In fact, this line from the article is far more serious: “Apple, for instance, will also need to contend with a reported requirement to allow side-loading of apps outside of its App Store, something it's spent years fighting internationally”.
>>> allow side-loading of apps outside of its App Store
Previous app submissions were rejected on the basis of being "too close to existing functionality". Maybe they meant dysfunctionality? If the EU needs witnesses of anti-competitive behavior I volunteer.
[1] https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/hackers-use-f...
It'll also lead to fragmentation and you'll have to manage 5-10 different "app stores" in order to use apps that you use day-to-day right now.
Overall it's just going to be a mess and really suck. Fortunately I don't use many apps so I don't see this affecting me personally other than occasional annoyance when I can't find something I may need in the future or having to help family members fix their phones now. For many though their experience using the iPhone will be degraded, particularly when it comes to software.
I'm sure the execs sell a yacht to pay their Apple taxes target than pass on costs as they do for everything else. /s
There's a price that the market (consumers) will bear to pay for a service. Let's call it MyBigBrand and you charge $5/month or idk, $10 for a one-time purchase.
Apple charges whatever their fee is, let's call it 30%, and they keep this fee and do lots of things with it including buy back stock and reinvest in improving their services.
MyBigBrand comes along and says hey that's not fair! They launch a marketing campaign "The Apple Tax" and file lawsuits. Courts decide Apple should allow 3rd-party app stores or that they can't charge the fee or have to reduce it.
In each of those scenarios, MyBigBrand continues to charge customers $5/month for their product. All that's occuring here is whether or not MyBigBrand gets to pay less to Apple or whether Apple gets to continue to charge MyBigBrand and eat into their margins.
For a consumer you still pay the same fee for the product, or potentially you have to download some other app store that MyBigBrand owns or collaborates with MyOtherBigBrand on and then they split the costs and keep more of the margin.
At the end of the day people are being duped into really caring about who gets to keep more of their money and it just doesn't matter, except that it appears Apple does something beneficial with the money they keep and having multiple app stores with exclusive apps will suck and be annoying.
I rented a car with Android Auto, went inside my podcast app, and couldn't go back to Google maps, and of course Android Auto makes google maps stop working on my mobile phone when android auto is on.
So i was trying things like ,,go to maps'', ,,go to navigation'', ,,maps'', but none of them worked.
Disconnecting and reconnecting andorid auto worked mostly (but not always)
oooh that would be awesome. I'm at a point where I only use it for timers and it even gets that wrong sometimes "I created an alarm named Timer for 01:30am".. oh yeah I can't just say "timer one hour thirty" because Siri hates British people and parses the numbers wrong lmao.
Also can we get multiple timers yet? Why is a device more powerful than the computer we used to send people to the moon limited to one timer?
Can't wait!
Try: "Hey Siri give me a 90 minute beef timer", "Hey siri give me a 25 minute chips timer"
Are we both talking about iPhone Siri?
Considering the number of people who celebrated in response to your comment, I think I get it now why people support side-loading---they don't actually understand it and are merely projecting their own interpretations.
Is this what you're wanting from an OpenAI integration?
Tomorrow I can guarantee they will immediately cut costs and ship out piles of sideloaded garbage
Sure, it’s up to the consumer to choose, but they’re not going to write that on the package
Yeah except that's absolute nonsense because you could already do that on Android and yet I recall only one instance where a developer explicitly asked me to sideload an app(for Fortnite, no less). It's going to remain an incredible niche that will affect 0.00001% users at most.
Clearly they believe that number is much higher.
(in hindsight I shouldn't have said it will affect 0.0001% users - maybe I should have said that I guess only that many users will choose to sideload software instead)
iOS’ advantage is it’s walled garden. It’s a place where a lot of trust is curated for the nontechnical. This evaporates that.
What appears good for the highly technical is not always good for the user.
We can’t be expecting grandmothers to check signatures, ensure an app has certificates pinned, trust that a company won’t let its update domains lapse, and understand public key crypto to set up their GPG keys for a messaging alternative much less handle them properly. Hell I’ve had senior engineers send me their private GPG key when requesting their public key.
Your argument was that the moment there is no longer a need to be constrained by Apple's App Store rules, your Samsung dishwasher will make you install its app through Shady Store Incorporated, because it's easier, and it'll make your grandma install it.
Except that doesn't happen. Noone has done that. The highest profile case is Fortnite, and it makes you install it either through Epic Games, or the Samsung Galaxy Store, and the only reason for that is that Google feels entitled to taking 30% of transactions too.
As a technical user, it doesn't bother me. When I consider many of my friends, it does bother me—most of them I know with non-iOS devices have complained about their devices moving slowly due to the junkware and the third-party app stores they've acquired (never F-Droid, always something sketchy). When I think about family members, I think about how web push notifications have rendered two of their phones borderline unusable.
Most "consumer-friendly" choices the EU makes are actually about developer & manufacturer profit. This isn't consumer-aligned. It eliminates the profit motive that's left iOS devices as more or less the only LTS phones on the market.
I don't like Apple products that much—I use Linux on my cell phone, but at the same time I refuse to adopt cheap rhetorical tactics to make app developers wealthier.
If they really wanted things to be consumer-friendly, they'd ban proprietary software. Instead, they make it easier for proprietary software developers to make profit off of users.