Many Apple indie devs and fanboys are literally screaming. I bet many people @Apple are too. There are so many things the company could do to regain geek-cred. Package manager and windowing on macOS. Align Mac App Store policies with the more liberal Windows 11 Store policies. Let people run what they want, even outside the EU, including other web engines. Invest in Proton so old Windows games can run on Mac (but then, no App Store tax). Keep OpenGL and Vulkan around for the scientific computation folks (and others). Commit to keeping Rosetta2 around indefinitely, because compatibility is your #1 job as a platform. Open-source more stuff (god forbid, your OSes! why not?).
But they've gotten timid and conservative. Top execs see risk, and VPs seem to think they're making products only for the stereotypical technophobic grandpa, rather than power users.
It was the popularity of unofficially created apps running on unlocked original iPhones (which led to many unlocking their iPhone) that convinced Apple to create the App Store.
This just isn't the case. The first iPhone with iOS 1.0 was essentially a very advanced demo that just barely made it out the door. There was no SDK, API documentation, or much of any developer toolchain for early iOS. Ask anyone that fought to build even simple unofficial apps what a nightmare using those early frameworks was like. They were not ready for public consumption.
Web apps were never the long term goal for third parties. Steve Jobs might have said that in public but it was a deflection about native SDK questions. Web apps were a stopgap until the dumpster fire of an internal SDK could be rebuilt.
It’s much easier to just make virtualization of old versions of macOS easy to facilitate compatibility with old software, which they’ve done — one can spin up a full featured GPU accelerated macOS VM with just a few lines of Swift, so you don’t even have to use third party software if you don’t want to.
I've heard from several former Apple fans who switched, and they all marvel at being able to run old binaries without recompilation. Even though they ship apps with the latest frameworks. It's still "just plain cool".
Linux is kind of a mixed bag. Some devs are ultra responsive while others only update when absolutely necessary, but the FOSS nature of most apps there helps since you can always take matters into your own hands and fork a project if it’s accumulated too much rust to be usable.
It’s a bit of a different situation under Linux where the norm is dynamically linked libraries kept up to date with a package manager, but even there static binaries and things like flatpaks and app images can be bad news.
The stick was mainly necessary for big devs back in the day, who never cared about making Mac-assed Mac apps. Now those have switched to Electron anyway; the stick no longer provides meaningful incentives. It just annoys people who want to play Half-Life for 5 minutes every few years.
I'm sure the people on the Mac team think exactly the way you do though, so I guess I hope they read this, or at least that they make sure their assumptions are still valid.
It’s hard to overstate the impact of Sparkle, it made it easy for developers to ship updates while also putting the control of that process in the hands of developers rather than the platform.
Linux went the opposite route with dozens of package managers which makes it harder for updates to reach users.
That doesn't right at all.
Apple famously dropped support for 32 bit binaries on iOS/iPadOS a while back (it's why I sold my iPad Pro).
Pretty sure they dropped support for 32 bit binaries on macOS at some point as well.
Hasn't Apple always been "computers for people who don't want to think about computers", while power users finding the tech interesting is just an accident?
This isn't 2012 anymore. Developers are into freedom and openness, and either Apple aligns itself, or Mac/iOS will have just as much appeal to cool indie devs as Android/Windows (a fraction of its current appeal). Apple platforms no longer feel exciting to devs.
But why do geeks have to destroy everything for everyone else, just for the benefit of their hobbies? Isn't Linux and Android enough and everything else hardware wise and software wise that isn't Apple? Apple devices work great for people who want to get stuff done in the real world and are willing to pay developers for great software. Why does that annoy geeks? Not everybody is interested in tech, they want something that works and get on with their day.
Just because geeks understand computers doesn't give them the right to dictate how other people should use their devices. Just like car modders shouldn't have a say on how normal people use their cars.
No one is telling normal people how to use their phones/cars. If you want the option of doing something different, however, you may need the government to help you stop companies from being anti-consumer.
You can make the same comparison for any machine. If your hobby is off-roading or dirt biking, you might want to be able to adjust fuel injection exactly as you see fit. But making every car or motorcycle owner have to adjust their gas/air mixture is not what normal people want. They want a safe vehicle that they can rely on for their commute.
You should seriously reconsider how much you believe Apple has a monopoly on usable personal computing.
Instead of nerfing Apple and ruining a good thing, why can't open source loving hackers try to improve Linux and Android (non-Google) instead, to make people want to use and pay for those systems and devices? It worked with servers for Linux. More competition and more better products is better for everybody, not trying to ruin Apple systems for consumers because of jealousy.
This implies they have lost geek cred. I think that Apple could install razor blades in their keyboards tomorrow and have more than half of HN believe it's a good thing.
Early indications are that Europe has learned from the mistakes of the GDPR, and enforcement of the DMA is going to be a lot more proactive. Notably, Facebook seems to be scared of it; the delay to launching Threads in Europe seems to have been for DMA/DSA compliance (in particular, it's not login-walled anymore, at least in Europe). Hard to imagine them delaying a product launch for GDPR compliance...
How do I so surely know that? Because Article 6(7), the one that forces free-of-charge OS access for developers, is the only piece of the DMA being proactively challenged in EU court by Apple even before the compliance deadline passed[2].
[1] https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/events-poolpage/app...
[2] https://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf?text=&do...
Corporations are people too, or something :)
Developers need the iPhone and Apple needs developers.
EU: "No."
It's called teleological interpretation, here's an EU document with a bit more background: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2017/5993...
Key quote:
> When interpreting EU law, the CJEU pays particular attention to the aim and purpose of EU law (teleological interpretation), rather than focusing exclusively on the wording of the provisions (linguistic interpretation). This is explained by numerous factors, in particular the open-ended and policy-oriented rules of the EU Treaties, as well as by EU legal multilingualism. Under the latter principle, all EU law is equally authentic in all language versions. Hence, the Court cannot rely on the wording of a single version, as a national court can, in order to give an interpretation of the legal provision under consideration. Therefore, in order to decode the meaning of a legal rule, the Court analyses it especially in the light of its purpose (teleological interpretation) as well as its context (systemic interpretation).
Facebook, too, tried rules-lawyering EU regulations only to be slapped with a huge fine. This shit doesn't fly here.
People on HN, sure; we aren't all lawyers. But companies? The EU is the second biggest market on the planet, might pass the USA any year now. They really should be familiar with the basics of EU lawmaking.
In this case, Apple is dragging their feet screaming trying to do their best not to comply with the intent.
What's going to happen next, they'll get a notice of nonconformity where they're asked to fix their behaviour. If they don't show good intent, they'll get hit with a fine. If they fix it and adhere to the laws here, then we'll all end up better - well, maybe the poor shareholders won't survive this hit...
If you're a company operating in the EU, just a little bit of willingness to adhere to the laws goes a very long way.
That's easy. Make a good faith interpretation of the intent of the law and follow that.
And don't try to find loop holes that only work in your favor.
Apple just appears to be hard of hearing, perhaps purposely.
That's the law. Not some linguistic technicalities in some document somewhere.
That's what I've done personally but that's not something you can ask most companies.
It's not like you can install android apps on iphone or iphone apps on android.
Sure in a market you might tell the consumer "shop somewhere else" but that's not an option here since they can't.
It's nowhere like shops where you can price compare and pick the shop you want every week.
In an actual market, both marketplace would compete.
What's why I'm saying it's not a market, phone users can't price compare stores.
I'm building a house, I'm going to buy the floor at shop B and the walls at shop A because it's a better value.
I want to buy some groceries, I can buy bread at shop A and eggs at shop B.
When you're on mobile you buy everything either at the play store or the appstore depending on your phone, that's it, zero choice, it's either everything in one or the other.
So first a grand total of two stores for the entire world isn't going cut it regardless and then those stores don't even compete with each other anyways because you are locked in to just one with your phone.
Is that any clearer now why it's not a market or still not?
Especially when both do their best to make migration to the other difficult.
Buying a cheap Android phone is $200-300 and selling an iPhone will more than pay for that. Switching from iCloud to something else for backups will actually save a little bit per month.
Average London rent is equivalent to 40K USD per year, as a random "richer country" example. It's not in the same ballpark, is it?
Average London rent is $3333 per month per person? I’m struggling to believe that.
greater london: ~£2600/mo (~US$3200)
inner london: ~£3100/mo (~US$3900)
outer london: ~£2200/mo (~US$2800)
Not per person, I haven't ever been charged per person except in student accommodation and Japanese hotel rooms, not sure how we'd know what that would be.
I'm not sure what you are doing with your phone but you should lower your dependencies on tech gadget if switching from iPhone to Android would cost you so much. The law can't regulate primarily for people making unreasonable decisions.
I might judge you based on your decision and chose to ignore you in future. This again would not violate your personal freedom I think
Put another way: Devs don't need iPhones, they need users to have freedom to install the apps they choose to on the computing devices those users own; regardless of the three manufacturers of those devices.
I wonder how this all works for Nintendo wrt the Switch?
Traditionally, console manufacturers have lost money on hardware, and made it up in license fees for software and accessories. It is a bit more complicated in reality, and I think that situation should change, but the DMA as currently written won't have any impact on it.
Smart phones are universal, 90% penetration. Game consoles are at best at 20% or similar.
Yet they are constantly making the case that third-party developers are value sponges that use “their” platform and access “their” customers for free, and give back nothing in return. They said the same towards Spotify in response to the recent ruling about anti-competitiveness in music apps.
What Apple conveniently fails to acknowledge is that they make an obscene amount of money from selling hardware, and their motivation for investing in the platform and SDKs is that more and better software leads to higher sales of hardware. (I am aware that iPhone sales have effectively peaked, which is likely exactly why they have decided that they are the sole enabler of all digital commerce on the iPhone)