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Comment by aryehof | Hacker News Reader

My take is that Apple are doing the maximum possible to protest their disagreement with consumer protection laws interfering with their ability to do whatever they want. Their announcement has the tone of a spoilt child, with an air of punishment to be applied to EU users and particularly developers. It’s bad faith compliance.

Rather than protecting the interests of users, they are more interested in obstructing the DMA and its attempt to promote competition and protect consumers from monopolistic practices.

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Fortunately, there are quite a few clauses in the original regulation[0], like 31-33, and some clauses in the 50s IIRC, that explicitly mention some of the coercive tactics Apple is employing.

Like leveraging other mandatory services provided by Apple to incur fees.

[0]: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?toc=OJ%3AL%3...

My favorite part: "EU users will be confronted with a list of default browsers before they have the opportunity to understand the options available to them. The screen also interrupts EU users’ experience the first time they open Safari intending to navigate to a webpage."

I mean it's like saying that having a choice before being educated by one of the parties among the choices is a bad thing and it looks bad.

The wording of the whole press release is hilarious. The tone is so petulant and odd for such a large company haha.

Just shows how triggered their SET is by all this.

Yes, I wonder what are they aiming for with this kind of language.

"Confronted" not presented. Lol the screen should also state in bold lettering "This freedom is forced on you by EU which we hate. You will pay for this, and it's THEIR fault, not ours. No hard feelings."

But this is the argument with the cookie banners again, isn't it? "Surely choice isn't a bad thing", except that everyone hates them and just clicks allow anyway. At least this regulation is only going to annoy people in the EU and not globally this time.

Do you really expect to see a browser choice dialog every time you open safari?

No, but a bad decision at this point is going to be tricky to resolve due to the type of user that might end up using it.

The only people who might be influenced by this popup are people who don't know that other browsers are an option. Are these the people that is makes sense to drop them into a random browser, are they going to be able to make a good choice from this popup do you think?

Is there a benefit to dropping some unsuspecting user into Opera, for example, and letting them deal with the myriad of incompatibility issues for the sake of an illusion of choice?

Is there a benefit to you, the expert user, to getting this popup when the first place you're going in Safari is the Chrome download page anyway?

Apple chose to comply that way. We're arguing over poor design right now because this is a user story for no one - that's Apple's fault. There are thousands of ways to comply with the DMA, and the proposed one here is nonsense; Android and Mac exist as proof that you can give people choice without sabotaging them.

Ostensibly, you're right; why give the uninformed masses an imperative browser decision? If Apple was willing to make it optional or put it behind a Developer Mode, they wouldn't be faced with such stark regulation. Blame whoever you want, but the writing has been on the walls for years - Apple sabotaged themselves if they weren't prepared for sideloading.

> everyone hates them and just clicks allow anyway.

This is an overbroad generalization and false for me at least. I will always take the two seconds to disable non-necessary cookies, or just bail on the site if it doesn't have the option or isn't absolutely necessary.

Fine, almost everybody. If there was any way to verify though, I'd put money on the numbers of people irritated by cookie banners and geo-blocks for websites was enough to tip the Brexit vote. I think the EU needs to be very careful about how these regulations are viewed by normal people.

> I think the EU needs to be very careful about how these regulations are viewed by normal people.

The EU doesn't decide how Apple complies with their regulation. If Apple wants to throw a temper tantrum and degrade the user experience, it is nobody's fault but theirs.

Which would be fine except the people interested in tech have less ability to spread their message than those that would like to weaken the EU.

Good news is, you don't need an iPhone to participate in democracy. Thank God our forefathers didn't make that mistake.

I always click deny

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