For anyone interested, EU has started an investigation on iPadOS despite not meeting the threshold: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_23_...
The investigation should be completed within 12 months.
The investigation should be completed within 12 months.
It's not my intention to poison the well, but Apple feels like treating its customers like cattle.
If there’s a future where there’s an app that requires me to install their store on my device to have the privilege of buying their app, I’m simply not buying that app.
I’m pretty sure I’m not alone in that.
The existence of an option does not force you to choose that option.
I say this as someone who strongly opposed any kind of mandatory apps.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple%E2%80%93FBI_encryption_d...
Even recently, the EU has been pushing for less safety for users.
https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/09/eu_casm_expert_identi...
More generally, your argument doesn't really hold up. Apple's never owned slaves. Apple's never killed coal miners. Apple's never put humans into concentration camps. The United States Government has done all of these things. Why should anyone trust it?
Why is it so hard to understand that market pressure will affect you indirectly.
Monopolies are harmful to even those who will never step outside Apple's walled garden... The mere threat from the EU, and anti-trust hearings in the US has already benefitted you by reducing the commission from 30% to 17% for apps with revenue under $1M.
This also assumes that Apple won't make their store more friendly to developers once they have competition... i.e that app that would have never existed could now exist in Apple's store because they are forced to actually compete. As I said - indirect benefits.
The old terms had it at 15% (small business program).
The only apps I know which are exclusively distributed this way are stuff banned from the store or developer tools.
I didn't think branding them as developers would change anything.
Nobody which has a real choice seems to distribute this way despite lots of potential gains avoiding the Google tax.
Usually hacked apps to remove ads or give them premium features or all power ups for free.
Or sometimes malware that wouldn't pass store review.
OK, and the first time you do it, you get a warning and you have to enable loading apps from 3rd party sources.
That's not a viable distribution channel at scale and that's intended.
It becomes a race to the bottom, where rather than the app stores competing for consumers by improving features, the app stores compete for companies with apps at the cost of the consumer.
You can see this pattern emerge across many marketplaces. Look at AirBNB, terrible customer experience because they are competing for hosts. Amazon turned one of the worlds largest stores into a co-mingled flea market. Because apple has a captive audience, apps have a choice to have access to apple customers or not. Apple does not have to have to make concessions to business interests they would if they had to compete with other app stores to attract apps.
This is clearly anti-competitive behavior. It is equally bad whether it's Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, or anyone else doing it.
That "evil company" can be Facebook, Epic Games, your bank, your government etc.
Most people are influenced by advertising, their friends, social networks etc.
It’s pretty easy to persuade someone to install something malicious.
Just look at how many scams are being pushed on X/Twitter. They obviously work otherwise nobody would bother with them.
Also, nobody is forcing you out of Apple's ranch. You are free to stay locked in if that's what you like. It's the other people who now have an alternative.
How do you feel apple is treating their customers like cattle?
People interests appear to be used as a rhetoric device, while the actual solutions are harmful to EU business (latest example: AI regulations).
Nothing to be jealous of.
> It's not my intention to poison the well, but Apple feels like treating its customers like cattle
A lot of remember how the computing world was before, the Wild West that the EU is trying to make the only option. We aren’t eager to return to that, and would make different platform purchasing decisions if we did. The EU is simply taking away choice, not adding to it.
I get it, Apple has an unfair advantage because they lock down their platform, and the EU making it suck as much as the other platforms, Apple will compete with the other platforms more fairly.
I think it is amusing that there is a contingent of Apple fans that actually believe the platform will get significantly worse because people are allowed to sideload and install browsers that have their own browser engines. I think this is a truly ridiculous line of argument. I don't like the other line of argument, which goes somewhere along the lines of "We should tolerate Microsoft-esque anti-competitive behavior because otherwise Google Chrome's anti-competitive behavior might win", but that is literally a better argument, to be fair.
I’m ok if this is actually all optional, but I don’t think the anti-Apple crowd is going to be content until iOS is just another Windows. That somehow it won’t just be an unlock that we have buy into and know what we’re are getting into.
Android already provides the option to root their phones and no reasonable user would go through the process to root their phone!
Even iOS had jailbreaks for a long time and exactly what kind of harm has that brought to the iOS ecosystem? Zero. Nothing.
The process to root/jailbreak definitely should not be an easy process because most users should definitely not be doing it. But it must exist.
The developer experience since the release of mobile systems has dramatically decreased. To say that is not true is just naive. These electronic markets will form no matter what. If apple and google was wiped of the face of the earth today, new markets will form within months. Apple and Google act like the markets are their God given property but in reality they are piggy backing off their first mover's advantage.
Honestly, i feel sad to see your type of attitude on HackerNews.
This is a category error. Your iPhone isn't more stable because Apple charges a premium to developers so that they can invite you to use their apps, it's more stable because of all of the good decisions they make technically around the platform.
Your iPhone isn't more stable because Apple refuses to allow competition to their apps. Just like you mentioned elsewhere, if you don't want third party apps, do not install them. Please do not come for my freedom to run the apps I please. Don't piss on me and call it rain.
Your Mac is also a very nice experience, but Apple isn't gouging and restricting the developers of your favorite Mac apps (much), so no one is complaining about MacOS.
A bit of an outsized response, no?
To be clear, I disagree with Zoom's rationale (avoiding a single confirmation click when the zoom website launches zoom), and I agree with Apple automatically disabling that server for it's customers. That doesn't mean I think we should throw the baby out with the bathwater.
I’m very careful what I install on my computers. I will install any random crap on iOS devices that I would never install on my computer because they are sandboxed.
Not purposefully, but there was a version of Chrome where the installer would leave your Mac inoperable if you had System Integrity Protection turned off.
https://support.google.com/chrome/thread/15235262/chrome-upd...
Both Google and Facebook encouraged iOS users to install developer certificates that were meant for internal employees so they could track them.
Epic, the biggest whiner about App Store policies, caused a huge security vulnerability when Android users side loaded Fortnite
https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/just-as-critics-feared-fort...
Not to mention the old school rootkits that Sony installed back in the day
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_roo...
It should be hard and require users to jump through hoops to allow apps to break out of sandboxes
Likewise, I don't think that's what makes iOS good, either. I don't think it ever was. I think that it's understandable that Apple's approach to this would in fact be to make a "walled garden", especially given that it is wildly profitable, but Apple already had beloved computers long before they started doing stuff like this. Yes, to be sure, the Macintosh had and has plenty of flaws, but I do not think that anyone's goal is to turn iOS into Windows, and Apple would retain a visegrip on the iOS experience just due to how locked down modern operating systems are. Immutable image based operating systems with heavy restrictions on what usermode apps can do are going to be inherently much more stable, even when faced with untrusted usermode apps.
The thing is, while I get why I and others get categorized as part of the "anti-Apple" crowd, it's not because I simply hate Apple for no reason whatsoever. Like many others, I desperately wanted to like Apple, and then they just crapped all over what I consider to be my demographic of users. Please understand: to me, I am not THAT loyal to ANY vendor. I am a user of computers first and foremost.
But what's worse is, I have to deal with the knock-on effects of this. My biggest pet issue is absolutely their tirade against patent-unencumbered formats like Opus, which impacts people I know who prefer iPhone because it's all they've ever known. "How can I get WebMs to play in Discord/My web browser/etc?" You own a computer where the manufacturer decided that you're not allowed to install codecs or alternate browser engines, so you can basically go fuck yourself.
"Bicycles of the mind" my ass.
In any case, I think there is no slippery slope here. Apple is not going to volunteer control of their ecosystem away, so god knows they're going to do the minimum necessary to comply with any of this. So I think the impact on the overall iOS ecosystem will probably not be that substantial once all is said and done.
Even on Android, app stores outside of the Play Store are relatively rare, and attempts to circumvent the Play Store for the purposes of making more money haven't done very well. Even on Windows, it's hard to compete with or avoid selling on Steam, because it's got so much momentum and users generally like it as a platform for buying games on. Apple has more than a level playing field, they have a decade head start, total control over the platform, and so much more; They are far from at risk of control slipping.
If they're worried about anything, it is probably quarterly financial reports not being as good as they possibly could be.
So you basically want to force your preferences on me, and that really just annoys me. You don’t have to buy an iPhone or an iPad for yourself, you have other choices that better suit your needs, so leave my preferences alone please. I don’t like being told what I have to buy.
A duopoly does not a free market make.
> The Digital Markets Act is the EU’s law to make the markets in the digital sector fairer and more contestable. In order to do so, the Digital Markets Act (“DMA”) establishes a set of clearly defined objective criteria to identify “gatekeepers”.
> Gatekeepers are large digital platforms providing so called core platform services, such as online search engines, app stores, messenger services. Gatekeepers will have to comply with the do’s (i.e. obligations) and don’ts (i.e. prohibitions) listed in the DMA.
> The DMA is one of the first regulatory tools to comprehensively regulate the gatekeeper power of the largest digital companies. The DMA complements, but does not change EU competition rules, which continue to apply fully.
No one is forcing you to install third party apps. Are you really unable to control the impulse to install third party app stores on your device? You need Apple to stop you from doing something you don't want to do in the first place?
Just because you want to stick in the Apple approved apps doesn't mean that I should have to do the same on my own iPhone.
But that's bad, I want the strong platform back. I left Android just few years ago precisely because I liked the guarantees of the iOS platform - now it's going to be just another shitty privacy nightmare like the hellscape of Android I left.
I don't understand why people can't just buy an Android if that's what they like.
> I don't understand why people can't just buy an Android if that's what they like.
I don't understand why you people can't just use the apps they trust and let me use the ones I trust.
I should not have to buy a different device to have the ability to put the software I want on it, and the hardware vendor shouldn't be able to get in my way.
Changing which app you use is, in most cases, a far less costly endeavor.
If you were upset that an injustice was occuring where you lived, would you want people to tell you to move to another country?
Oh yeah so many alternatives, there's Android with an identical business model and hmmm ... yeah that's many already!
The websites that are actually a problem? The ones that don't care. The ones that really could not give a shit less if it runs on your stupid iPad or not. Those are the websites that you can't use on iPadOS. And while the top 500 most popular websites are never going to act this way, this mentality is more widespread than you think. They do not care, and will not care, that Apple doesn't let you run an alternative browser on your tablet. Therefore, you simply miss out.
In addition, some web apps will just not be able to have good support on Safari because Safari just generally takes longer on standards. So instead, you will just not see support for Apple mobile browsers at all. Again, you come upon it a lot. It's not out of malice for iOS users, its that Safari just isn't as good at keeping up with web standards as Firefox and Chrome are. And yes, a lot of web standards suck, but a lot of them also don't and are made to resolve real problems with the web app platform, and look, if Apple's argument that you don't need sideloading is "just make webapps", then I think it's only fair to say that it's not a very good option when they have such inferior support for the standards that people are making to make better and faster webapps.
Apple's influence on web standards has always felt petty. They're the only company that has the specific kind of influence that they do because users can't simply opt to use an alternate browser; they compete in a totally different way than almost every other browser. They should have to compete on a level playing field. I reckon that suddenly, WebMs will start playing on iOS and iPadOS.
I am sure it made them a rich company, but they were going to be rich anyways. They also hoard money like fucking crazy, so it's not like it's all getting spent on R&D.
If I could have bought the same hardware with the same functionality, but not Apple, I absolutely would have. It's not because I hate Apple products (I happily use Macintoshes), but because the system is too closed.
I overwhelmingly prefer Android, Microsoft, and macOS to iPadOS -- primarily because I can get a browser I like on them, but not on my iPad. If I didn't use it for drawing, I would sell it.
“…so we should use the government to force people to build that product I just dreamt up, rather than the one they want to build.”
My argument was against the person above claiming that an open platform makes for a worse product, and that European iPad users would get an inferior experience. I disagree.
Let's not forget that Apple invented the smart phone, but then they lost their dominance over the smart phone market. It seems to me that consumers like open platforms.
I don't think there should be laws forcing closed platforms to be open, given a competitive marketplace where people have a choice. I think most people will choose open platforms in a free market, but it is good that closed platforms exist for people who prefer them. That is one of the benefits of competition.
I do think anti-monopoly laws are necessary for maintaining this competition. However, I don't know enough details of this case to know whether I agree with this specific ruling. I do think the EU can be very heavy handed without sufficiently considering the implications. But that's their business, I guess.
Their innovation has always been marrying software and hardware. It is a high risk approach that they execute well.
I or someone needs to get around to reverse engineering the digitizer's stylus support, since ipad6 digitizer glass can be bought for ~$11 last I checked, and all-in that's pretty competitive with regular drawing tablets even if you include the rpi nano used to drive the thing.
It’s a good natural experiment. In the states, it feels like a good issue to drop for a couple of years from a lawmaking perspective. (Investigation and enforcement should continue.)