I wonder why the EU is pushing Apple this hard, and not the other gatekeepers. For example, Xbox, Playstation, and Nintendo consoles should now support an external store.
Because they are not "gatekeepers", a term defined by the DMA which focuses on specific sectors.
Also the video game ecosystem is pretty healthy these days, with nearly every major game available on Windows at launch or a few months later. As a matter of market competition, letting you hack your game console or smart TV or whatever just isn't that relevant.
Apple amply touted the iPhone's capacities ("there's an app for that") and smartphones are defacto a core component of our lives. The Switch isn't.
And it's not like the iPhone is the only phone you can get. If Apple is restricting such a core component of our lives, you can simply buy non-Apple products.
- an app that's used by pharmacies to handle prescriptions from the public health system;
- an app I can legally show a police officer so they can determine that I have a valid driver's license;
- an app I can use to pay my taxes;
- an app I can use to pay parking meters to the local authorities;
- apps used to register consumption (kWh, m3, etc) with the local utilities.
Some of these are published by the government itself, others by public companies. A smartphone is not a Playstation or an Xbox. We have Androids and iPhones, that's it. And significant portions of our lives are tied to having Androids and iPhones.
PS: I also remember having an app that used an API purportedly developed with amazing good will to help public health systems trace COVID exposure. Remember that one? How everyone having a smartphone was going to help get us back to the subway safely?
We can't allow two global multinationals to gatekeep this much of our modern lives and simply do nothing about it. Or we could, but we don't want to.
Apple and Google can leave the market if they don't like the rules.
Apple's app store isn't nearly as important to society as books, but the EU regulates it much more. That makes me think that the driving factor behind these particular regulations is not importance to society.
Being a successful smartphone manufacturer (or a smartphone OS manufacturer), shouldn't give you a monopoly on software distribution, that's the entire point.
And even the Kindle, which doesn't have the market relevance of iOS, isn't as locked down as iOS: the Kindle does support reading ebooks from other sources, they just don't support DRM from other stores.
Right now you have a "Hobson's choice", but if you could ditch the iPhone while still keeping access to iMessage and iCloud, wouldn't you?
I use iPhones because they're smaller than Android phones. Would I like it if Apple still made phones in the form factor of the iPhone 4 or 5? Absolutely. Should the government force Apple to do that? Probably not.
As I read it they're subject to the anti steering and alternative PSP ruling, but not app downloads nor alternative app stores.
That's two limitations the other platforms don't have.
> I don't think there's a bright line
Well there is one. The bright line would be the services that the DMA applies to or doesn't. That is a bright line.
You are not going to do your online banking on an Xbox, or write a letter on a PlayStation, even if the hardware is theoretically capable of that, it’s just not what it’s for.
It's not the same.
Since what's possible or impossible is the only options you've given me, Is it "impossible" for your mom to just do all her banking in person or over the phone? The phone works perfectly fine.
See how that sounds?
Anyways, having a central gatekeeper to all those essential services is not optimal from an economic or technical perspective. (Again, notice I said "not optimal" even though you created the false alternative of "not impossible").
Your concerns about malware are valid. Or at least as much as they are valid on MacOS. Which is to say - somewhat, but not enough in the balance of things.
And yes, I have elderly parents too. I plan to continue educating them.
And your malware claims are total BS There's been alternative stores on Android for years and the malware situation remains stable to slightly improving thanks to hardening of the OS that Google did resulting from the goal of supporting multiple stores. Far more people in the world use Android and bank on it than iOS so the idea that the sky will fall if Apple opens up is pure ridiculousness, utter silliness.
Also "Console manufacturers can endure being forced to sell products at cost." is a different argument than "Console manufacturers are more successful when they sell products at cost.", which is what I was addressing.
And the cool thing for MS and Sony is that the consoles sell well through their entire lifetimes only tapering off strongly in the last year or so as anticipation for the next generation hits. So, where profits may be minor, none, or negative in the first year or two of sales, the next 5 or 6 years turns game consoles into profitable businesses before any game sales are accounted for.
(There are typically about four Moor's Law cycles per console rev so how could costs not come down dramatically. Heck, each time the leaders move to a new node, the old one drops pricing by 10-20% and there are probably 5-6 generational leaps during a console lifetime. If the PS4 APU was $175 in year one, it could have been down to $115 at the midpoint of the console's lifecycle and down to perhaps $30-$40 by the last year or two of production. This is also reflected in memory price drops as well, though perhaps not to the same degree and as a smaller fraction of the total but one could imagine that PS4 that originally cost $400 to build and sold for $400 would be down to under $250 to build with a lifetime profit margin of about 15-20%. Not App Store 30% free money but not the loss leader most seem to think they are.)
Of course, Nintendo is the outlier and they're reasonably profitable on the console from day one, consistently.
I suspect if half the console market was unlocked ala the Steam Deck, the EU would be pushing for the other half to also be unlocked, too.
We also have to keep in mind that Epic sued Apple, not Microsoft, Sony, or Nintendo. A lot of monopoly maintenance involves obfuscating the business relationships that make the monopoly work. i.e. Apple doesn't report how much money they make from the App Store[0] because that information would be very useful to regulators looking to undo their monopoly. The discovery on the Apple lawsuit published a lot of this previously hidden information. In other words, the EU had Apple land on their plate ready to cook and serve.
Epic will not sue their console partners. The damage to their business would actually be a lot worse: instead of merely seeing Fortnite taken off the various console stores, the console manufacturers would be sending repo men to take away all the devkits Epic uses to test Unreal Engine, demanding they delete the console ports of the engine, and refusing to cert any new games using Unreal Engine, forcing all their partners to license different technology and rebuild their games from the ground up. It would be immediate and total financial suicide.
In other words, the console manufacturers are "getting away with it" because they had way more control over their niche than Apple did.
[0] Related note: there's an unenforced SEC rule that specifically forbids not reporting this information, to prevent monopolies from obfuscating their profit centers like this.
I think this is a lil extreme. Even if Epic had some reason to sue the console makers, there are too many high profile and high grossing games (e.g. the next Witcher and Cyberpunk, Hogwarts Legacy, Star Wars Jedi series) for Sony/Microsoft to choose to completely ban Unreal. Imagine too: if one of them announces they will prohibit Unreal games, why won’t the other swallow their pride and become the console-exclusive platform for that title? Not even Apple has banned Unreal, and I can’t think of any big games on their store that use it.
It depends on who's being sued and who isn't. Microsoft absolutely would swallow their pride here if it meant getting one up on Sony, if only because the Xbox is already partially open anyway[0] and the Xbox business is significantly hurting right now. Reverse the roles, however, with Microsoft being sued, and they absolutely would respond by trying to disable Epic's access to the Xbox platform and to other Xbox developers. Sony would not do Epic any favors here either and probably would stand in solidarity with Microsoft - because they have nothing to gain and everything to lose.
Remember: the console business is about handcuffing users and developers; Epic's lawsuit goes against that. We actually know a lot about Epic's communications with the console manufacturers as a result of the Epic v. Apple lawsuit[1]. They were worried that the "direct payments" stunt was going to eat into microtransaction profits, because Epic had applied the discount you got on V-Bucks to consoles as well as iOS. Epic also kept the both the lawsuit and their lobbying from including videogame consoles, because of the possibility that it would impact the Unreal business.
For what it's worth, Apple actually did try to get Epic's Unreal division banned from iOS, but was stopped by the judge in the Epic v. Apple case. Apple also has tried to regulate what frameworks app developers are allowed to use in the past. Back a decade and change ago, Adobe shipped Flash Packager for iPhone to allow Flash developers to ship SWFs as iPhone apps. Apple changed their developer agreements to specifically require all apps be "originally written" in Objective-C, C/C++, or JavaScript; so they'd have cover to reject Flash apps. They backed down a few months later only because the Obama-era DOJ actually threatened to sue, which is why you've probably used a ton of Flash games on your iPhone without even knowing.
[0] To be clear, you can get access to the Shared partition to run software on but you cannot access the Exclusive partition without a devkit.
[1] Because Apple was trying to prove that the lawsuit was a stunt and that Epic was suing over a very normal business practice everyone else in the business embraced wholeheartedly