16 ms·

Apple vs the Law

391 points by tempodox 1y ago

mrangle 1y ago
The whining and flailing about threats to democracy are as sincere as their future level of contentment with Apple leaving the EU. I hope that it can and does, rather than allowing their product to be compromised by for-profit companies who enjoy local regulatory capture. No one has to buy Apple products. There are myriad options. Those who push this regulation necessarily need to imply the opposite, as we see here. It's false that consumer companies are widely compelled to grant third party access to their operating systems. This regulation is selectively applied. If Apple plays hardball to the point that they are about to leave the market, we'll see if the histrionics were sincere or if it was dishonest manipulation toward encroaching on Apple's assets. If Apple leaves then its regulation focused critics will have to buy other products themselves, continuously justify to the populace that having no Apple is better than a walled garden Apple, and continuously deal with the political fallout when that convincing largely fails. That isn't practical. My guess is that this is bullying and bluster, and this looks to be Apple's guess as well.
nolok 1y ago
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.
- bitpush 1y ago
  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
  - zelphirkalt 1y ago
    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.
  - jjani 1y ago
    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".
- rickdeckard 1y ago
  > 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...
  - qweiopqweiop 1y ago
    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.
grishka 1y ago
> "...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.
- jeroenhd 1y ago
  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.
  - thaumasiotes 1y ago
    > 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.
    - horsawlarway 1y ago
      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.
      - thaumasiotes 1y ago
Fizzadar 1y ago
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).
- Aeolun 1y ago
  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.
  - celeryventure 1y ago
    You're right the way that they should force Apple and all the other phone manufacturers to open their bootloader and provide a common interface so that we can finally have some real freedom and competition on the mobile OS market. We should not settle for anything else than the freedom we already have on PCs.
  - oaiey 1y ago
    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.
- christina97 1y ago
  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.
saubeidl 1y ago
All-time great read about Apple/EU conflicts: https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2024/facing-reality-in-the-eu-and-tech/ 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.
- JoshTriplett 1y ago
  > 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"?
  - saubeidl 1y ago
    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.
    - JoshTriplett 1y ago
      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.
pyman 1y ago
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.
- leosanchez 1y ago
  > billionaires keep getting richer and computer scientists are out of work Not just computer scientists right ?
  - pyman 1y ago
    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-backed-by-openai-s-sam-altman-bolsters-support-for-basic-income https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-07-22/ubi-study...
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - charlesrobertd 1y ago
      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.
EMIRELADERO 1y ago
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;jsessionid=633876E1BA6F7E1A414B08CD64355914?text=&docid=281105&pageIndex=0&doclang=en&mode=lst&dir=&occ=first&part=1&cid=3156332 https://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf;jsession...
- jb1991 1y ago
  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.
  - LoganDark 1y ago
    > 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.
ankit219 1y ago
> 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.
- celeryventure 1y ago
  With the latest versions of Android, they made sideloading apps way more difficult so I wouldn't be surprised if your parents weren't able to find how to it. Also, if you really want to block it you can use parental controls.
EMIRELADERO 1y ago
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.
simonask 1y ago
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.
- aryehof 1y ago
  Don’t overestimate Apple versus your economy. Its real value (book value) is about 60 billion. It might have a speculative value in the trillions, but speculative value is just well… speculative.
- FinnLobsien 1y ago
  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.
  - aerzen 1y ago
    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.
  - zarzavat 1y ago
    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.
b0a04gl 1y ago
[dead]
isodev 1y ago
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.
- cageface 1y ago
  I finally gave up and pulled all my iOS apps from the store after receiving yet another app update rejection from a reviewer that clearly hadn't spent 5 minutes trying to understand what the app is for. I'm tired of begging for having access to my users restored every time something like this happens and I'm through feeling that powerless. From now on I'm an Android user and only building PWAs.
- amelius 1y ago
  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.
  - bzzzt 1y ago
    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.
    - fsflover 1y ago
      > 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.
jjcob 1y ago
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.
- bzzzt 1y ago
  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.
  - ohdeargodno 1y ago
    > 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.
  - itopaloglu83 1y ago
    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.
OkPin 1y ago
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?
- oaiey 1y ago
  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.
  - concinds 1y ago
    Why is slowness synonymous with rule of law? Apple's implementation is overtly malicious. This malice is a publicly-known, conscious effort on the part of some of their trashier employees to make it as malicious as possible to please their execs ("Ohh, keep going"). All you need for "rule of law" is an independent judicial entity to notice this. Why give them months and months "to comply", when everyone on Earth knows they have no intention to? Why turn up the fines slowly, when we all know we're headed all the way to the seizure of 10% of global turnover in 4 years? Why are we all pretending not to know the end-state?
    - oaiey 1y ago
      Preparation of arguments, making sure that it is well rationalist. In this case, making sure all parties are heard and that they can explain themselves. I am not arguing pro Apple here. IMHO the right approach should be maximum penalty after this round. They act malicious and everyone with a little IT understanding knows it.
jjcob 1y ago
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.
- innocentoldguy 1y ago
  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.
- nonethewiser 1y ago
  >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.
- microtonal 1y ago
  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.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - AnonHP 1y ago
    > 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 Are you referring to notifications on the Apple Watch? If yes, you can control them by app and decide which ones you want (or don’t want) on the watch. The default is to “Mirror my iPhone”. You can change the notification settings for Apple Watch by app in the Watch App, opening the Notifications menu (the very first one below the watch faces) and then scrolling down to the apps.
anupj 1y ago
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.
neuroelectron 1y ago
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?
- mathstuf 1y ago
  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.
  - djaychela 1y ago
    Coming from android I have to agree, it's terrible. The only help I can offer is that if you press and hold the space bar you can drag to go through to where you need to be, but it's still painful. I can only bear ios because I am using SwiftKey - the default keyboard genuinely stopped me from switching to an iPhone, I found it that bad. And some apps force you to use the default ios one which is even worse!
moontear 1y ago
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?
- twoodfin 1y ago
  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.
  - moontear 1y ago
    "forced to standardize" - I really haven't thought about it this way, but then it totally makes sense for Apple to cripple their products in the EU (and other markets with similar requirements) making it in turn a worse experience for all consumers. Not what the EU intended, since this is supposed to be pro-consumer. Ultimately may lead to less sales since the products maybe be worse without all features.
semessier 1y ago
what is the effective tax rate for Apple in Europe last year?
- disgruntledphd2 1y ago
  15%
nntwozz 1y ago
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.
- inatreecrown2 1y ago
  your dream sound cool, would love to see it play out in some form!
- xandrius 1y ago
  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?
  - inatreecrown2 1y ago
    the keyboards on the laptops don't break in masses for one.
  - humanpotato 1y ago
    I have no idea, as the two dumbest Macs, the Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh and the "Trashcan" Mac, were before and after Jobs, respectively.
  - nntwozz 1y ago
    Not silly thin and overheating is the main way, your criticism is still valid though.
- rTX5CMRXIfFG 1y ago
  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.
mentalgear 1y ago
" 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."
dan-robertson 1y ago
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.
- xandrius 1y ago
  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.
udev4096 1y ago
EU privacy laws are a fucking joke anyway
desperate 1y ago
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.
fmajid 1y ago
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.
- thedevilslawyer 1y ago
  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.
  - fmajid 1y ago
    They have a staff of 7, and Google just hired 1,500 lawyers, on top of those they already had, to fight them. Interestingly, he was complimentary of the Trump administration’s efforts, including seeming no-brainers like vetting expert witnesses for conflicts of interests (e.g. Carl Shapiro, who he claimed did actual perjury).
nntwozz 1y ago
This reminded me of Rockefeller’s reputed remark, “Competition is a sin.”
saagarjha 1y ago
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 :(
- Spivak 1y ago
  And, honestly, if I was Apple and got dragged to a "workshop" that had no teeth and wasn't legally binding I would have even less decorum than Apple's lawyers. If you had the power to actually make me do "$wishlist" you would have sued or fined me already.
  - saagarjha 1y ago
    The goal here is that they show up here in good faith and fix things before they get fined.
quitit 1y ago
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.
- paulluuk 1y ago
  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?
  - quitit 1y ago
    The only "feel" is pretending that these rules don't have a protectionist outcome. It's -widely- observed by economists, and even the EU's own statements include language that infers protection of local industry. The EU rules also require a fair deal of transparency about these matters, so sticking one's fingers in their ears is not an option. Here for example you can view Spotify's very active schedule with the EU parliament: https://www.lobbyfacts.eu/datacard/spotify?rid=365747616583-15&sid=222204 https://www.lobbyfacts.eu/datacard/spotify?rid=365747616583-... (which includes various click-throughs to the official EU publishings.) That's an outsized representation for a business of their revenue and service model. It's on par with significantly larger businesses such as pharmaceutical companies and banks. In matters concerning the app store, the EU met with Spotify not less than 65 times, prior to fining Apple for app store practices. In that same window of time Spotify has increased their prices when competitors did not, all while introducing no features (not even those which were promised), while all major competitors introduced a steady stream of innovation and near-unanimously froze prices. With this you are directly observing the aforementioned symptoms of protected businesses: prices go up and the product doesn't improve. Meanwhile competitors not receiving those benefits are offering a more competitive product.

391 points by tempodox 1y ago

The whining and flailing about threats to democracy are as sincere as their future level of contentment with Apple leaving the EU. I hope that it can and does, rather than allowing their product to be compromised by for-profit companies who enjoy local regulatory capture. No one has to buy Apple products. There are myriad options. Those who push this regulation necessarily need to imply the opposite, as we see here. It's false that consumer companies are widely compelled to grant third party access to their operating systems. This regulation is selectively applied. If Apple plays hardball to the point that they are about to leave the market, we'll see if the histrionics were sincere or if it was dishonest manipulation toward encroaching on Apple's assets. If Apple leaves then its regulation focused critics will have to buy other products themselves, continuously justify to the populace that having no Apple is better than a walled garden Apple, and continuously deal with the political fallout when that convincing largely fails. That isn't practical. My guess is that this is bullying and bluster, and this looks to be Apple's guess as well.

nolok 1y ago

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.

bitpush 1y ago
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
- zelphirkalt 1y ago
  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.
- jjani 1y ago
  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".
rickdeckard 1y ago
> 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...
- qweiopqweiop 1y ago
  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.

grishka 1y ago

> "...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.

jeroenhd 1y ago
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.
- thaumasiotes 1y ago
  > 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.
  - horsawlarway 1y ago
    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.
    - thaumasiotes 1y ago

Fizzadar 1y ago

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).

Aeolun 1y ago
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.
- celeryventure 1y ago
  You're right the way that they should force Apple and all the other phone manufacturers to open their bootloader and provide a common interface so that we can finally have some real freedom and competition on the mobile OS market. We should not settle for anything else than the freedom we already have on PCs.
- oaiey 1y ago
  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.
christina97 1y ago
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.

saubeidl 1y ago

All-time great read about Apple/EU conflicts: https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2024/facing-reality-in-the-eu-and-tech/ 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.

JoshTriplett 1y ago
> 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"?
- saubeidl 1y ago
  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.
  - JoshTriplett 1y ago
    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.

pyman 1y ago

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.

leosanchez 1y ago
> billionaires keep getting richer and computer scientists are out of work Not just computer scientists right ?
- pyman 1y ago
  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-backed-by-openai-s-sam-altman-bolsters-support-for-basic-income https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-07-22/ubi-study...
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - charlesrobertd 1y ago
    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.

EMIRELADERO 1y ago

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;jsessionid=633876E1BA6F7E1A414B08CD64355914?text=&docid=281105&pageIndex=0&doclang=en&mode=lst&dir=&occ=first&part=1&cid=3156332 https://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf;jsession...

jb1991 1y ago
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.
- LoganDark 1y ago
  > 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.

ankit219 1y ago

> 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.

celeryventure 1y ago
With the latest versions of Android, they made sideloading apps way more difficult so I wouldn't be surprised if your parents weren't able to find how to it. Also, if you really want to block it you can use parental controls.

EMIRELADERO 1y ago

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.

simonask 1y ago

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.

aryehof 1y ago
Don’t overestimate Apple versus your economy. Its real value (book value) is about 60 billion. It might have a speculative value in the trillions, but speculative value is just well… speculative.
FinnLobsien 1y ago
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.
- aerzen 1y ago
  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.
- zarzavat 1y ago
  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.

b0a04gl 1y ago

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isodev 1y ago

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.

cageface 1y ago
I finally gave up and pulled all my iOS apps from the store after receiving yet another app update rejection from a reviewer that clearly hadn't spent 5 minutes trying to understand what the app is for. I'm tired of begging for having access to my users restored every time something like this happens and I'm through feeling that powerless. From now on I'm an Android user and only building PWAs.
amelius 1y ago
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.
- bzzzt 1y ago
  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.
  - fsflover 1y ago
    > 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.

jjcob 1y ago

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.

bzzzt 1y ago
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.
- ohdeargodno 1y ago
  > 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.
- itopaloglu83 1y ago
  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.

OkPin 1y ago

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?

oaiey 1y ago
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.
- concinds 1y ago
  Why is slowness synonymous with rule of law? Apple's implementation is overtly malicious. This malice is a publicly-known, conscious effort on the part of some of their trashier employees to make it as malicious as possible to please their execs ("Ohh, keep going"). All you need for "rule of law" is an independent judicial entity to notice this. Why give them months and months "to comply", when everyone on Earth knows they have no intention to? Why turn up the fines slowly, when we all know we're headed all the way to the seizure of 10% of global turnover in 4 years? Why are we all pretending not to know the end-state?
  - oaiey 1y ago
    Preparation of arguments, making sure that it is well rationalist. In this case, making sure all parties are heard and that they can explain themselves. I am not arguing pro Apple here. IMHO the right approach should be maximum penalty after this round. They act malicious and everyone with a little IT understanding knows it.

jjcob 1y ago

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.

innocentoldguy 1y ago
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.
nonethewiser 1y ago
>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.
microtonal 1y ago
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.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- AnonHP 1y ago
  > 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 Are you referring to notifications on the Apple Watch? If yes, you can control them by app and decide which ones you want (or don’t want) on the watch. The default is to “Mirror my iPhone”. You can change the notification settings for Apple Watch by app in the Watch App, opening the Notifications menu (the very first one below the watch faces) and then scrolling down to the apps.

anupj 1y ago

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.

neuroelectron 1y ago

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?

mathstuf 1y ago
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.
- djaychela 1y ago
  Coming from android I have to agree, it's terrible. The only help I can offer is that if you press and hold the space bar you can drag to go through to where you need to be, but it's still painful. I can only bear ios because I am using SwiftKey - the default keyboard genuinely stopped me from switching to an iPhone, I found it that bad. And some apps force you to use the default ios one which is even worse!

moontear 1y ago

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?

twoodfin 1y ago
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.
- moontear 1y ago
  "forced to standardize" - I really haven't thought about it this way, but then it totally makes sense for Apple to cripple their products in the EU (and other markets with similar requirements) making it in turn a worse experience for all consumers. Not what the EU intended, since this is supposed to be pro-consumer. Ultimately may lead to less sales since the products maybe be worse without all features.

semessier 1y ago

what is the effective tax rate for Apple in Europe last year?

disgruntledphd2 1y ago
15%

nntwozz 1y ago

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.

inatreecrown2 1y ago
your dream sound cool, would love to see it play out in some form!
xandrius 1y ago
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?
- inatreecrown2 1y ago
  the keyboards on the laptops don't break in masses for one.
- humanpotato 1y ago
  I have no idea, as the two dumbest Macs, the Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh and the "Trashcan" Mac, were before and after Jobs, respectively.
- nntwozz 1y ago
  Not silly thin and overheating is the main way, your criticism is still valid though.
rTX5CMRXIfFG 1y ago
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.

mentalgear 1y ago

" 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."

dan-robertson 1y ago

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.

xandrius 1y ago
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.

udev4096 1y ago

EU privacy laws are a fucking joke anyway

desperate 1y ago

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.

fmajid 1y ago

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.

thedevilslawyer 1y ago
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.
- fmajid 1y ago
  They have a staff of 7, and Google just hired 1,500 lawyers, on top of those they already had, to fight them. Interestingly, he was complimentary of the Trump administration’s efforts, including seeming no-brainers like vetting expert witnesses for conflicts of interests (e.g. Carl Shapiro, who he claimed did actual perjury).

nntwozz 1y ago

This reminded me of Rockefeller’s reputed remark, “Competition is a sin.”

saagarjha 1y ago

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 :(

Spivak 1y ago
And, honestly, if I was Apple and got dragged to a "workshop" that had no teeth and wasn't legally binding I would have even less decorum than Apple's lawyers. If you had the power to actually make me do "$wishlist" you would have sued or fined me already.
- saagarjha 1y ago
  The goal here is that they show up here in good faith and fix things before they get fined.

quitit 1y ago

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.

paulluuk 1y ago
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?
- quitit 1y ago
  The only "feel" is pretending that these rules don't have a protectionist outcome. It's -widely- observed by economists, and even the EU's own statements include language that infers protection of local industry. The EU rules also require a fair deal of transparency about these matters, so sticking one's fingers in their ears is not an option. Here for example you can view Spotify's very active schedule with the EU parliament: https://www.lobbyfacts.eu/datacard/spotify?rid=365747616583-15&sid=222204 https://www.lobbyfacts.eu/datacard/spotify?rid=365747616583-... (which includes various click-throughs to the official EU publishings.) That's an outsized representation for a business of their revenue and service model. It's on par with significantly larger businesses such as pharmaceutical companies and banks. In matters concerning the app store, the EU met with Spotify not less than 65 times, prior to fining Apple for app store practices. In that same window of time Spotify has increased their prices when competitors did not, all while introducing no features (not even those which were promised), while all major competitors introduced a steady stream of innovation and near-unanimously froze prices. With this you are directly observing the aforementioned symptoms of protected businesses: prices go up and the product doesn't improve. Meanwhile competitors not receiving those benefits are offering a more competitive product.