New iOS features you're not getting because you're outside the EU | Hacker News Reader

New iOS features you're not getting because you're outside the EU

mashable.com

43 pointspg_123424 comments

It takes extra effort to make these features be unavailable outside the EU, so this is active malice, not laziness or anything like that.

It does not in fact take extra effort to make them be unavailable outside the EU.

A minimal effort to have a feature switch depending on region is still some effort more than not having that. It may not be a lot of effort, but it would absolutely be easier to have the same features everywhere.

At a minimum they need to detect if the person is in the EU.

Of course it does. At minimum you need to have your dev team program these features so that they can be disabled without breaking anything else. At the absolute minimum, QA and all costs involved are doubled for the foreseeable future.

Apple are so obsessed with anti-competitive lock-in that they are willing to spend resources on doing it on the region basis. It's already some insanity level of obsession and just highlights what kind of control obsessed freaks are running the company.

As they should be considering what a large percentage of their revenue this will effect.

Illegal revenue they shouldn't have had in the first place if competition law wouldn't have been toothless. EU showed how it's applied.

So "should be" is a very questionable idea here.

Google is already rolling out a dark pattern to try and get users to switch to Chrome. If you try to open a link in Google Maps on iOS, instead of directly opening in your default browser, they present a large menu for which browser to open in with Chrome at the top, Google second, then Safari, and finally a generic “your default browser”. It is sized to hide the switch (default ON) that says, “Ask me which app to use every time” at the bottom which itself is in a lighter font color to make it less visible. Since it doesn’t use the native share UI, it’s also less obvious that you should scroll to find that option to turn off this new behavior. I like that the EU has forced Apple to open up its ecosystem, but the result of that is now everyone is going to start putting in dark patterns that were not allowed before.

Yes, big chance this will make things shittier, just like the EU's cookie law.

The US ought to take some protectionist measures and punish the EU for this.

*Google

The cookie law resulted in an annoying popup on lots of websites, which is definitely tiresome, but it also means that major companies actually need to think about what cookies a user has to accept in order to use their website. Accepting ones marked "Strictly Necessary" while rejecting all the others (which has to be an option under the Cookie law) means you aren't tracked by first or third parties (if the site is compliant) because tracking isn't necessary for sites to operate. There's at least some upside to the cookie banners.

Websites are not required to show a cookie consent if they don't track you, tracking makes the web much shittier than a banner telling you that your privacy is being commercialised.

Maybe shift a bit your mindset, complain about the right thing and not the one thing giving you some power against shitty behaviour.

That's been happening for at least a year for me on Gmail.

I've had this behavior in the US for what feels like forever. Definitely has nothing to do with the EU.

EDIT: If you search online for things like "gmail/google (maps) link ios popup", you can find things online from a few years ago on reddit and stack overflow.

oh look, it’s a government getting involved with big tech and improving the lives of its citizens. Funny how the just let the market decide folk suddenly go quiet on threads like this.

Is there some way to re-home my iPhone to the EU to get this stuff, without actually moving there?

I foresee a 'service' which does this. Start with an EU iPhone. Ship to US. VPN proxy updates? Not sure how Apple detects geo location for updates' purposes.

For EU-specific permissions, it sounds an awful lot like GPS is used. (The permission is revoked when you're geographically not in the EU for more than 30 days)

faraday cage with spoofed GPS signal and update the phone?

No, the whole purpose of their "countryd" is to detect people who do that and deny these features to people who'd do that. It has the side effect of also denying them to EU citizens who are outside of the EU for more than a month, but Apple doesn't care about those people.

> Third-party app stores

I wonder if we'll finally get UTM on the ipad without jailbreaks and weird stuff.

Being able to run a small virtual machine on my ipad would really be a game changer.

https://9to5mac.com/2024/01/26/ios-17-app-stores-and-more-ip...

I don't know if that's out of date, but as of January 26th, the iPad wasn't getting third party app stores

I don't think so, because third party app store isn't going to lift an iOS restriction on JIT.

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