Apple's reluctant, punitive compliance with regulators will burn its goodwill

This undervalues I think what Apple has delivered vs Microsoft and Samsung/android et so.

With windows you will be spammed in various tailored experience ways through notifications and search, random apps come pre installed on windows pro and the list goes on. Android comes packed with blostware and remote managers backed in from others to force / silent install crap. Cancelling payments can be a nightmare.

Apple is playing in part a long game. Dial back the crap to dial up the trust. Long support periods. Easy subscription cancels. The list goes on. Then they squeeze folks hard cost price side to make up for that for sure.

"But Apple’s scaremongering is likely overstating the problem, since Android as mentioned has exposed users to this risk for quite a while now -- and Mac and Windows devices have always done the same. Somehow, despite that, society remains intact and people are mostly ok with using those platforms with reasonable success."

Again, it is about trust, isn't it? For those in cyber security: set up an app store with rigorous vetting, monitoring, and auditing, and see whether it will fly on the B2C, B2B, or B2G markets, or all of them.

> Somehow, despite that, society remains intact and people are mostly ok with using those platforms with reasonable success

Are they? Anecdotally in my family, kids and the old people don't get Androids for that reason. And we were regularly dealing with viruses and adcrap on their Windows machines so they got them iPads instead. Some also got Macs. While Mac is not perfectly secure, I am not regularly cleaning garbage toolbars off then anymore. The market share of Windows and Android is falling.

Fuck yes.

Tim Apple has spent so much corporate & personal credit swearing the sky will fall if Apple doesn't have total control.

Someone finally has had enough with this bullshit horrible smokescreen crap & has done something about it. Apple has nearly no foreseeable winning plays where they can possibly hold back the tide anymore. It has never been true, has always been self-dealing, and they are going to be spending the next decade being the bad guys & squabbling over every inch of terrain & working overtime to find new legal horseshit ways to entrench/intermediate/extract.

The new plan to charge hundreds of thousands a year to let devs ship outside the Apple store is a classic Apple thinks they can write whatever rules they want move. They will burn their house down around them rather than be a respectable decent operator. Nothing will even slightly justify their absurd protectionist stance and they'll keep looking worse & worse.

Apple is not going to lose this long game with dignity. They will lose it like sour graceless chumps.

Agree - up until this moment, I held Apple in high regard. I wasn’t oblivious to their tactics. Sure, Apple was restoring user privacy as means to dismantle the advertising establishment. But they were doing something good in the process (depersonalization). However, the EU fiasco is something else entirely. It seems like they are trying to mock the verdict. A part of me will be deeply disappointed if this is truly the position of the company going all the way up to Tim Cook.