have the magnifying glass with a cursor. But then the cursor might just decide to jump to the end of the word. Sometimes it's impossible to get the cursor in front of the first letter if the UI is cramped. Maybe it will copy the text into a floating clipboard if your finger drifts a few pixels south. Maybe it will bring up a context menu? If you're using Safari, maybe it won't even let you select any text at all. Then you can take a screenshot and select text from an image to work around that.
if you hold down the space bar you can use that to slide the cursor around :)
Yes but sometimes it doesn't work, weirdly. The cursor just doesn't go where you put it, jumping to the end of the line or next line entirely, where it gets lost in limbo because it's a single line text box. It's ridiculously broken sometimes.
Now that's not a big deal until it happens 3 times in a row randomly and now something that would take less than half a second on a keyboard is taking over 20 seconds. Not only that the random behavior is extremely frustrating which just makes you avoid it in the future.
I use that on Android all the time. But I feel I've only gotten it to work once or twice on iPhone. And even then the word boundaries were very "sticky" (IIRC) and precision placement still very difficult.
The greatest gem is found in the footnote, IMO
> "They managed to convince the courts that iPadOS is a separate operating system to iOS (it's not), which delayed iPadOS being designated as a gatekeeper for almost a year. They are currently challenging all of the rest: the iOS, Safari, and App Store designations, and successfully managed to avoid iMessage being designated at all. They have taken the DMA law to court for an apparently ambiguous comma in article 5(4) - the payment one, and for somehow infringing on human rights law in article 6(7) - the interoperability one."
Looking at the actual filing[1], Apple says:
> "First plea in law, alleging that Article 6(7) of Regulation (EU) 2022/1925 is inconsistent with the requirements of the European Charter of Fundamental Rights and the principle of proportionality, and that Article 2(b) of the European Commission Decision of 5 September 2023 is unlawful insofar as it imposes the obligations under Article 6(7) of Regulation (EU) 2022/1925 on Apple in relation to iOS."
For context, here are the full contents of Article 6(7):
"The gatekeeper shall allow business users and alternative providers of services provided together with, or in support of, core platform services, free of charge, effective interoperability with, and access for the purposes of interoperability to, the same operating system, hardware or software features, regardless of whether those features are part of the operating system, as are available to, or used by, that gatekeeper when providing such services."
[1] https://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf;jsession...
Big companies like that have a vested interest in paying their legal team A Lot Of Money to find stupid details like this and to argue the toss over them because a ruling can cost them billions. If arguing over a comma means they don't have to, or that it pushes the point where they have to pay forwards, it's worth the expense to them.
It also costs them my trust, though.
This happens in the confines of legal (EU, California, ...) institutions and courts with the occasional boring news reporting the average consumer doesn't read, like this article.
It's clearly a win for Apple.
More people are getting annoyed with Apple over these issues, and they are bleeding into the mainstream media more frequently. I have a few die hard Apple friends (Non-professionals) that have recently got so frustrated with being pushed into corners that they have given up the fruity ecosystem altogether.
In no way am I suggesting that Apple are on the way out, but they have definitely started to turn the same corner that IBM and Microsoft have in the past. They are becoming seen as 'big business' instead of 'challenging underdog'.
Not super digging with Apple’s push back on EU laws nowadays, will probably not get another Apple phone… but, the competition is not very good so far. Currently on an iPhone 12. So, hopefully by like 2030 the Linux phone ecosystem will really be there for day-to-day use (maybe it already is there, I haven’t checked lately).
And I must admit, this phone has already had a good run. If it lasts that long, I’ll be impressed for sure.
“Challenging underdog” isn’t a term I’d have applied to Apple since the early days of the iPhone. They’ve been very big and very “big business” for a long time now, and I’ve called myself an Apple fan since the 1990s. They are a very different company today (mostly due to means; they’ve always had the ambition).
Yeah, couldn’t really call them the underdog post-iPhone. But they were a top-dog for a while after that.
The decline takes a long time to set in though. MS had lost the plot by 2012 (the release of Windows 8), but they’ve been shambling on for more than a decade since then.
Exactly my point, in the days of the first colourful iMac G3, ads with Jeff Goldblum in it, and the massively popular iPod, Apple was known as the challenging underdog. Even when they first launched the iPhone they were thought of as challenging the existing mobile device space dominated by Windows Mobile and CE, and PalmOS. They were exciting, moving fast, and disrupting markets.
That early built up reputation has got them far, and I would say has continued on for about another decade or so after the iPhone launch. Since that, their coninued lawsuits and anti competitive practices have been more and more prevalent in mainstream media, and that previous reputation is now begining to tarnish amonst normal consumers. When the standard user sees them as big business and not the challenging underdog anymore, it paves the way for a new cooler small tech company to come and steal their bacon.
I believe that tipping point has come.
Apple has always been like this, they were only humble during the few years they almost went bankrupt and needed all the help they could get.
Not in the view of the general public. The 'colourful era' of Mac G3s, and fancy iPod ads went a long way into making the average consumer see them as trendy, cool, and disrupting the normal boring tech industry we were used to. That reputation got them really far by riding the wave into the launch of the iPhone.
Since then their reputation has been slowly eroding with the average consumer with the combined stagnation of product design, and the string of high profile anti consumer and anti competitive moves highlighted in the media. We have seen this before in big tech, and I look forward to the next cool disruptor taking their place.
That was exactly during the humble phase when the possible bankruptcy was still not yet fully sorted out.
They were also doing visits to universities showing how great it was the BSD / NeXTSTEP foundations of OS X, for doing UNIX related stuff.
Similar to how NeXT used to position itself against Sun, and other UNIX workstation vendors.
During my CERN stay at 2003 - 2004, they did visits to our IT telling more or less the same.
Had the coloured Macs with OS X Aqua or the iPod failed the market, that was it, yet another footnote of remarkable computing history company now gone.
Yep, as I keep saying. They built a bit of good reputation by breaking the mold, so the average consumer thought they were the greatest tech company ever. As time has gone on the mask has started to slip and the general population are starting to see them for the big business they are.
We techies always saw it, but the average consumers are only just begining to catch up.
As long as MS keeps making Windows worse and worse each release (and no one willing to develop decent ARM SoCs) and Android smartphone manufacturers keep releasing utter dogshit, Apple will have customers. They already market themselves as the privacy-friendly, "just works" alternative - and that's legitimately hard to fight.
Apple isn't in the position it is just because they make factually good hardware or because of their business practices - they are where they are because the competition constantly shoots itself with a sawn off shotgun.
IMO Apple have started to do the same. Their software is consistently getting buggier with worse user experiences, along with their reputation.
Tech savy windows users that are trying out Apple are finding that it very much doesnt 'Just Work' anymore, and that sentiment is starting to creep out more and more.
Take a look at Linuses recent evaluation of macOS by using only a Mac for a solid 2 months. His conclusion is that it is no better or worse than windows, and definitely doesnt 'Just Work'.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOgRmw1atFU
> Their software is consistently getting buggier with worse user experiences, along with their reputation.
Related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43243075
If earlier actions of Apple didn't affect anything [0,1], then I doubt this one will. What's the alternative? Android [2]?
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34299433
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25607386
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26639261
And yet odds are you continue to spend increasingly large sums on Apple products every year
I am certainly not surprised that Apple is employing a lot of legal tricky to work around judgments. But what does surprise me is that there’s a very common attitude in forums that somehow Apple is the only company doing this, or they’re doing it worse than any other company.
For me personally they seem to be more expensive than competitors and have a more aggressive stance on openness (ex: compare PWA support on Android vs iOS, not to mention the multiple other things like no multiple stores, the browser engine discussion, etc). So, I am not amazed that people think "on top of all the other things that you annoy us with you also try to avoid the law?!".
While I hate Apple's anti-consumer practices as much as anyone, the PWA platform is a system set up by Google first and foremost. Take-up has been limited outside of Google Chrome. I wouldn't say Apple's PWA approach is necessarily an example of Apple's fuckery.
This wouldn't be much of an issue, of course, if Chrome would just run on iOS like it does on any other OS, so Google can implement PWAs themselves.
Mobile web apps that can be installed on device were invented by Apple.
This was the way developers were supposed to develop apps for the iPhone when it was released, before Apple introduced the App Store.
I don’t think that’s true. Apple said web sites were the way to add functionality to the first iPhone, but “can be installed on device”?
Jobs framed it that way, but IIRC, all you could do is create bookmarks. Creating an icon on the Home Screen? Impossible. Reliably storing data on-device? Impossible. Backing up your on-device data? Impossible. Accessing your on-device contacts, photos? Impossible.
Also, Jobs made a vision statement about web apps in June 2007, but Apple announced a SDK only four months later (in October 2007) and shipped it in March 2008.
⇒ I’m fairly sure he knew about that SDK when he made that statement.
The ability to install web apps that open as standalone apps, and not in Safari, was introduced by Apple with iOS 2.1 in 2008. Well before this ability was added to Android.
Apple invented installable mobile web apps.
Link about the needed metatag: https://www.mobilejoomla.com/forum/4-feature-requests/330-ip...
Steve Jobs introducing web apps as the way to develop apps for the iPhone in 2007: https://williamkennedy.ninja/apple/2024/01/30/steve-jobs-int...
Mobile web apps were what Apple wanted developers to use, but they weren't new, let alone invented by Apple.
I didn't say Apple invented mobile web apps. I said Apple invented the ability to install mobile web apps on device.
I'm not 100% sure no other mobile OS allowed this before to be honest, but I'm pretty iOS is the one that popularized it.
Another Apple myth, Symbian had a Web runtime before anyone at Apple came up with the idea.
Also that was precisely the idea behind Windows 9x Active Desktop apps.
IMHO. Apple were the first to make it useful. Because the iPhone was always online and the browser window was limited. Active Desktop aimed for the technological stars and was just buggy and slow as a result, it was cool but too flaky to be used.
Symbian I just never had an Phone expensive enough to use like that.
In the end none of them really worked out I guess.
> This wouldn't be much of an issue, of course, if Chrome would just run on iOS like it does on any other OS, so Google can implement PWAs themselves.
You do understand that the reason it doesn't is because Apple won't let it, not that Google don't want to?
Of course, Apple is sabotaging Chrome and has been for years, and that's a much bigger problem than PWAs. The Safari team shouldn't need to implement PWAs against their will, Apple should instead let Google bring out a browser that does PWAs and then let the users decide if they want to use PWAs or not.
Google does something quite similar, though; Chrome can install applications into Android's app drawer, but that requires privileges other browsers can't attain, needing to resort to things like widgets instead. Firefox doesn't care about PWAs and Apple doesn't care about any platform but their own, so it's not as obvious a problem, but Android is full of "you must be the manufacturer or Google to compete" permissions. Android is just a lot better at fair competition than iOS, to the point you'd barely notice.
This is a fantasy. No customer wants PWAs. They exist to make developers' lives easier, not consumers' lives.
The consumer doesn't care which method is used to serve an application. PWAs could easily be presented to the end user like a native App.
The problem is rather that PWAs would prove a viable path for universal cross-platform applications, taking away the gatekeeper role the OS-vendors have.
Paradoxically PWA-support is also part of the "we're no gatekeeper" narrative, so it's in the OS-vendor interest to keep it maintained as a hampered alternative to native apps.
> The consumer doesn't care which method is used to serve an application. PWAs could easily be presented to the end user like a native App.
No it can't. The web will never support what's necessary for parity with native apps. Imagine trying to implement Liquid Glass in CSS.
PWAs are the primary way for small busineses to have internal private apps for running staff services on local devices. Apples App Store has way too many hoops to jump through and has far too high a wait time to publish for businesses to move fast and update internal apps with bugfixes and new services etc.
Android accomplishes this by allowing devices to connect to private app stores and repos, which enable companies to issue their own apps on their own terms. As Apple plays hard ball on this front, the only way is to use a PWA.
Custom apps published for internal use by companies with fewer than 100 employees who aren't eligible for enterprise app distribution sounds like a niche of a niche use case, so it's pretty consistent with my view that they're more developer catnip and not a serious technology.
Developer efficiencies can be translated to customer wins.
Certainly in theory, almost never in practice. The enterprise slop shop that chooses web technologies because the consultants are cheaper is not trying to make anything lasting or delightful.
Then allowing Apple the efficiency of not implementing yet another way to build a GUI also is a customer win.
Apple already implement everything needed. They just decided that they can clear client-side storage for PWAs whenever they like (deleting user data), making them useless for anything that needs to store data and isn't synced to the cloud.
The goalposts move every time Apple resolves some bug that PWA advocates promise is the one issue holding them back from taking over the world with crappy web apps.
Openness is not a concern for the people who buy Apple devices, and probably not for the public at large. It certainly is no concern to me, I need a machine which works so I can get stuff done. For a MacBook that means opening the lid. For a Windows laptop that means plugging it in, opening the lid, waiting for half an hour for the system to update while it is unusable and hogging all the bandwidth at this time, etc.
Smart phones took over from personal computers, because people want something which works and they hate having to fiddle with their device, trouble shoot and fix things. They don't care that they can't install an Arch Linux terminal on it or download torrents. And if they need something more pro, they go for an iPad or a Macbook when they can choose. Openness is only important for programmers and people who love to mess with their device, not for the public at large.
> But what does surprise me is that there’s a very common attitude in forums that somehow Apple is the only company doing this, or they’re doing it worse than any other company.
Apart from being irrelevant and whataboutism, this is the narrative Apple is playing, particularly towards its userbase.
The EU regulation doesn't focus on Apple in any way, the purpose of the DMA is to have objective criteria to identify a scaled market of digital goods with an uneven playing field for all players.
The EU DMA has identified that Apple created a closed market of significant size, made themselves the gatekeeper and invited companies to compete there. But Apple participates in the market also as a player, and skews the playing field in their favor.
So it's an unjust market where forces are unable to flow freely, and the EU is attempting to rectify that.
The reasons why Apple is in such public focus on this are #1 because they operate an unusual amount of closed markets and #2 because they WANT this: it is part of Apple's strategy to rally publicly against the regulation and shape a different perception of it.
I wouldn’t argue that Apple is worse than any other company. They’re just the tip of the spear in the fight against EU competition regulation. Other companies would fight just as hard if they had as much to lose by following the rules.
> But what does surprise me is that there’s a very common attitude in forums that somehow Apple is the only company doing this, or they’re doing it worse than any other company.
Apple creates vertically integrated devices. For many people, Apple dictates their entire digital life - far more so than any megacorporation on the mere level of, say Google, could ever hope to, considering Apple owns the hardware, software, and everything in between. So they are in a position shared by no other company - they are entirely unique in this. You cannot buy a device with entirely Google-designed hardware and software - Pixels with Android come close, Chromebooks come close, but nothing reaches Apple, even without custom silicon. I would say the closest company that exists in terms of vertical integration is Oxide Computer, but those aren't consumer devices.
So it's not that Apple is the only company doing this. It's also not that they're "doing it worse than any other company". It's that when they do this it affects people on a level not shared by any other company. It has a much larger impact than anybody else ever could.
For the record, I don't mind Apple's vertical integration, in fact that's one of their main selling points for me. It just gives them the greatest possible leverage to implement these sorts of practices.
> You cannot buy a device with entirely Google-designed hardware and software - Pixels with Android come close
I don’t really understand this distinction. How is eg a Pixel 9 Pro running Android with GMS on a Tensor any less entirely Google-designed than an iPhone 16 is entirely Apple-designed?
You can still install Huawei market place or Fdroid marketplace and sideload all the apps you want. And it's easy to do.
> How is eg a Pixel 9 Pro running Android with GMS on a Tensor any less entirely Google-designed than an iPhone 16 is entirely Apple-designed?
Android is developed by the Open Handset Alliance[0], which is not just Google:
Android is more of a collaboration than Apple's entirely in-house. (Technically Apple's current generation of operating systems traces back to NeXTSTEP, which itself traced from some other things, but it's still had much cleaner provenance and been much more tightly controlled than Google's continuous conglomeration.)I will say though I'd never heard of the Tensor until now, that's very interesting. I guess I am out of date on Pixels.
Apple owns manufacturing and patents for most of the tech they use in their phones (e.g. batteries, biometric sensors, and so on). Google Pixels use third-party suppliers (e.g. their fingerprint sensors are usually from FPC, Goodix or Qualcomm), they follow the same sets of protocols as other Android devices, and they use many of the same drivers provided by the third-party component vendors. For this reason I also wouldn't say the Microsoft Surface is vertically integrated. At best it's designed to work well with the software that's on it, and the software has had some features added for the device. Maybe that's some measure of vertical integration, but not quite to the level of Apple.
Apple certainly doesn't own everything; for example the actual display panel in an iPhone usually is manufactured by Samsung or LG Display. In my opinion though they still own enough to be far more integrated than Pixels are.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Handset_Alliance
Apple is a very stylish kind of company. Their public perception matters more because when you use an Apple product, it creates an image of you.
If I buy a Google phone, no one is going to comment on it. If I buy an Apple, or a Tesla, or luxury vehicle, people are going to comment on it.
If Apple is known to be scummy and you buy it, it makes you look bad. I think we are seeing that with Tesla now, I doubt too many liberals are buying a cybertruck.
maybe true in some parts of the world. where i live, literally 50% of phones are apple phones. they are commonplace. nobody comments on them.
Can someone explain what apple is arguing here?
_How_ do they claim that this section is inconsistent with the European Charter of Fundamental rights?
Glad to see Apple standing up for human rights in Europe.
Maybe they are just different-thinking, artistic, humanist underdogs after all.
As a developer for apple platforms, it's extremely difficult to keep a positive mindset to all this. Year after year, Apple finds ways to continue unbounded fuckery. Making apps for iPhones is not that profitable anymore either, at this point is more about addressing a painful necessity - Apple is the phone company and you have to make it work if you want access to that "unmovable" infrastructure.
I'm seriously at a loss about why people would support this increasingly developer-hostile ecosystem and essentially work towards their own demise and perhaps even the rest of their profession. I'd suggest switching to a different source of income while you still can, even if only out of self-respect.
Because as a developer, you often don't get that choice, for example, if your product is an online service. Either you have an iOS app and play by Apple's stupid rules, or you don't, and your iPhone users go to a competitor that does have an iOS app, or at the very least complain quite loudly.
If your product is an online service, having a website seems like a slam dunk.
It’s a good start. But then people want push notifications, Sign in with Apple, to pay with card but they have an iPhone etc - so many points Apple makes a lot harder than they should be. Eventually, it’s economically better to just suck it up and make an app.
Do you know why QRCodes are by far the most popular banking system? Because, Apple didn’t like it if apps use NFC for payments that’s not Apple Pay. There was a time BLE beacons had to be iBeacons too etc. it’s really decades of pressure in all kinds of ways.
Because most people are not developers? Between ad-infested Google, enshittified Microsoft and still not ready for the desktop Linux the Apple ecosystem might be the most accessible and easy to use platform for most non-technical users. As a developer it's an annoyance but I have to admire the elegance in the way Apple uses their core software and hardware technologies over their entire stack. As a user I don't care about what developers feel about it. Apple's market share is big enough to draw lots of them.
> still not ready for the desktop Linux
This has been a myth for the last decade. I'm even using GNU/Linux on my smartphone, which is arguably not ready for the average consumer but can be good enough for the HN audience.
My Bluetooth headset does not work with Debian. But it does with WinDOS.
My Bluetooth headphones work even with my GNU/Linux phone. Perhaps your problem is not with Linux but on the other side of the connection.
Linux on the phone is not Linux on the desktop.
Here's a working Bluetooth on a Linux laptop: https://forums.puri.sm/t/bluetooth-stopped-working-on-l14-wi...
Proving my point. “Linux on the desktop” implied that you don't need to be a DIY hacker to get it working. Probably the reason why the poster you originally replied to called it “still not ready”.
All iOS and Android developers I know don't write app that they sell themselves. They work for customers that more often than not give away their apps for free because they make money from the service the app gives access to. And they don't sell the service on the app store.
Think about banks, insurance companies, TV broadcasters, train timetables and services, cars management, etc.
Making quality software is usually a business, and if you distribute it in walled gardens even more so. That said, I have a number of iOS apps installed that I know are developed and sold by specific individuals or small businesses: myNoise, NetNewsWire, The Iconfactory (Bitcam, Tapestry), Sun Seeker, Rarevision VHS are some examples. I am sure there are plenty more, but there are reasons someone would not want to publish an app under own name—same as why you would create an LLC: liability, not having people stalk you personally if they did not like what you make (especially true if you distribute it for free or for a very low price), appearing more professional, etc.
I believe iOS App Store has been groundbreaking specifically in how it allowed a solo developer to start distributing work to millions of people across the entire globe with very little friction, taking care of things that are not just boring but actually not in reach of an individual—pricing in different currencies, accounting under different legal and tax systems, zero friction installation, discovery (at least before it, thanks to the aforementioned qualities, became ultra competitive and overwhelmed by businesses who outsource development and/or by less than scrupulous people wanting to earn a quick dollar), etc.—and just getting you paid. If there was a comparable precursor that I am not aware of, I would be keen to know.
> If there was a comparable precursor that I am not aware of, I would be keen to know.
Play Store Apps is contemporary to App Store, no?
I dream of an alternate reality where Steve Jobs makes snide remarks about politics, sets things right with the App Store (worldwide), Siri, Ai and the lackluster UI and quality control of software lately. Steve would get on top of things and speak his mind and we were all better off for it.
There's a severe lack of character in Tim Cook, I think the best thing to come out under his reign is the M-series hardware and return to sane computer design. He's timid, and his penny pinching fuckery is costing Apple a lot of goodwill that's a lot more precious and harder to gain back.
Maybe it's a shareholder problem, whatever—the early 2000's spirit of Apple was splendid.
I admire Steve Jobs as a visionary as much as everyone else, but I never thought it was fair for people to keep discounting Tim Cook as the “lesser” man between the two. He was the one who took the company to a trillion dollar valuation. He took on the operations and supply chain work that no computer nerd or product visionary ever wants to take. He did the hard, unsexy work that no one wanted to do and yet people see him as worse for it.
> He was the one who took the company to a trillion dollar valuation.
Are you comparing Cook to Jobs as an Apple investor or as an Apple customer? As an Apple customer, not an investor, I don't care at all about the company's stock market valuation.
Investors seem to love Tim Cook. Warren Buffett recently said that Tim Cook made more money for Berkshire Hathaway than Buffett himself did. But as an Apple customer, I don't give a crap about Buffett or Berkshire either.
The difference between Cook and Jobs is that Cook is a money person and not a product person. According to his biographer, Jobs lamented that Cook was not a product person. And IMO the products have suffered under Cook: not in terms of profit, but in terms of design and functionality, the things a discerning customer cares about.
I think what's special about Jobs was that, ironically, he had no special training. Of course he was smart, ambitious, and charismatic, but he wasn't an engineer (before Apple, Jobs outsourced some of his work to Woz and took credit for it), wasn't even a professional designer, and he certainly wasn't an MBA. He had no qualifications whatsoever to start a tech company. Jobs was simply a computer enthusiast who had the great luck of meeting a computer genius, Steve Wozniak. Since Jobs was ordinary in many respects, he was able to empathize with ordinary computer users; that was one of his primary roles within Apple. Jobs cared deeply about the user experience, from a first-person perspective. Few if any other massive tech companies have been built by such a founder.
It's easy to assume that Apple is where it is today because of Jobs. But when you look back, there are actually a number of key decisions made by Tim Cook since Job's death that led Apple here.
Cook has plenty of leadership vision. He's led Apple into the VR space with Vision Pro, and has pushed into services/content (Apple Music, Apple TV+, Apple Fitness+), and wearables (Beats acquisition, Apple Watch, AirPods). He's defined Apple as a company that cares about privacy, and it's because of him that Apple is so stubbornly fighting regulation in the EU and US.
If anything, you could criticize Cook for being too ambitious, if you thought that his attention to these areas came at the expense of iPhone & Mac quality.
Sane computer design, in what way?
I still see unopenable devices, batteries glued to death and even more closed systems. Next they reverted to liquid glass UI, is that sane?
Not silly thin and overheating is the main way, your criticism is still valid though.
I have no idea, as the two dumbest Macs, the Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh and the "Trashcan" Mac, were before and after Jobs, respectively.
the keyboards on the laptops don't break in masses for one.
Timid? Dude seems pretty ruthless by all anecdotes and how his company has operated. But he has a quiet demeanor and Southern accent, so many will assume he is weak and stupid. He seems to use it to his advantage.
Steve Jobs was an asshat and the restrictions Apple puts on their software are exactly in line with what he would've done. He was firmly against third party apps on the iPhone in the first place and had to be convinced to permit it. Everything Apple is doing right now is in line with what Apple was doing when Jobs was still around. He would've had plenty to talk about, but none of it would be about no longer infringing users' rights.
Back in the early 2000's when Apple was still the cool, alternative, underdog computer company, it did things very differently, but for the same reason as it always did: make a profit.
your dream sound cool, would love to see it play out in some form!
> "...unfortunately, it's impossible to do all the complex engineering to comply with the Commission's current interpretation of the DMA..."
There's nothing complex and impossible about removing some "if" statements responsible for code signature enforcement.
I agree that Apple's answer is of very little value and realism but I disagree on two count;
One of surface, it's a lot LOT more work than that, the very obvious is "it's probably not if, but assumptions made everywhere, so it's not remove a condition but add a lot of check and rethink the whole process to ensure it's still consistent and safe";
Two, that's not what the issue is. It doesn't matter if it takes a lot of work or not. Nobody would accept something like "unfortunately, it's impossible to do all the complex engineering to comply with the YourCarCannotHaveA50PercentChanceOfExplodingWhenStarted regulation", which is an exagerated exemple on purpose; whether it's hard or not has nothing to do with anything being discussed, it's only a PR cop out.
That sounds way too hard to accomplish. Remember, Apple is a company with limited means, only bringing in the GDP of a small country. There's no way they can afford to pay programmers to check all of those if-statements! Those kinds of complex operations are only possible if a third party app manages to interact with iMessage's servers, or if someone figures out a way to replace a screen on their phone without Apple's express permission.
> Apple is a company with limited means, only bringing in the GDP of a small country
For reference, in 2023, Apple produced a little less than Romania or Hong Kong, and a little more than Egypt or the Czech Republic.
Hong Kong is small (though not a lot smaller than the Czech Republic); Egypt is big.
--- edit ---
I accidentally compared Apple's revenue in 2023 to the IMF forecast of GDP for 2025. For 2023: Apple produced very slightly more than Hong Kong or Nigeria, and a little less than Malaysia or Iran.
Nigeria is even bigger than Egypt. It still produced less than Hong Kong.
Ah, yes - tiny numbers like "Slightly less than the total GDP produced by 91 million people in Iran" or "Slightly more than the 6th most productive metro of the most populous country on the planet".
I agree - such a small player like checks notes "the 3rd most valuable company in the history of humanity" has no chance at implementing these troublesome rules.
If they stand behind that statement, surely they are ready to stop doing business in the EU then? I don't see how they could continue given they are unable to follow the law here? And if it by some miracle turns out to be possible in a month or two, what consequences will Apple face for lying about this?
I suspect it goes a lot deeper than just a single if-statement somewhere, and hundreds of thousands of lines of code and various interfaces and all the rest are built on the core assumption of the signatures being there and the packages etc being signed.
These sort of things can be tricky to refactor and more complex than they first seem. For example I recently spent the past 12 weeks or so just moving some fields around on a CRUD app (not adding or removing - just changing their order!) because there were assumptions built on assumptions built on assumptions about what order things are in and what comes first and what has already been done or not and so on. What ostensibly seemed trivial, actually required almost a complete rewrite of whole parts of the CRUD app to overcome the assumptions and implied behavior of what happens when and how.
They share a lot of "AMFI" infrastructure between iOS and macOS, with macOS having a much more permissive security model (you can run self-signed code) while still retaining "private" entitlements for sensitive private APIs, only available to Apple-signed apps. Unless you disable SIP, then you can just do whatever.
(Disclaimer: I may be wrong, I haven't done much of my own research, it's just things I read in various articles over the years)
While signature verification could be disabled with a few code changes, the real challenge is maintaining security boundaries when opening up previously controlled interfaces - it requires rebuilding permission models, API stability guarantees, and sandboxing mechanisms that were designed with closed-system assumptions.
I honestly didn't expect the "it's just one line of code" argument on Hacker News.
I am generally positive towards Apple, but this is the most outrageous point to maintain. You made the iPhone, the Apple Watch, and the VisionPro. You create chipsets that smoke any other competitor. But sure, you can't fix some software processes because the engineering of that is too hard!
It turns out it's very easy to not know things when your salary depends on you not knowing them.
When a rule is vaguely defined, deliberately so that a regulator can take different interpretations depending on whether they are having any effect and who is doing it, even trivial things become complex. Eg: Meta is asked to withdraw monthly subscription for no ads offer when EU GDPR courts approved it, all EU publishers offer the same service, but the DMA interpretation of regulators for Meta keep saying No.
On the surface, it's easy to do. But that is also based on the assumptions where they had to maintain some first party apis vs now having to create and maintain them so that third parties could use it. If they are committed to security which apparently DSA mandates, they have to devote many resources on it to ensure there are no threat vectors. Plus, there is no set guidelines on how much the APIs need to offer, it will be another session where competition asks for more and they will be asked to do that too.
I didn't follow the case with Meta, but isn't it different ? Because you talk about both the GDPR and DMA, which are different regulations.
I agree that a lot of websites (mostly news websites) have the "ad tracking or subscription" model, and I'm not sure if there has been a clear ruling in it yet, but maybe the DMA makes this stricter for Meta since it is a Gatekeeper
Meta offered Pay-or-consent model (nov 23) at 10 euros or so to placate the then GDPR regulators, as the court found contractual necessity as an invalid argument. CJEU stance seems like its valid for meta and they had a long opinion on that.
But DMA regulators dont agree calling it a false choice and asking meta to monetize by non personalized ads. The thing as you mentioned is how other publishers have the same model, which was never objected by any authority under GDPR either (so they clearly seem to think the model is valid). Its obviously a sticky situation where rules are different for different companies in the same jurisdiction when they are offering the same thing.
A counter could be whether if Meta isn't allowed, would no one else be allowed, but you already know the answer to that question.
That is exactly why the EU offers consultation workshops like the one mentioned in the article - so that companies can discuss this sort of thing and figure out a way that is workable for both them and the legislator.
It's unfortunate that Apple thinks of these as opportunities to lecture them on their own laws instead and unsurprising that approach doesn't work.
Consultation workshops should not be needed. The rule should be clear enough that there is a clear interpretation for everyone. If you need these kind of consultations, you already signal it will be a moving target. Why not just publish clearly what they want Apple to do. In any case, if this was about reaching what works for both regulator and Apple, don't you think these would have happened before DMA went into effect. The timelines are that DMA went into effect in 2023, the first changes in March 2024, and then first set of workshops last year, and second set this year. Is this a novel way to first do the changes and only then discuss them?
I understand a situation where what they want is literally impossible via tech, but then if EU is already talking to others in the space, they would have the same understanding. Otherwise, why keep the regulations vague?
Based on various accounts it does not seem these workshops are looking at arriving at a consensus either. Morever, it seems Apple did consult with EU regulators while rolling out their changes.
That is how EU law works - the intent matters, not any written down version. Not only is that the only workable way when 24 different language versions of any law are valid at the same time, it also prevents rules-lawyering on technicalities that is oh-too-common in law systems like the one in the US.
Apple knows the intent of the law and thus they know what to do. They just don't want to and so try to but-actually their way around it with bad-faith interpretations like they would in other systems. What they don't get is that that's just not how things work here.
> When interpreting EU law, the CJEU pays particular attention to the aim and purpose of EU law (teleological interpretation), rather than focusing exclusively on the wording of the provisions (linguistic interpretation).
> This is explained by numerous factors, in particular the open-ended and policy-oriented rules of the EU Treaties, as well as by EU legal multilingualism.
> Under the latter principle, all EU law is equally authentic in all language versions. Hence, the Court cannot rely on the wording of a single version, as a national court can, in order to give an interpretation of the legal provision under consideration. Therefore, in order to decode the meaning of a legal rule, the Court analyses it especially in the light of its purpose (teleological interpretation) as well as its context (systemic interpretation).
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2017/5993...
It’s extremely complex. I’m not debating whether they should comply - they should. But it’s gonna cost them years of engineering effort, and maintenance far into the future. See, for example, BrowserEngineKit
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/browserenginekit
They needed to engineer, maintain, document and support a whole class of APIs so that third parties can create their own competitive browser engines (that offer JIT, etc) while still maintaining iOS sandbox security. There are going to be hundreds of frameworks, thousands of APIs, that will need to come to ensure compliance with the DMA
Or, they could just let their pocket computers run the software users download and install, like every single other computer ever made and sold, rather than special-case engineer padded cells for every use-case, application class, or bit of interoperability.
That is an oversimplification of what I stated.
Apple has a significant engineering challenge to turn their current operating system into something that allows side-loading similar to what Google offers. It's not a matter of "commenting out an if statement"
The current developer SDKs Apple offers are strongly tied to their services, which cost them money to run. So first thing is, they have to decouple that so developers can implement applications using a baseline SDK that does not use Apple services (no iCloud, no Maps, no HealthKit and so on)
I think it would be great for users if they did do this. It would be akin to what Google does by shipping and updating Play Services separately from the base Android install
The reason I linked BrowserEngineKit is because if you want to do this properly, you have to build something like Apple has built with that framework (which was built to comply with these policies). Take for example, implementing your own JIT: because arm64e uses pointer authentication, the system uses PACs to ensure that pointers into executable code have not been tampered with. Apple now develops and supports a whole slew of APIs like `be_memory_inline_jit_restrict_rwx_to_rw_with_witness()` in order for developers to manage this themselves.
You saying "just let their pocket computers run software users download and install" is not like every single other computer ever made and sold. This is a gross oversimplification of the modern state of computing, both on mobile and on desktop. There are reasons you don't want random developers loading code into your OS kernel, and Windows and macOS both have protections for this (though the CrowdStrike crashes recently shows what happens when those protections are lax!)
If Apple gave the users root and let them run arbitrary software and just didn't sign certificates for their infrastructure (for push for example) this wouldn't be a problem. Supposedly they've already even developed a VTE for iOS. All they need to do is have a toggle under settings to disable signature checking and ship the VTE so people have an escape hatch and everyone would probably calm way down.
Sure, I'd be into that. But that would not comply with the DMA I think? As in, Apple still has a ton of work to do, engineering wise, if they are to make their platform available to all in the way specified by the DMA
For example, I don't think it would fly that they could say to the EU: users who want a third-party browser just have to enable root access and lose access to all Apple services and authentication
Ah I forgot Apple advertises managing SSO as a feature of iOS and not an external service like sane people would.
Well. I guess they'll have to choose between opening it up like every other company does or acknowledge that it's a separate pay for service then.
They do a lot of that kind of thing and my answer for all of it is the same: Open it up to everyone or acknowledge it's a pay-for cloud service that has nothing to do with the actual phone OS. If people have root they can (and will) develop their own services that won't need that which would comply with the DMA.
You mean those users that don't even know what an application is? And you mean that software that only has the users best interests in mind and is not spying on them, trying to scam or confuse them into buying unnecessary stuff?
I think Apple has done a great job of protecting non-technical people from a lot of the possible harms of malware. There's a lot of incentive for them to make sure security is handled right. I'm convinced going back to the 90s and giving every software developer full access to users phones would create a lot more problems than it would solve.
Maybe let's not optimize everything around people being tech-illiterate? We live in a society. You are expected to have some baseline knowledge to live in one. So let's instead educate people about that stuff instead of encouraging ignorance and punishing power users.
Would be nice if everything instantly became better with a bit of explanation, but I'm just a bit to cynical to trust that. Most people using tech need guard rails.
Yes, guard rails are good. I'm not denying that. They are an important part of user education.
But only when they can be overridden. MacOS around 10 years ago is a good example. It came out of the box in a foolproof state — only apps from the app store or registered developers would run, and SIP is enabled. But if you know what you're doing, you could disable both those things without any loss of functionality.
You can see the problem by browsing old help forums and see how often people suggest 'disable SIP' as a solution to some problem instead of really fixing the problem. Also, the clueless user will -at best- just follow instructions and disable all kinds of security features making them more vulnerable to malware.
If someone is trying to help themselves by participating in forums and following instructions, that's already very much an above-average user. They'll be fine anyway. I'm talking more about the kinds of people who would download a .jpg.exe and run it. Or transfer their savings to a "safe account" because someone called them out of the blue and told them to do so. Or fall for scammy ads. You get the idea.
I'm more concerned about the 'good with computers' type people helping the average users. Those are the people who use google and forums and leave other peoples phone and/or computer in a less than optimal state which makes the .jpg.exe attack more likely to succeed.
An iPhone isn’t a pocket computer. It needs to be really secure because someone gaining full access to it through a badly written browser would cost you your life savings if not your life for some.
How and why is that somehow fundamentally different from someone gaining complete access to your computer, which allows you to run anything freely? Both are your personal devices that store your sensitive personal information.
That’s a very good and valid question but did they sell the device with the premise that anyone can run any app they want or only the apps Apple approved can run?
We believe in the same thing, our devices should be free like speech. But the whole thing turned into a show because some rich software companies don’t want to pay Apple 30% while they have no problem with other platforms like gaming consoles.
> some rich software companies don’t want to pay Apple 30% while they have no problem with other platforms like gaming consoles
Why would you think they don't have a problem with the cut game console manufacturers take?
It's also different kinds of companies: Epic and Spotify have quite different concerns, for example.
Apple does market the iPhone as a general-purpose communication and computing device. Not an appliance like a game console. Most iPhone users don't know what making an app is like, how asinine the app store review process is, and what kinds of bonkers rules developers have to follow.
Apple initially did that to protect the ecosystem from malware and make sure all apps meet their quality standards. Also to make distribution easy for indie developers. All commendable goals. But as the iOS market share grew, this turned into a very convenient revenue source that they can't let go now.
Somehow, Android manages to do it. Not only for browsers; all apps have JIT access without any entitlement/review needed.
It doesn't seem like the average Android user is worse-off because of that, security-wise.
And Android apps can be installed from apk files without any Google involvement whatsoever. All apks are self-signed anyway and signing identity only comes into play for updates, not initial installation. As in, when you first install an app, it doesn't matter who signed it, but installing an update over an existing app requires the new apk to be signed with the same certificate as the initial one. This is to protect the potentially sensitive data in app's private storage (under /data/data).
But iOS requires that everything be signed by Apple in one form or another. Even debug builds of your own apps you run on your own device from Xcode. IMO, it is absolutely unacceptable to market your devices as general-purpose ones, make the SDK public, but still be an intermediary in app distribution for no good reason whatsoever. I'm surprised the EU is so seemingly patient with Apple's clearly contemptuous conduct.
Google engineered and maintains the system that allows you to install APK files. This is my point. The fact that they have developed a security model around APK updates is exactly what I'm talking about.
If Apple wants to offer something similar, now, they are going to have a lot of work cut out for them.
You're not thinking this through, it's not a magic button Apple presses. They are going to have to develop a ton of frameworks just to get something like installable APKs.
Apple allows developers to use iCloud and Maps for free. Presumably because you distribute through the App Store. So if they allow for side-loading they're going to have to lock down and split their App Store "services" into a separate framework — hey, sounds familiar? Just like Google Play services.
Separating out all of Apple's authentication layers, paid and cloud services, and ensuring apps can be cleanly distributed without dependencies on those things it not a trivial engineering exercise.
I'm not trying to imply that Apple should not comply with the DMA. I believe they should. I also believe that it would be a seriously complicated thing to extract their App Store services from their developer APIs in such a way that people could develop against a baseline SDK sans Apple services.
The average Android user is far worse off security-wise than the average iOS user, and it isn't even close.
How so? As of late, Android FCZC exploits pay out more than iOS ones do at the moment[1]. And anecdotally from what I hear from friends involved in security, Android is very well hardened at this point and is equal to iOS despite having a much wider surface area for attacks.
[1] https://opzero.ru/en/prices/
Average Android users are not targeted by exploits.
Would you say that's primarily due to JIT, or maybe due to the budget for security patches for most Android devices being a tiny fraction of what Apple has?
You missed my point. My point is that if Apple wants to add this now, it's going to cost them engineering resources.
You think side loading on Android cost Google "nothing" to implement and maintain? No, it costs them engineering resources to support that feature. It's a good feature to support and it's beneficial to users. But it's not free, it doesn't magically insert itself into the Android codebase if they "comment out an `if` statement" as the GP suggested.
Also, Android is gradually adopting many iOS-like permissions and security models. We recently updated our Android apps related to reading and writing to the file system. Why is that? Because the free-for-all they shipped with was heavily abused by developers.
I attended the workshop remotely (one of my questions is in the recording, if you watched it) and IMO it was mostly a waste of time. I didn't even stick around past the App Store section. Partly because it was daytime CEST but mostly because the format was awful. Apple would spend half the time talking about how the EU was forcing them to make their OS worse and then the EC thought it was a good idea to make Q&A a batched thing so Apple could just talk for five minutes about none of the questions instead of actually being forced to answer anything. I was thinking the EC would ask questions like why nobody actually used the provisions that Apple so generously provided third party developers (obviously, because Apple designed them to be unworkable) but they mostly just stayed silent and let the Apple lawyers talk the entire time :(
I'm interested to see what this will all be in ~20 years time.
Policies with protectionist side effects (even if they're not marketed as such) have historically led to local businesses being less capable and less competitive over time. Whereby there is no need to compete or innovate as the business is insulated from genuine competition.
My assumption is that the EU believes this will lead to local businesses having the breathing space to grow to a critical mass where they could compete more robustly.
Looking back to historical examples we saw that businesses that benefitted from artificial protections were less competitive than ones that did not receive a benefit. We also saw that favoured businesses tended to be trapped inside the market where they receive those protections, i.e. they were optimised for those conditions. We see this more contemporarily with protected Russian and Chinese firms.
I am also curious if state-sponsored competitors will engineer a way around being labelled a gatekeeper. Such as by having a range of products with shared intellectual property spread across a number of legally discrete entities, effectively using a distributed form of anti-competitive practices.
We are seeing this, kinda real time, with autos. Americans manufacturers were shielded from Chinese competition and in the last couple years had nothing to show for it. Meanwhile Toyota, in this very short time, came up with the BZ3X (cost around $15.000) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_bZ3X
All of that being said, the EU rules can be good (ie: usb-c); the problem is that often they get co-mingled with bad protectionist policies.
I don't understand what you feel is "protectionist" about this? I would say that the US pressuring the EU on behalf of big corporations is arguably "protectionist", but I don't think that's what you mean.
But even if policies make companies less "capable" and less "competitive": that completely ignores what effect they have on society. I bet that a company that was given a free pass to use slavery would be very capable and very competitive -- but is that what we want for our society?
I’m a bit conflicted: when I used to care more about this freedom stuff say 10 years ago, I would have been more in favour of these regulations. Today I care less about that and more about security and I mostly think that Apple’s preferred approach is better for security than what the EU proposes. That said, I am not super happy about the rate of scams or junk in the App Store.
I think even for Americans who like the anti-gatekeeper regulations, you might worry about the precedent for the powers European governments get over these tech companies as the other thing they want is removing as much encryption as reasonably possible, which you may not want. Those changes seem quite unavoidable though so maybe it’s not worth thinking about them together.
The more damning thing IMO is the whole ‘America innovates Europe regulates’ trend. I think it seems pretty important that the EU (and U.K.) work out how to escape the anti-innovation troughs they have found themselves in. Or perhaps by 2050 the EU will largely be a tourist destination where citizens watch ads for the American tech companies to make profits to be highly taxed by the EU to fund subsidies for the German auto industry to sell cars to Americans and Chinese.
Today I care less about that and more about security and I mostly think that Apple’s preferred approach is better for security than what the EU proposes.
This is mostly a false dichotomy that Apple likes to push. macOS has strong security with sandboxing, code signing, malware scanning, etc. I have never encountered someone among my direct acquaintances who had their Mac compromised. Yet, it's perfectly possible to make an alternative app store, circumvent code singing, etc. on a Mac.
Even with the freedom of an EU iPhone, you can still choose to completely stay in the Apple ecosystem and pretend that the extra freedoms that you have gained aren not there.
The thing is that Apple knows that people will purchase from an alternative reputable store if the prices are lower because the margins are lower. Or that developers will move there because they can increase their margins. And then Apple will actually have to compete on price (app store fee) and features.
It has very little to do with security and mostly with Apple wanting to keep their 15%/30% because it's hugely profitable.
the precedent for the powers European governments get over these tech companies as the other thing they want is removing as much encryption as reasonably possible
This does not make any sense at all. Why would you remove encryption, you could just accept an additional root certificate as a user and be protected by the same encryption.
I think it seems pretty important that the EU (and U.K.) work out how to escape the anti-innovation troughs they have found themselves in.
We are doing fine, we just don't believe in profit over everything. Moreover, the current US tech feudalism makes it harder to innovate and develop competitors, because you only get to do what the feudalist overlord permits you to do. Regulation is necessary to make it a fair marketplace again.
I think you are seeing it slightly skewed: in the past, for a variety of reasons, the US got at the forefront of tech and got even richer in some pockets of the country.
The EU and other countries had some pretty compelling competitors which got more or less slowly crushed by the US.
After over 30 years of this, a handful of the remaining US megacorps turned around and started fencing their own little profitable field, disallowing anyone else to even try to get in.
EU is the only non-purely adversarial entity to uphold laws also to these seemingly untouchable megacorps.
What I find weird is that there is a selective memory in people who are either from the US or pro-big businesses where on one side they are openly against these claims the EU makes (calling them anti-innovation) while also being a fervent supporter of "liberal" policies like medicaid, right to repair, warranties and such. As if they do not realise that they stem from the exact same place, and often they do come directly from Europe.
I'm at a point where I believe that if someone is against what the EU is doing against these megacorps (not saying everything the EU does is gold btw) has either A) vested interest in such companies, B) hates the concept of EU and anything it touches, C) they are rich and don't really care about anything, D) not very bright.
The whole tech house of cards would fall apart if tracking a user is made illegal - or serving ads based on any sort of tracking.
> as the other thing they want is removing as much encryption as reasonably possible, which you may not want
This is the wish of a vocal, but powerless minority, not an actual law. It often gets misused as anti-EU FUD.
The saddest part of this whole fiasco is that Apple itself is suffering from the lack of competition.
Apple Watch for example gets a huge boost from being the only wearable that integrates with iOS. But it has a lot of quality issues, and is by far the worst Apple product in my opinion. Apple would have a lot more incentive to improve it if they had to compete with other smart watches on a level playing field.
Yeah. I recently got a Garmin Watch after years of using an Apple Watch. On Android you can enable/disable notifications per app. On iOS you are stuck with all or nothing because Apple does not permit the same amount of integration as they permit their own products.
>The saddest part of this whole fiasco is that Apple itself is suffering from the lack of competition.
The Apple watch suffers in your scenario. Not necessarily Apple.
What quality issues have you experienced? I've owned almost every Apple Watch since their debut and have never had an issue with any of them.
Apple’s DMA “compliance” feels less like opening the walled garden and more like planting hedges around the new gate. The irony is, for a company obsessed with seamless user experience, they’re making interoperability as convoluted as possible, unless, of course, you’re using Safari.
I think at this point we should change the law so that Gatekeepers aren't just required to enable competition, but are somehow forced to actually support competition.
I'm not sure how we could enforce that, but maybe the law could stipulate that a certain minimum percentage of users must use 3rd party app stores, or use web apps. They should pay a fine if less than say 5% of apps are distributed outside the app store, or if less than 5% of people use a 3rd party browser engine.
First they have to enable competition, you're saying they have to support it but seemingly you want to enforce it. Where does it stop? Should Apple just pay out a part of their profits to their competitors?
If a competitor wants market share they have to build a better service. Forcing users to go with a bad deal gets the incentives all wrong and is actually bad for consumer choice.
> If a competitor wants market share they have to build a better service.
Except when Apple ensures that it always comes out ahead when competing. It's not a level playing field.
Look at Apple Music vs Spotify - ignoring the self-preferencing iOS does to Appke Music, the App Store ensures that Spotify will always make less money than Apple Music. Spotify either has to hand over 30% to its competitor, raise its prices (and lose customers, while still paying its competitor), or just not offer in-app signups. Do you reckon Apple Music has to give away 30% of it's subscriptions?
It seems bonkers that the only option to have a competitive music streaming service is to make your own operating system or mobile phone. That's unhealthy.
Not offering in-app signups doesn't seem to make Spotify less dominant. I'm in the Netherlands, almost everybody I know has a Spotify subscription, I know just one guy using Apple music.
The 30% fee also drops to 15% after one year, and there are companies that negotiated lower fees. Also, 'doing it yourself' won't be free, you still need some party to do payment processing, customer service and returns which also can come close to that 15%.
The argument you need to make your own phone seems a bit far-fetched. There are multiple music apps making money on iOS.
The problem here is that Apple have a competing service that doesn't have to pay the money. That's the issue, and it needs to be resolved for Apple to be compliant with EU law.
Or they can leave, if they think that makes more sense for their business.
I think the EU started with the correct intentions. They saw a need to increase the competition in the digital marketplace and reduce the power iOS-Android duopoly has.
However, instead of defining the market rules, the process has been more about competitors and companies (who’re not happy with Apple’s success) trying to take a chunk of their business.
An iPhone is not a general computation device, it’s not an open ecosystem. Neither PlayStation, but there’s enough competition in the gaming console sector so nobody comes up with complains about not being able to install any app they want.
Edit: spelling and clarity.
> An iPhone is not a general computation device, it’s not an open ecosystem.
And yet it's many people's primary computing device. That's exactly the problem.
As a historical example, consider telecommunications. Phone networks were "natural monopolies" for many decades, and people must have found it hard to imagine any other way back then. Without regulatory intervention enforcing competition, we'd probably still be paying double-digit cent amounts for long-distance calls.
> Forcing users to go with a bad deal gets the incentives all wrong and is actually bad for consumer choice.
Nice bad faith strawman, where'd you buy it ?
Apple is trying to have its cake and eat it too, selling off their devices as general computing devices and opening it partly to external developers, taking away a massive portion of profits and threatening them when it's not advantageous to them. The entire point is that you _cannot_ build a better service because Apple is blocking you.
Sony isn't getting this treatment for the PS5, despite qualifying well for being a gatekeeper, because there's no pretenses of being an open market.
If Apple wants out of this, then let them close down the App Store.
This is fascinating and troubling. Apple’s presentation felt more like a marketing defense than a compliance discussion. Their claim that meeting the DMA “current interpretation” is “impossible” really stood out, it’s almost like they’re banking on legal ambiguity to stall real change.
I’m curious: if Apple and Google are using workshops as delay tactics, what’s the EC’s real enforcement power here? Are small fines enough leverage or do we need tougher mechanisms, like mandatory timelines or public transparency on third-party integrations?
Rule of law also means, that fair process is given. which takes time. It is a problem, 100% agree, but I prefer a slow enforcement because of this than a unjust enforcement.
All arguments invoking privacy and security coming from Apple when faced with loss of control over the iDevice software aftermarket should be discarded as nothing more than bad faith excuses.
Why am I being so absolutist? Well, because we know this to be the case thanks to the Epic injunction compliance brouhaha. Employee slack chats show quite clearly that the "scare screens" were deliberately worded in a way that would deter any users from pursuing the linkout payment option, while we now know that it was all a ruse to prevent that option from ever being competitive with Apple's 30% IAP, only for economic (monopolistic) reasons.
We now have court-affirmed precedent of Apple intentionally using privacy and security as a veneer for darker, anticompetitive motives. After that, there's not much more to honestly debate.
FWIW, I was speaking yesterday with a friend who works on Big Tech antitrust at the European Commission, and he surprised me by telling me he considers Apple the worst of a rum lot, followed by Meta, Amazon then Google.
Makes sense. Google's stranglehold on phone/browser have alternatives for consumers, who generally don't choose them). Apple and Meta enforce staying in walled-gargens - all or nothing.
It's just plain scary that Apple talks about the government as temporary and thinks it can delay complying with the law until something gives.
I really hope the EU keeps up the pressure. The level of control the gatekeepers have is beyond ridiculous. Sure there’s the “take your money elsewhere” option but we’re at a point where that’s just not realistic to be a normal person. (My sons nursery for example requires an app that only exists on iOS/Android).
EU looks set to be the only big enough institution with any spine or willingness to take this on. Will probably take years if it ever happens due to all this legal dance bullshit, but I really hope they win eventually, even if it’s just for the benefit of EU citizens (of which I am, sadly, not).
The whole point of the gatekeeper designation is that they gatekeep access to things in such a way that you can’t simply take your money elsewhere. If you want to use a popular banking app, it’ll be available on exactly two platforms: iOS and Android.
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Starting to feel like it'd be more sensible to just have the EU fund an independent phone OS/Hardware. Export the hardware specs so everyone can build the hardware for it, then come preinstalled just like Android is doing now.
I think there is enough very good competition on the phone side. Google, Samsung, many other asian brands. The DMA (to my understanding) is about what happens on top of the phone once you are a (golden caged) user of that product and cannot move out.
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Ah, the title point at something I said in an earlier thread that was misunderstood or I probably explained it wrong : the way apple played it, it was not about the actual regulation anymore, and anyone who kept arguing "but it's a bad regulation bla bla" where missing the point.
By playing it the way they did, with their public statement against the regulator, and half implementation clearly done to be non cooperative on purpose and all, they put themselves in a very different fight, now the question has nothing to do with this or that regulation, it becomes does Apple need to respect EU law to sell product in the EU. That's all there is to it anymore, by making it about compliance and who has a stronger grip, they forced themselves there; and it's obviously a fight the EU is not going to back down from (nor is it going to lose it).
I compare that to many moves from Meta, Google, Microsoft, ... Who played the same but knew when to back down and either do it or argue in a more court and legalese oriented manner.
I'm not sure why Apple leadership played it that way, maybe they have a stronger belief in the US administration ability to strongarm the EU into accepting a loss there, but at the point it's at, it has very little to do with the content of the regulation.
Apple is very cunning when it comes to push back. In China they go along with no whining. In US and EU, they make a big deal citing "privacy" and the likes.
The only animating objective for Apple is money. Everything else is opportunistic
This is correct. Someone above commented this "Starting to feel like it'd be more sensible to just have the EU fund an independent phone OS/Hardware.". The sensible thing is much different; it's to start behaving like China, in the sense of "my way or the high way, and no you don't get to drag it out in our courts for years, we're not interested".
It would be a day of irony, if the CCP decides, that Apple in China should rather be owned by them, than a figure at Apple itself. A state owned company from now on. Imagine the outcry at Apple, when realizing they danced at too many parties at the same time.
> I'm not sure why Apple leadership played it that way, maybe they have a stronger belief in the US administration ability to strongarm the EU into accepting a loss there
Apple is playing it that way because they are rallying their USERS against the EU. They want to create pressure from EU citizens against these EU regulations, and amplify their narrative also to US Apple users in political positions.
Unfortunately this strategy seems to work, there are already a few voices on how the EU taking offense with Apple's sole purpose of doing the best for its users, and that lawmakers try to force Apple away from this path...
There should be a case against Apple intentionally misinforming people in the EU coming up next then. They must be taught a lesson that every step against the law costs them dearly.
Not just their users, the US government too. They've successfully turned it into a geopolitical issue. Apple not being viewed in the same light as Microsoft in the 90s is one of the best marketing ploys ever seen.
Towards the US government they surely play a different narrative and emphasize on revenues/profits as well as their leadership position as US company being threatened.
Towards the users the narrative is never about revenue/profit of Apple, and never acknowledge their leading market position.
But the end user narrative also works for US government members with influential position but low subject-matter knowledge.
what is the effective tax rate for Apple in Europe last year?
15%
" I called this article "Apple Vs The Law" primarily in reference to the rule of law, about how it should be applied equally and fairly against all, no matter the size and influence of your company. I think some of these gatekeepers - above all Apple, do a lot to undermine this process, in some places genuinely damaging trust in democracy. Going out of their way to paint the DMA law and the EU as overstepping and extreme hurts its reputation, as does the invented rhetoric about it being the "great risk to privacy ever imposed to government" (China?), or that they're "acting without experts in the field". Similarly for the number of covertly funded and supported lobbying groups that they bring to regulators all around the world."
All-time great read about Apple/EU conflicts: https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2024/facing-reality-in-the-e...
From the conclusion:
> Normally when the EU regulates a given sector, it does so with ample lead time and works with industry to make sure that they understand their obligations.
> Apple instead thought that the regulatory contact from the EU during the lead time to the DMA was an opportunity for it to lecture the EU on its right to exist. Then its executives made up some fiction in their own minds as to what the regulation meant, announced their changes, only to discover later that they were full of bullshit.
> This was entirely Apple’s own fault. For months, we’ve been hearing leaks about Apple’s talks with the EU about the Digital Market Act. Those talks were not negotiations even though Apple seems to have thought they were. Talks like those are to help companies implement incoming regulations, with some leeway for interpretation on the EU’s side to accommodate business interests.
> Remember what I wrote about electrical plugs? The EU is pro-business – often criticised for being essentially a pro-business entity – and not in favour of regulation for regulation’s sake.
> If Apple had faced reality and tried to understand the facts as they are, they would have used the talks to clarify all of these issues and more well in advance of the DMA taking effect.
> But they didn’t because they have caught the tech industry management disease of demanding that reality bend to their ideas and wishes.
> If Apple had faced reality and tried to understand the facts as they are
When the EU attempts to legislate crypto backdoors, do you plan to say "If Signal had faced reality and tried to understand the facts as they are"?
That is a bad-faith argument and a false equivalency I will not engage in, lest I be warned by the mods for falling for obvious bait again.
It is an argument made in good faith.
Companies and individuals should fight against bad laws. And a press campaign is a legitimate, and sometimes effective, tactic for doing so. Different people may disagree about which laws are good or bad; I fully expect, for instance, that more people support the DMA than would support crypto backdoors. But it seems shortsighted to suggest that those who think a law is wrong should simply accept it anyway, rather than fight tooth and nail against it.
They're happy to be quiet and comply with Chinese laws even if they're wrong[0]. How is a requirement to stop giving your own products an unfair competitive advantage a bad law? It's only bad when you see it from the perspective that you'll lose a lot of money.
https://9to5mac.com/2022/11/09/everyone-option-airdrop-10-mi...
> It is an argument made in good faith.
Then I suggest you rework your "good-faith" discussion methods.
You're answering a poster who explained how companies are onboarded to new regulation with a gotcha question about a law that isn't voted yet.
I'm answering someone who said that the response to being "onboarded to new regulation" should be to "face reality", rather than fight it and try to stop it. Whatever level of tooth-and-nail fighting you'd expect someone to do in response to a law you do think is wrong, it's reasonable think someone would wish to do in response to a law they think is wrong.
You're missing the point. A law in the process of being voted is up for discussion and political involvement.
Once the law has been voted, you can still complain about it, but it is not wise to use the talks given to you by the regulator in order to help you adapt to new regulation as a soapbox for your complaints. That will burn goodwill with the regulator and make them discard any legitimate feedback you might have.
Or, in short, lobbying parliament is fine, trying to strong-arm regulatory bodies is not.
In that case, I would recommend you read the article.
It's not just fighting a bad law. It's fighting the very foundation the EU is built on and that has guaranteed peace in Western Europe since the end of WW2.
Apple might not get this, because they don't have an understanding of European history. But that lack of understanding is exactly why they keep getting their nose bloodied in Europe.
Why is it a false equivalency, apart from "i agree with one law but not the other"?
One is a law. The other is a doomed attempt at a law by a fraction of extremists - they have tried and failed to do this many a time and it does not deserve to be taken seriously.
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Note: I know some folks working in big tech won't like this comment, but it's time we talk about the elephant in the room.
Tim Sweeney is the only billionaire and computer scientist who's actually fighting against inequality. The big difference between him and folks like Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Larry Page, and Marc Benioff, is that while those billionaires talk about universal basic income to make up for the mass layoffs their tech is going to cause, Tim's out there fighting monopolies, hiring people, building tools for developers, and making games. That's why his HQ isn't in San Francisco. He's the only one who hasn't been brainwashed by VCs or sold out to greed.
He speaks for millions of computer scientists who don't live in the Valley and are using their knowledge of maths and physics to build things that help people, not hurt them. Because let's be honest, a future where billionaires keep getting richer and computer scientists are out of work, scraping by on UBI, begging billionaires for $10 more bucks a month, is a feature no one wants. And when I say "we" I mean myself, my colleagues, and all my students.
Tim, thank you. You inspired a whole generation. Keep fighting against Apple, Google and corporate greed!
Inequality matters.
Tim doesn't want open platforms, all he wants is EGS to be able to exist within a walled garden. As long as he gets that, he's golden. If he wanted to support truly open platforms he'd be putting more money and time into helping develop Linux into a stronger contender for desktop and mobile and fighting against things like Play Integrity API, which are just another form of vendor lock-in.
That's your opinion, and I respect it. But let's look at the facts:
- He sued Apple and Google for monopolistic behaviour. He's been fighting for fair access and better deals for all developers, not just Epic Games Store.
- His fight's not about open source or open platforms, it's about fair access, lower fees, and giving developers more control.
- He speaks for millions of independent computer scientists who build games.
- He purchased 7,000-acre Box Creek Wilderness (about US$15 million), fought off a power company's attempt to run lines through it, and donated a conservation easement in 2016 so the land stays wild.
- He's actually walking the talk. While other billionaires post about saving the planet, he's out there buying forests to protect them.
> He sued Apple and Google for monopolistic behaviour.
Meanwhile he doesn't substantially support the one option for computing that doesn't result in vertical control. He uses the tools that enable that control, rather than criticize their existence.
> He speaks for millions of independent computer scientists who build games.
Epic's apparent support for indie developers is marketing to grow his business. This isn't intrinsically a bad thing, but he isn't some golden saint. It also comes at the cost of catering to consumers, which is in large part why EGS has failed to gain traction beyond throwing free games at people in order to try to entice customers to their store. Key word: try. It hasn't worked.
> He purchased 7,000-acre Box Creek Wilderness (about US$15 million), fought off a power company's attempt to run lines through it, and donated a conservation easement in 2016 so the land stays wild.
Whatever. This is just billionaire philanthropy and $15m is a drop in the bucket to these people.
I'm not sure what your expectations are when it comes to billionaires. Tim's definitely not Linus Torvalds, that's for sure. But he's one of the few actually pushing back.
I wonder what you think of Gabe Newell then
I was expecting more from him, given his wealth and power.
Bill Gates said that as countries get wealthier and automation replaces workers, UBI might become a viable option.
This is the same person who told OpenAI he'd invest between 1 and 10 billion of his company's money if they focused on ChatGPT and speeding up the development of autonomous AI workers.
> billionaires keep getting richer and computer scientists are out of work
Not just computer scientists right ?
Yeah, this affects everyone who isn't rich. Some billionaires are even running UBI trials, fully aware that the tech they're building or funding is going to cause social chaos:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-07-22/ubi-study...
Why are billionaires doing this instead of governments? It doesn't make sense.
Governments are supposed to protect workers, regulate industries, and make sure technology benefits everyone. Looks like billionaires and VCs who love monopolies are building the future on their terms.
They don't want to get eaten. We already had symbolic real assassinations of CEOs. It's only a matter of time. You can call it savagery, but you also can call it economics.
Politics is funded by the rich. It's the only way to win an election. Just like a VC investment is the only way to build AI.
If you need to mitigate the danger quickly it's only prudent to try to do it yourself than to delegate to politicians you bought. Especially if you neglected the problem for so long.
That's why billionaires are talking about basic income before politicians do. They know the window for their survival is closing fast.
>those billionaires talk about universal basic income
Because they don't expect that UBI money to come from their profits, but from the taxes paid by the working class.
They're just cosplaying socialists to score brownie points like they did with rainbow flags in the past, knowing it will be on other people's money, and it's all performative.
Edit: @pyman
>My biggest fear is that UBI can turn into a tool for control,
CAN?! It WILL be. The same way state pensions in Europe are used by the government for control of the population. "Vote for me and I increase your pensions. Step out of line and I cut off your pension and make you homeless like we did to that German woman protesting against the government."
EU isn't regulating AI for the good of the people, it's regulating it for control since they don't want to leave the freedom of speech and the freedom of opinion to entities they can't control that can tell people opinions that are not state approved.
My biggest fear is that UBI can turn into a tool for control, give people just enough to survive, to eat, keep the lights on, and afford some AI tokens to stay productive in the system.
This sounds similar to the welfare trap: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_trap
> The same way state pensions in Europe are used by the government for control of the population.
It seems the other way around that governments need to bend backwards to the will of pensioners to get elected.
EU privacy laws are a fucking joke anyway
> Unintentionally installing something from the app store is all good though, because App Store review absolutely ensures that nothing could go wrong, that there's no scam apps, and more than makes up for the web's "orders of magnitude" stronger sandboxing, more stringent permissions model, and better phishing prevention. And so, web apps logically require a convoluted 4-step process including "share" and "add to homescreen" to locate the install button, meaning that all but the most technical users can't find it.
Written with sarcasm.
I am sorry but the argument that an app store and browser are comparable in terms of amount of spam is a deluded take. The core argument seems to be that since app store allows installing anything, so should browsers. The kind of changes that would benefit a smaller % of smart population, to the detriment of anyone else who can be convinced by a text to download any kind of content on their phone. The ones who push it would want it, but these are the kind of "features" on android that prevents me from giving my parents an android phone.
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I get the spirit of the DMA. I get the whole designation of gatekeepers and do agree Apple is a closed ecosystem. What I don't understand are the implementation details and I always hear "it is complex".
Let's stick with earbuds or watches, where the argument (e.g. Garmin) is that they can't create functionally equal devices to AirPod / Apple Watch, because not all APIs are open. I understand this point, since yes, Apple has a lot of internal implementation that only Apple can use for their devices. What I don't understand is the EU's standpoint of "just opening it up(!)". Let's say Apple would allow everyone to use all APIs to communicate with their AirPods/Apple Watches. Assume everything is open now - wouldn't that create chaos?
Another vendor could implement everything Apple does and release similar AirPods or Watch with whatever hardware quality - but what happens when Apple changes their internal implementation? Changes the implementation every week, because they optimize for THEIR devices. There is no official ISO standard, Bluetooth standard or whatever standard they are adhering to, they would just open up their implementation. I assume the EU would then say "this is against the spirit of the DMA, do not change your implementation so often", but this would seem like a very long cat and mouse game (it already is a very long process).
Why doesn't the EU define some interoperability requirements that gatekeepers need to adhere to in the EU market? This would make it easier for everyone. I don't get why it always is just the talk about "open it up" - that would be a start in terms of interoperability, no doubt, but that isn't the solution is it?
> Assume everything is open now - wouldn't that create chaos?
Yeah, but equal chaos to all. In the end the achievable experience for Samsung and Apple earbuds need to be the same. It does not need to be the best one.
If Apple wants to have the best experience, they should create for each improvement a new API version and tell it in reasonable advance to their competitors to allow them to equal the playing field.
You put your finger on it.
And Apple is responding by not shipping features into the EU that it believes it will be forced to “standardize” and document for others’ use, like iPhone mirroring to Mac.