3 ms·

I'm as cynical as anyone, but iPadOS was introduced at WWDC 2019 and thus was in the works for some time before then. This conspiracy theory doesn't stand up to

by lapcat 3y ago

I'm as cynical as anyone, but iPadOS was introduced at WWDC 2019 and thus was in the works for some time before then. This conspiracy theory doesn't stand up to the historical timeline. The more plausible and less conspiratorial theory is that iPadOS was made separate to help market more expensive iPad Pro devices.

lolinder 3y ago
Government bodies also move slowly, and they usually telegraph their moves years in advance. When corporations act like they're caught off guard by a new regulation it's usually (though not always) just a PR move. It's not improbable that Apple could have predicted that separating the ecosystems would be legally beneficial, even if they didn't know about this specific regulation back then.
- lapcat 3y ago
  > Government bodies also move slowly, and they usually telegraph their moves years in advance. There's no evidence of that in the pre-2019 period. See https://fasos-research.nl/vista-jmn/files/2022/10/VISTA-Policy-Paper-02-Cini-and-Czulno-10-2022.pdf https://fasos-research.nl/vista-jmn/files/2022/10/VISTA-Poli... "For much of the 2014-2019 period, European Commission leaders, most notably those linked to DG Competition, articulated a commitment to the use of traditional competition instruments to meet the needs of the new digital economy." > It's not improbable that Apple could have predicted that separating the ecosystems would be legally beneficial I disagree. It's improbable. Show me any evidence that anyone in the world was talking about splitting out iPadOS for legal reasons. In any case, it's really more of a minor annoyance than anything, relatively speaking, because iPhone has a vastly larger user base than iPad. iPhone is Apple's bread and butter, and iPhone is what the DMA is regulating. Apple wasn't able to spare the iPhone by separating iPadOS.
  - lolinder 3y ago
    > There's no evidence of that in the pre-2019 period. GDPR was proposed in 2012 and implemented in 2016. Any reasonably intelligent observer would look at the contents of the GDPR and predict that the EU was interested in sweeping regulation of large American tech companies, and it would have been foolish to think they'd stop at data use. Apple's legal experts and lobbyists are more than just reasonably intelligent observers, they were interacting regularly with EU regulators and knew that change was on the wind, even if they didn't know the details before 2019.
    - lapcat 3y ago
      > they were interacting regularly with EU regulators and knew that change was on the wind, even if they didn't know the details before 2019. One wonders, then, why Apple didn't do more to open up the iPhone and protect it from regulation before the EU had to force something worse down Apple's throat. (The tone of Apple's PR yesterday was startlingly bitter and combative.) Moreover, it's not clear that the iPadOS ploy is even going to work in the end: "the Commission has opened a market investigation to further assess whether Apple's iPadOS should be designated as gatekeeper, despite not meeting the thresholds." https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_23_4328 https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_23_... In fact, Apple has made a series of anticompetitive moves with the App Store in recent years, enraging third-party developers and practically daring regulators to bring down the hammer. Besides, iPad is already kind of a neglected software platform. Some developers still don't bother to specifically support it with their apps. Lack of iPad support isn't going to stop anyone from going outside the App Store if they can; indeed, this move may backfire on Apple by causing even fewer apps to support iPad.
goosedragons 3y ago
And March of 2019 Spotify filed a complaint with the European Commission over Apple's practices. https://newsroom.spotify.com/2019-03-13/consumers-and-innovators-win-on-a-level-playing-field/ https://newsroom.spotify.com/2019-03-13/consumers-and-innova... And "iPadOS" was and still is basically just a name change. Even from day 1 iPads had a different set of features.
- lapcat 3y ago
  That was March 13. WWDC 2019 was June 3. Do you seriously think that Apple magically switched everything to iPadOS in 2 months? And why? How exactly did iPadOS even help with the Spotify complaint?
  - tech234a 3y ago
    March (not May) was about 2.5 months before WWDC.
  - goosedragons 3y ago
    Sure, why not? How hard is it to change "iOS" to "iPadOS"? And to hedge their bets. It's a mostly meaningless change that has let them claim it's distinct from iOS. They could tell where the winds were blowing.
kmeisthax 3y ago
iPadOS does not exist outside of branding. Apple never actually forked the OS - there's jailbreak tweaks that will enable Stage Manager on iPhones, for example. iOS and iPadOS also share the same SDK - which incidentally, is still called iPhoneOS.sdk, not even iOS.sdk. iOS has always had the ability to gate features behind iPads vs. iPhones ever since the iPad first launched. That being said, I still don't think Apple rebranded iOS for iPads to evade an EU regulation. The EU wasn't even aware of Apple's monopoly until the Epic lawsuit a year and change later.

by lapcat 3y ago

lolinder 3y ago

Government bodies also move slowly, and they usually telegraph their moves years in advance. When corporations act like they're caught off guard by a new regulation it's usually (though not always) just a PR move. It's not improbable that Apple could have predicted that separating the ecosystems would be legally beneficial, even if they didn't know about this specific regulation back then.

lapcat 3y ago
> Government bodies also move slowly, and they usually telegraph their moves years in advance. There's no evidence of that in the pre-2019 period. See https://fasos-research.nl/vista-jmn/files/2022/10/VISTA-Policy-Paper-02-Cini-and-Czulno-10-2022.pdf https://fasos-research.nl/vista-jmn/files/2022/10/VISTA-Poli... "For much of the 2014-2019 period, European Commission leaders, most notably those linked to DG Competition, articulated a commitment to the use of traditional competition instruments to meet the needs of the new digital economy." > It's not improbable that Apple could have predicted that separating the ecosystems would be legally beneficial I disagree. It's improbable. Show me any evidence that anyone in the world was talking about splitting out iPadOS for legal reasons. In any case, it's really more of a minor annoyance than anything, relatively speaking, because iPhone has a vastly larger user base than iPad. iPhone is Apple's bread and butter, and iPhone is what the DMA is regulating. Apple wasn't able to spare the iPhone by separating iPadOS.
- lolinder 3y ago
  > There's no evidence of that in the pre-2019 period. GDPR was proposed in 2012 and implemented in 2016. Any reasonably intelligent observer would look at the contents of the GDPR and predict that the EU was interested in sweeping regulation of large American tech companies, and it would have been foolish to think they'd stop at data use. Apple's legal experts and lobbyists are more than just reasonably intelligent observers, they were interacting regularly with EU regulators and knew that change was on the wind, even if they didn't know the details before 2019.
  - lapcat 3y ago
    > they were interacting regularly with EU regulators and knew that change was on the wind, even if they didn't know the details before 2019. One wonders, then, why Apple didn't do more to open up the iPhone and protect it from regulation before the EU had to force something worse down Apple's throat. (The tone of Apple's PR yesterday was startlingly bitter and combative.) Moreover, it's not clear that the iPadOS ploy is even going to work in the end: "the Commission has opened a market investigation to further assess whether Apple's iPadOS should be designated as gatekeeper, despite not meeting the thresholds." https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_23_4328 https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_23_... In fact, Apple has made a series of anticompetitive moves with the App Store in recent years, enraging third-party developers and practically daring regulators to bring down the hammer. Besides, iPad is already kind of a neglected software platform. Some developers still don't bother to specifically support it with their apps. Lack of iPad support isn't going to stop anyone from going outside the App Store if they can; indeed, this move may backfire on Apple by causing even fewer apps to support iPad.

goosedragons 3y ago

And March of 2019 Spotify filed a complaint with the European Commission over Apple's practices. https://newsroom.spotify.com/2019-03-13/consumers-and-innovators-win-on-a-level-playing-field/ https://newsroom.spotify.com/2019-03-13/consumers-and-innova... And "iPadOS" was and still is basically just a name change. Even from day 1 iPads had a different set of features.

lapcat 3y ago
That was March 13. WWDC 2019 was June 3. Do you seriously think that Apple magically switched everything to iPadOS in 2 months? And why? How exactly did iPadOS even help with the Spotify complaint?
- tech234a 3y ago
  March (not May) was about 2.5 months before WWDC.
- goosedragons 3y ago
  Sure, why not? How hard is it to change "iOS" to "iPadOS"? And to hedge their bets. It's a mostly meaningless change that has let them claim it's distinct from iOS. They could tell where the winds were blowing.

kmeisthax 3y ago

iPadOS does not exist outside of branding. Apple never actually forked the OS - there's jailbreak tweaks that will enable Stage Manager on iPhones, for example. iOS and iPadOS also share the same SDK - which incidentally, is still called iPhoneOS.sdk, not even iOS.sdk. iOS has always had the ability to gate features behind iPads vs. iPhones ever since the iPad first launched. That being said, I still don't think Apple rebranded iOS for iPads to evade an EU regulation. The EU wasn't even aware of Apple's monopoly until the Epic lawsuit a year and change later.