iPadOS Identified as Digital 'Gatekeeper' Under New EU Tech Rules
macrumors.com
macrumors.com
Safari is just a piece of junk. The only reason it has any marketshare at all on iOS and iPadOS is because Apple is being anticompetitive and doesn't have to compete with Google. When they do have to compete on MacOS, guess what. People are voting and the vast majority like and chose to install Chrome. Apple users claim Chrome users don't know any better and Safari is so much better but that's the argument Android and Windows users like to make about Apple users in general so that argument is moot.
I rarely see people using Chrome on a Mac.
Ha ha, because they are unable to quit the app.
https://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?opt...
My experience with Arc (which I would assume would be heavier than Chrome) has been that it adds a lot of scary entries in the Resource Monitor App, but doesn't impact my day-to-day use on my 16 Gb M1 MBP.
With Safari, on the other hand, I've experienced audio stutter and delays when using resource intensive wep-apps like YouTube, Figma, Netflix and others.
I have never experienced audio stutter and delays like the upthread commenter claims.
The actual UI is a lot more complex. On the front page there are dozens of dynamic categories that are filled out with high-res thumbnail images, and the content starts autoplaying within a few seconds when you stop on an item.
Now, I’m not saying that’s necessarily a good interface (personally I hate overactive autoplay). But from an engineering POV, clearly there’s a bunch of prefetching and cache management that needs to happen to make that UI look seamless, without loading pauses or missing content at any step. And media caches do qualify as “resource intensive.”
Dark patterns in finding this setting that 99.999% of normies would not even know of, ever. But equally a plausible excuse that "there is a setting to shut it off". Right.
Edit: and reading further it seems like it may have largely been an issue with malicious extensions.
They recklessly add any random API with very little thought given to privacy and security. Which is why advertisers have been able to create browser fingerprinting that can be close to 99% accurate.
All cheered on by fools who think Safari and Firefox are stagnant by being more careful and pushing for standards.
They do think about privacy, they just want you to have none.
I won’t go into whether that’s true, but I don’t think the EU has any objection against companies selling (or attempting to sell) bad products.
The EU is acting because they think companies effectively do not have the choice of going around Apple to reach their customers, and that is limiting competition.
Web developers love chrome because it's turning the web browser into the lowest common denominator operating system. It's a terrible idea. I want native apps, I hate web-apps, I hate Electron apps. They all have UI tweaks that don't fit in with native apps, are typically slower and more bloated.
But because most web developers are useless, its all that is ever built these days.
IMHO that ship has sailed.
With the current state of the web, what JS needs to do and what it needs access to, any mainstream web browser needs to become an OS in all shape and form. Managing Skype or Zoom on the web is so far away from displaying Craiglist 20 years ago, and users sure want to be able to open a link and interact with the service without having to download an app.
And this acceleration in web "pages" becoming full fledge apps is of course partly caused by Apple and its control on what can and cannot be distributed in the AppStore and middlemanning all payments. And god forbid to have multiple versions of the same app with different users for instance.
~80% of web usage is looking at web-sites, and most of them are already a bloated mess of JS. If anything, the web would be much better if more sites were like craigslist. That ~20% is not worth the cost in terms of privacy, security, complexity, battery usage. I would rather a native app, or use a competing service that provides one.
Dealing with the security and privacy aspects of those would be enough to get near the complexity of an OS. And to note...looking at the facebook app for instance, being native doesn't seem to be a protection from bloat, it will there either way.
On the web as a static thing, sure 80% of the web is fine as a static information. The 20% on the other hand are things we care a lot about, and I personally hate the "why don't you install our app?" prompt on every damn site. Reddit is the poster child of this, and god no I don't want their native app.
To each their own I guess.
I look at the emails/calendar on the web _because_ I do not want notifications and other junk/distractions. I do not think it is big deal for people to have an email client app on their phone if they want their functionality.
I totally get that you prefer notification on your apps and no notification on the web, the same way people enjoy notifications on their watch and not on their phone, or only read their mail and calendar on their laptop and keep nothing on their phones, etc.
There is an infinite number of combinations of what people want, the whole purpose of these rulings is to let users manage the state they want instead of Apple dictating what is allowed or not solely based on their business interests, even if it those can align with your preferences for instance.
All this apple-related HN web-browser drama is not about what _users_ want, it is only about what app developers and companies want.
- Dark patterns to trick you into Google Pay
- Those stupid sign in with your Google account dialogs you can't disable and make the website input glitch in weird ways, steal focus and I don't think they can even be dismissed with esc.
- The "Lens" sidebar
- Bimonthly popups about "themes" and "Ad Topics" dark patterns
- Copying console.logs is now broken in weird ways as of a few updates ago
I should really find a fork which is focused on not adding on top.
? I'm absolutely for Apple opening up to allow other browsers, but for me Safari is at least fine. I use it for preference on macOS too, it's very resource-efficient.
Somewhat niche yes but I loathe chrome for that behavior.
Is there a way to turn that off?
> Most developers put the majority of their effort to optimising their apps for the web and the best extensions are made for Chrome on desktop
Also, I’m guilty of this as a safari user, lol. My extension is available on Chrome + ForeFox but it’s too much of a pain to make a free extension for safari.
Note that Chrome on Android doesn't support extensions either, especially no adblockers.
> People are voting and the vast majority like and chose to install Chrome
Is it really users voting when Chrome is the only browser that works with some websites?
Apple is the only thing standing in Chrome's way of becoming a global browser monopoly. The last time this has happened it was devastating for the web. The web is also way smaller than it is now.
What frustrates me the most though is how aggressive and pervasive all the big tech companies have become. Attempts to regulate one seem to benefit another. In this case, regulations to force Apple to open up their platform walled gardens will primarily benefit Google and Meta. On the other hand, the regulations to rein in the latter companies (GDPR) seem to have largely failed and only serve to widen their moats with barriers to entry.
It honestly feels like we've spawned a multi-headed hydra and it's only going to grow more heads (LLMs?) as regulators struggle to keep up. Does anyone have any different ideas on how to solve this?
You're changing one monopoly for another in the name of convenience. This is the wrong way to think. We have Firefox and Safari for a good reason, and should support them as to not make another IE.
Where does it fall down? Some of the later RFPs for web technology (bluetooth, battery level, etc) aren't supported but I think I agree more with Apple than some random web-app developer.
Chrome is the new IE. Forget that.
This hasn't been true for a few years. When I bought my first iPhone a few years ago (the iPhone 12 in 2020), Safari indeed was a piece of junk. But starting the very next iteration cycle (iOS 14 or 15 I think) they fixed almost all the issues I had with it (tons of bugs, including rendering issues on some sites, but also quality of life features, like moving the URL bar at the bottom).
At first I used Safari because there was no other choice, today I use it because it's a decent browser and doesn't drain battery too much. Even if Firefox with Gecko or Chrome with Blink were available, I would stick with Safari.
I have a M1 laptop and one-before-last iphone SE that cannot open a ticketing website from a major global airline on Safari without an OS update. Irony being I can open the same website on all chromium browsers and firefox without an OS update.
If this is not a completely broken experience, I don't know what is.
The website works on the Safari that comes with the latest OS. I can't update the Safari version without updating the OS with a 14GB update. Nevermind the extremely annoying hassle of having to backup the devices before the updates "just in case".
I don't have to do that for any non-Apple browser while using the same Apple laptop. [0]
I think it was the late and great Joe Armstrong who said, in a tongue-in-cheek remark on object oriented programming,
"You want a banana, but to get the banana you need the gorilla holding the banana and the [goddamn] rain forest it lives in." (brackets might be my frustrated addition.)
[0] there were other websites that would work seamlessly on other browsers but would throw security errors that disappeared after the OS update, including an email provider that is regular posted about on HN.
If you're sweating your socks off trying to get a plane ticket last minute on the go, someone telling you for whatever reason to update your OS can kindly fuck-off.
That's utter contempt for your users and a non-option pure and simple. The only real option is to hug and hold onto your non-Safari browser for dear life.
What I want from my iPad is to be able to dual-boot into macOS. Everything else are small steps with the intent of postponing the ability to run a full-blown OS on the device.
Incidentally, you can run Chrome on the iPad if it can run macOS.
Literally the only problem is lack of thirdparty apps, but apart from a great downloader and adblocker I don’t really need much.
I don’t even want alternative stores, now my mother can download unverified apps from shady sources, before that was too difficult for her to do.
If chrome/google is so good then why aren’t people buying pixels for it? Why does google need the EU to break iPadOS?
She uses it for drawing stuff in Procreate, and is pretty happy with it, but it feels like such a waste. The "desktop" experience is so bad that she also has a macbook pro for "real tasks". In reality, if the iPad wasn't so gimped by the software, she wouldn't need the macbook. I guess Apple realizes this, which is why they put in the limitations.
I really hope the end result is that Apple just ends up shipping OSX on the iPad pros instead of iOS. Highly unlikely, but a man can dream.
The iPad accessory ecosystem is also just ridiculously overpriced. $200+ to $300+ for a keyboard/mouse combo that will if you're lucky will maybe work on the next model you upgrade to and only works with a single device is insane. Then the stylus is $130 more. They make the MS Surface accessories look cheap.
I don't want OS X on the iPad. I genuinely think that would be a bad experience but they do need to not cripple iPadOS.
Hrm. Can I put Linux on an iPad?
Both for improving competition and reducing e-waste.
I'm not sure it makes sense to ding Apple for this in particular since support for old Android devices is similarly bad on Google's store.
The only thing that they do and makes this unbearable is that they prevent downgrading devices (or having older simulators or older xcode on newer macs), so testing on older iOS versions is painful or even impossible. But they don't require you to abandon older versions in any code related stuff, you can use modern features and still support older iOS.
I have an iOS app on the AppStore that supports iOS 9. Noone is forcing Zoom to require newer iPads or OS versions.
Can Xcode 15/iOS 17 SDK still build 32 bit apps for iOS 9, and can you upload them? I'd be very impressed if so.
Instead they seemed to have accepted Apple's fiction about these being separate platforms, and then to get the outcome they wanted they just ignored the own inclusion thresholds. Look, the EC set these thresholds. They had years to review those thresholds. And the moment they produce an outcome the EC didn't want, they just go "lol, the threshold was never 45M users, it's actually about being 'close to 45M users'". Will everyone now be judged on the basis of being pretty close to the threshold, or was that a one off for Apple? What even counts as "close"? Are we talking 40M? 30M? 20M?
What a clownshow.
iPadOS being close to the threshold with forecasted growth seems to very much fall in line with the DMA.
Spotify has clearly an entrenched and durable position (the government of England formally declared them a monopoly)... and they are using their market power to strong-arm others: Look at all the Spotify-only or Spotify-first streaming playback devices (Teslas, for starters). They pay massively lower rates to artists than other streamers (like Apple Music) for another example. As for consumer harm, I seem to hear nothing but complaints from friends about Spotify's latest AI-generated playlists and poor user interface... those again speak to entrenched and durable market power.
It really makes me question whether Europe has such low rates of corruption as everyone says.
Do you have a source for this? So far as I know this isn't true, and some (admittedly quick) searching doesn't reveal anything.
I think you're describing a different kind of antitrust.
> As for consumer harm, I seem to hear nothing but complaints from friends about Spotify's latest AI-generated playlists and poor user interface...
That's not market harm, that's a bad product. If you're particularly upset from Spotify's behavior, there are no shortage of competing alternative services you can entirely replace it with.
This is basically what Apple did to avoid compliance requirements. The whole toolchain, the core libraries, even the compiler suites, are identical.
iPadOS and tvOS have less than 10 ifdefs in the Safari codebase last time I checked.
C'mon EU! This is as bullshit as the US's TikTok ban justification.
Apparently they define a threshold but then use a number that doesn't reach said threshold as justification to take action. We're not talking about troops massed on a border here: if they defined a threshold for action they should not then use it to justify action when the target hasn't been reached yet.
Regardless if you agree or disagree on the EU's position, it's hard to support the rule of law when it's explicitly arbitrary like this.
> Business users are locked-in to iPadOS because of its large and commercially attractive user base, and its importance for certain use cases, such as gaming apps.
This, on the other hand, made me laugh: business users are locked into a platform because it's the only place they can play games?
The quote about businesses and gaming is in reference to businesses as the producers of apps trying to reach customers, not as the consumer themselves.
I think that's the wrong metaphor. Regulation functions well when it is 1 - clear, unambiguous, and consistently applied and 2 - conservative, in the sense of being a bit "behind the times". By this I don't mean reactive.
There are cases when those approaches can't be followed, for example when you see an army being built up on a border, medical cases (not just the one you cite, which isn't a regulation, but drug approval) and other incipient life-threatening cases. But those cases are messy, often wrong (but with a risk vs cost profile that makes it worth doing), and often controversial.
But this is simply an ipad. The kind of metaphor I think of is I'll speed at 120 km/h when my passenger is bleeding profusely, but if I'm late to a contract negotiation, well, I still have to drive the speed limit. A sense of arbitrariness discourages compliance with the rules.
Consider the EU ETS. They already had an example to follow (the north american SO2 trading scheme), had the emissions and other data, and it is indeed an issue killing people. But they took the time to make sure it was right, and it works great, a little grumbling aside. At the end of the day the ipad is even less than that, and so clarity and consistency serves the wider goal.
Regardless of whether you are an Apple customer or not, surely you see how claiming that iPadOS is not equivalent to iOS earns you regulatory ire.
[0] - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/avast-security-privacy/id12765...
[1] - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/mcafee-security-privacy-vpn/id...
- Private Relay
- Hide my Email
One time disposable email address for an unknown web site registration form.
All of this nicely integrated in all your iPhone/iPad/Mac and Safari with a great convenience.
Chrome – someone wrote it here - it’s such a resource hungry piece of crap.
The only reason for Chrome is feeding Google/advertisers your online behavior.
I guess the possible reason the EU saying iPadOS is a gatekeeper is Google/advertisers heavy lifting.
You really are falling for those snake oil VPN ads.
Btw. What will you do when Apple bans your account because you hold your iPad wrong? All those nice hide my emails won’t be accessible any more.
Otherwise it's hard to see why they create a law that basically specifically discriminates against Apple
Because pretty much no other major OS has such bizarre/stupid/choose your adjective restrictions on installing software.
Android already allows side loading and alternative app stores.