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Apple said "hey, can we not comply with the law", the EU said no, so it didn't launch. Seems pretty straightforward to me. I can see why Apple might want to re

• epistasis 4mo ago
  I think there's a reasonable question of whether the Siri stuff is even a feature that customers want. Additionally, money can not solve all problems, 9 people can't make a baby in a month, and if these sorts of regulations are serious at all like they are for medical regulation then you really do need to do the work of assessing risks, etc., and there's a chain of waterfall development to all that.
  • thinkloop 4mo ago
    [flagged]
    • epistasis 4mo ago
      Does a baby build itself? No. Does the mother build the baby alone? No. I don't think you can call the process unrelated to the mother or the baby, they're both pretty important throughout the whole thing.
    • nandomrumber 4mo ago
      [dead]
• giancarlostoro 4mo ago
  > It's not as if Apple doesn't have the money to dedicate a team to matching the EU's requirements on a deadline. They just choose not to. The one legacy in Apple that Steve Jobs left behind is their distaste for taking risks that lose them money (ChatGPT was going to be their AI core... but then they had Altman ousted, so they backed away and partnered with Google instead), and spending money. I think they're still the only company with a kitchen in the valley that still makes employees pay for their own lunch, and the reason is the most BS reason that Steve Jobs pulled out of his rear end. It's so the employees appreciate the lunch, really?
  • y1n0 4mo ago
    Well, whatever the real reason is, people do appreciate things they have to work for more than things given for free. I’m not saying I believe that’s the real reason here. But it is broadly true. Ask any company that offers a free tier where most of the complaints and problematic customers come from.
    • giancarlostoro 4mo ago
      > Well, whatever the real reason is, people do appreciate things they have to work for more than things given for free. People can also appreciate things they get for free though. I'd appreciate a free lunch, most places I've worked at, actually nowhere I've ever worked, EVER has given me a free lunch. Now if its a difference of paying for a quality lunch at a reasonable price, and not paying for lunch but its mediocre, then yeah, seems like a no-brainer. I wouldn't be surprised if Steve Jobs implemented was a way to get them back into the green. Also, TIL: > Jobs, who notoriously took a salary of only $1 a year, used to "scam" Apple out of free lunches by scanning his badge alongside colleagues and insisting on paying for everyone, knowing the charges would just default back to Apple.
• bnj 4mo ago
  As I follow the situation, it seems that regulatory uncertainty is a major issue though- the EU’s requirements are framed in terms of outcomes sought, rather than in terms that can be quantitatively shown as met or broken. So it’s not a matter of dedicating a team to meet a list of requirements, but instead navigating the worst case scenario of enforcement if post-launch the EU determines that the proscribed outcomes aren’t being met.
  • gmueckl 4mo ago
    A lot of regulation is legally defined in terms of outcomes. That in itself isn't unusual. Checklists of technical requirements are almowt always a derivative and a suggestion about a safe path to meet the regulated outcome. This is how "blessed" standards for e.g. medical devices work. This shields the laws themselves from overly technical discussions. The only difference that I can see here is that the standards layer hasn't solidified yet.
    • bnj 4mo ago
      That’s a good point. So maybe another point of divergence here is that the outcomes of the DMA are rooted in inherently unpredictable market interactions, whereas a medical device standard depends on the device performance and characteristics. I don’t think it makes sense to create an accountability framework for a company that requires the cooperation of the market, because I think companies should be in a position to either comply or be held accountable on their own merits
  • thrance 4mo ago
    EU laws are written like this to give companies maximum freedom in how they implement their solutions, not to lay traps for them to fall into.
    • ahartmetz 4mo ago
      The criticism reads like people who don't understand a high trust society - which I don't think is actually the case here, more like assuming that the foreign guys are bad guys. "They really don't try to fuck you over if you engage with them in good faith?" "Yes, really."
• gmueckl 4mo ago
  Throwing infinite money at engineering problems doesn't move deadlines arbitrarily. But Apple's position here is actually really wild: Apple claims to protect user privacy all the time. But they can't offer a product in a major jurisdiction that has actually meaningful privacy laws? Didn't they consider that while designing the product? This is quite the contradiction.
  • Aurornis 4mo ago
    > Apple claims to protect user privacy all the time. But they can't offer a product in a major jurisdiction that has actually meaningful privacy laws? Didn't they consider that while designing the product? Complying with complex privacy laws is surprisingly orthogonal to making a product with good privacy. In another regulatory area (not privacy, but something more historically regulated) we ran into strange situations where complying with the letter of the law would require us to walk back things that we had done in a better way. The laws are not simple and they're not written by engineers or even people who understand what future product needs look like.
    • bflesch 4mo ago
      Privacy laws are not complex, they only become complex if your goal is to actually skirt them. Tax laws are also quite easy, tax lawyers are only needed if you want to NOT pay what the country you're operating in is owed.
      • JumpCrisscross 4mo ago
        > Privacy laws are not complex Privacy isn’t complex, compliance is. > Tax laws are also quite easy Yet audits are still a pain. > tax lawyers are only needed if you want to NOT pay This is nonsense. Tax lawyers are sometimes used to skirt the law. They’re much more often there to help prove you followed it.
      • kube-system 4mo ago
        Respectfully, it sounds like you just haven't dealt with any significant tax or regulatory tasks. There's entire industries of experts who work on these tasks, and they don't just work for people trying to skirt the rules. I've hired people for both tasks and the reason was specifically to comply.
• rdtsc 4mo ago
  This has the "do you even know who you're talking to?" air from Apple. Everyone should comply but not us, we're too cool and too damn important.
• eykanal 4mo ago
  Google eng mgr here. I've worked on a few projects related to compliance with various government policies. This isn't "assign a two-pizza team to it, will be done in a quarter"; these types of compliance efforts can mean completely redoing multiple core systems to handle privacy, wipeout, audit, reporting, per-location policies, etc etc. These efforts can involve hundreds to thousands of people for multiple years. Sure, there's a messaging component to this. However, any company that isn't trying to just skirt the law will aim to do this sort of thing correctly, and it's an enormous effort.
  • epolanski 4mo ago
    Yet Gemini had no issues to comply with EU's DMA and release on all phones? Let's call it how it is: Android phones allow every competitor to run their chatbot in place of Gemini. Want Perplexity instead of Gemini? You can have it. Samsung launches with Perplexity as of late. Apple? As always, went into "ay mate, too integrated, can't give the same APIs to competitors" lame excuse.
    • zdragnar 4mo ago
      If the options are "launch in the rest of the world quickly and get to the EU later" or "launch everywhere at once years after the competition" PMs and execs are going to choose the latter every time.
      • rootusrootus 4mo ago
        Former, you mean?
        • zdragnar 4mo ago
          Yes, indeed, I wasn't paying attention.
          • rootusrootus 4mo ago
            I figured, just wanted to verify, because while the former seems like the obvious answer, it could be argued with a straight face that Apple's strategy is in fact the latter. Or something like it.
• dominotw 4mo ago
  so you think its just a matter of ppl working through paperwork? seems a bit simplistic.
• spullara 4mo ago
  Personally, I wouldn't want Apple to comply with this EU law and I hope that more companies refuse to release features with onerous requirements. Opening up all access to control the phone to some random app the consumer installed seems super dangerous.
  • flumpcakes 4mo ago
    Don’t install the app then. Consumer protection at some level means the consumer needs to be informed. I’d rather have a choice than just chow down on whatever the gatekeepers call food.
    • deleted 4mo ago
      [deleted]
  • necovek 4mo ago
    Letting a US company (under jurisdiction of, say, US Cloud Act, but also unknown administration orders that might come) strictly control the phone for a privacy focused EU citizen (or more broadly, non-US citizen) seems super dangerous. The requirements are not onerous, it is the basic preemption of monopolist behavior. Qualifying "random apps" is something that is a true challenge, but that holds regardless of the API being offered — the problem is that Apple saves some programming API only for themselves, instead of introducing acceptable & objective market terms to be met (if deemed unsafe, they could require companies to demonstrate compliance with things like CRA to get access to these APIs).
    • spullara 4mo ago
      I am perfectly ok with EU having different rules of their own but they also can't be upset when features aren't offered there. That is the trade-off they have chosen and I am ok with it.
      • necovek 4mo ago
        People in EU are upset that Apple is saying that EU would not let them build it, not that it's not offered there.
• LurkandComment 4mo ago
  [flagged]
  • necovek 4mo ago
    It sounds like the work on the privacy layer was significant and to give "equal" access to other competing AI systems, they would need to include that "for free" as part of the platform. Or they could try to keep that as the moat for Siri AI, and only offer privacy "entry points" that other agents can tie into, but vendors would have to implement privacy preserving functions themselves. This is the bit that's likely hard, because generally keeping safety and privacy guarantees as data flows through the system is extremely hard, and Apple would not be able to guarantee it for other products without large review investment. But ultimately, they probably just do not want to do it until Siri AI gets a decent marketshare first, so competing agents would have to both build new solutions for the platform once open, but also deal with an incumbent dominant player already on people's phones.
• torginus 4mo ago
  Apple has a third of the EU market to itself. It would be just insane for the EU to give an exemption that means the law doesn't apply a third of the time.
• seydor 4mo ago
  In the end Apple is a business and the EU is a dwindling market, they have to choose smart.
• tahoeskibum 4mo ago
  [flagged]
• jsbisviewtiful 4mo ago
  > But on the other hand it also feels like a straightforward play for consumer sympathy 100% - just like Apple making such a grandiose show of "privacy". "Privacy" for Apple eventually led to Apple specific and Apple-only allowed ads in first party apps and now Siri connecting to Google servers.
  • microtonal 4mo ago
    Indeed. If they really cared about privacy, they would end-to-end encrypt iPhone backups by default. But since they don't, US law enforcement can request my iMessage chats because the people I talk to (probably) do not have ADP enabled (which enables end-to-end encryption for backups).
• sieabahlpark 4mo ago
  [dead]
• _the_inflator 4mo ago
  [flagged]
  • tomhow 4mo ago
    Please don't post bombastic, inflammatory comments like this on HN. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
• burnte 4mo ago
  > It's not as if Apple doesn't have the money to dedicate a team to matching the EU's requirements on a deadline. They just choose not to. Exactly, that's actually why I LIKE this decision so much. I'm not on Apple's side, but I REALLY like the idea that a company just says, "Fine, we'll comply by not even offering this product." It's a perfectly legitimate choice, and it FORCED Apple to evaluate the pros and cons. I want more companies to not get exemptions and thus not offer law-breaking products. I LIKE that the government is saying, "fix it or don't bring it here" and Apple just has to live with it. I like that Apple also is refusing to just bend over to the EU. We need more of these types of conflicts so we can work out good regulations, and not just always bend over and take it from whatever party won. While I like a lot of Euro regulations, some of the privacy ones go too far with the whole "we're going to enforce this on the whole world" crap. I like California's method of "to sell it here you have to have this but we're not going to sue you for selling a noncompliant product elsewhere."
  • Nifty3929 4mo ago
    Yes, exactly! Also forced EU voters to consider how much they value these services, and whether the regulations are worth it not to have them, or to have watered down versions of them. I say this without judgment - I see it as a legitimate area of consideration. I think the worst is hugely impactful laws for which exceptions are constantly carved out so nobody can truly evaluate whether the law/reg is a good one or not.
    • slekker 4mo ago
      I value them a lot, happy that the EU didnt bend down to Apple. If it werent for the EU, the companies would get away with all sorts of shit. Is as if people forget companies are evil by nature and will fuck you any chance they get.
      • thesmtsolver2 4mo ago
        Meanwhile: EU pushing to snoop on private chats and US companies are pushing back.
• crazygringo 4mo ago
  > It's not as if Apple doesn't have the money to dedicate a team to matching the EU's requirements on a deadline. They just choose not to. That's disingenuous. It's not about money, it's literally about engineering velocity. The amount of planning and engineering required for an entire interoperability layer that also ensures security and privacy is absolutely going to be something like a year-long engineering effort minimum. You can't speed that up by adding more money. So it's either try to get an exemption to deliver this feature to Europeans while that work gets done, or wait 12-18 months for the work to be done -- work that isn't required to launch in the rest of the world. Apple just wants consumers to be happy and be able to use their features. But the EU is requiring a ton of additional interop engineering, so consumers will just have to keep waiting and get features 1 or 2 years after the rest of the world, or never.
• mirekrusin 4mo ago
  They should use siri to code it quickly, no?
• InTheArena 4mo ago
  The market regulators don't give a fuck if companies screw over their customers privacy wise, as long as it's to the advantage of European companies and European customers. This can lead to absolute insanity as companies try to satisfy both privacy and market conditions. It's not simple. How many years did google waste with Sandbox?
• smegma2 4mo ago
  > let them get used to using it every day for 18 months, then pressure the EU to let it continue or you rip the feature away and anger users (who you then point to the EU as the problem) And you’re saying that consumers would be incorrect in thinking that?
• luis_cho 4mo ago
  EU should mandate open alternatives to Siri on Apple
• shaky-carrousel 4mo ago
  Seeing how abysmally bad is Apple with all AI related, they are doing us Europeans a favor by having Americans as alpha testers.
• musictubes 4mo ago
  I’m glad this is at the top of the comment chain. I’m also angry with myself that I kept reading other comments. As you say, the current situation makes sense. Apple made something they way they want, the EU says it doesn’t pass muster with their laws and so Apple doesn’t release it in the EU. Siri AI is just one of many AI products that aren’t released in the EU. If people are mostly happy with that then I guess things will continue as is. I do find it a little odd that so many people are championing the DMA as a beacon of consumer choice when it seems to be limiting what consumers have access to.