Apple set to be first Big Tech group to face charges under EU digital law | Hacker News Reader

Apple set to be first Big Tech group to face charges under EU digital law

ft.com

121 pointssaeedesmaili61 comments

> The European Commission has determined that the iPhone maker is not complying with obligations to allow app developers to “steer” users to offers outside its App Store without imposing fees on them, according to three people with close knowledge of its investigation.

I think that's a fair assessment based on the bizarre fees and hoops Apple has created under the guise of malicious compliance. There was even a brief moment where they blocked PWAs.

The Core Technology Fee was such a mistake, on Apple's part. Presumably it's their attempt at creating a defensible position ("well it's not the App Store but our core technology now"), but it also relocates a relatively volatile discussion from just the App Store to the iPhone itself.

Apple knows what they're doing, they even retroactively added a Free software carveout to the policy in an attempt to offer an olive branch. The longer they spend trying to reinvent the same racket though, the more obvious their market damages become. And if the EU lets them get away with this reconfiguration, they'll let them get away with anything. The US suit ought to bring the hammer down, and threaten Apple with a breakup if they can't find a way to compete with third-parties naturally.

Apple's hope is probably EU backepdaling or something but as Microsoft vs USA demonstrated, the government machine can be very slow but if it wants to - it will get the things done.

I think Microsoft vs USA demonstrates that stalling until a new administration shows up can be a valid tactic. It’s not guaranteed to work, but even if the odds are say 20% that’s far from nothing when you’re talking 100’s of billions of dollars.

It allowed them to avoid breakup but it still immensely affected Microsoft creating the dead decade or whatever it was called. Nobody expects that regulators will force Apple to breakup (Google is in bigger danger there).

The Core Technology Fee is so absurd. I couldn't help but notice that the Mac is conspicuously missing it. Perhaps the farce would have been too obvious to non-tech people if they had tried to impose it on the Mac.

Next time someone says lawyers don’t do stupid shit.

This was lawyers doing stupid shit. FAFO.

Apple deserves money for every app on the phone (per Apple). Therefore the CTF makes perfect sense to them.

I think they’re really annoyed by the Facebooks and Spotify’s of the world that make a fortune from the iPhone and pay nothing.

“We have to open up” + “this is our chance to claw some back” = here’s the core technology fee.

> I think they’re really annoyed by the Facebooks and Spotify’s of the world that make a fortune from the iPhone and pay nothing.

And not the Mac?

It seems pretty obvious that it's not even an ideological thing, Apple is fine with some users not being forced through their ecosystem. They know that the iPhone specifically is most lucrative and are trying to arbitrarily distinguish it from their other products. It frankly doesn't matter how Apple feels about it at the end of the day, there's only compliance and noncompliance.

I think they see them as different for historical reasons. The Mac is a computer and the iPhone is an appliance, so the differences makes sense to them.

Also they tried to retrofit the App Store onto the Mac, it’s a joke compared to what they seem to have thought it would become. Yeah there is software, and I use it, but for many reasons it’s far less successful than it should have been if done well.

> It frankly doesn't matter how Apple feels about it at the end of the day, there's only compliance and noncompliance.

I agree. Some people see the CTF and can’t imagine why they’d create it. I’m just trying to explain what I (and others) have suggested was the reason. It makes sense and is just given their seeming point of view.

Problem for them is no one else, even huge fans, seems to agree.

Wait so you really think that Ford should be viciously angry at somebody if they buy a non ford branded air freshener for their car? Because the air freshener company "makes a fortune from the car and pay nothing".

The PWA block has more nuance than that. PWAs are locked to Safari's engine and Apple interpreted that as potentially against the law. And part of the problem is that some competing web engines allow extremely dangerous APIs in their web platform which Mozilla has considered harmful.

Which isn't to say that Apple isn't playing malicious compliance hard, the entire CTF thing is ridiculous and demonstrates how desperately they do abuse the claim of security when it is actually all about profit... but the PWA thing isn't really part of that.

So why are PWAs and alternative browser engines okay on macOS but not iOS?

These security excuses are bullshit and that does include PWAs.

I mean, I think those alternative browser engines are dangerous on other OSes too. Both at work at home I enforce policy on computers which disables a lot of harmful web APIs. It is much harder to protect mobile devices with policy.

Those so-called "dangerous" APIs are available in a normal browser visiting a normal website too. The APIs don't somehow become more dangerous if you let people put an icon for your site on the home screen.

This isn't true on iOS. Because allowing arbitrary websites access to system hardware is pretty dangerous and stupid, Safari gates some of the newer APIs they do support behind PWA installation.

So basically Apple screw up writing their iOS kernel and Safari?

Do you have a source for that?

At any rate, it's not clear to me that granting hardware permissions when you install a PWA is any better than letting the user choose what permissions to grant when you first visit a page. If that really is how it works, maybe alternate browsers will be able to improve over Safari's permission model too.

That request really kinda falls into "let me google that for you" territory, but, you know, here you go: https://webkit.org/blog/13878/web-push-for-web-apps-on-ios-a...

> it's not clear to me

So, you may not have watched normal users operate a web browser. But... they click on everything in their way. This is why, for example, most "malware" calls I get are just dozens upon dozens of Notifications API permissions being granted in Chrome to random websites. The best way to fix this is... just destroy the Notifications API as a thing, it's a terrible idea. But the next best way is to ensure access to it is limited to contexts where it's obvious a user is interested in persistent communication with a given site or app. Like installing it.

At any point where you thought "just asking the user when they first visit the page for permission" was an adequate concept, you were wrong. And most malicious websites abuse this wrongness ad-nauseum, to the point that browsers now include ways to block websites from making repetitive requests as a attempt to fix it without fixing it.

Firefox has a pretty good record, and I consider their standards positions (https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/) the gold standard. iOS/Safari moves a little more slowly, but generally aligns with good practice.

Google and Microsoft are the two companies everyone else (including Safari) is significantly improving over by actually paying attention to how real users interact with the Internet.

We're straying a bit from the original topic of direct access to hardware, but I'll humor you. Let's look at one of your users who does click yes to everything. In $YEAR, spam websites will say "enable push notifications to view this funny cat image. In $YEAR+1, spam websites will say "install our PWA to view this funny cat image" or "install our native app to view this funny cat image" and our user will still obey because the popup is in the way.

For the clueless user, nothing has changed other than which button they obediently push. For the savvy user, you've added an arbitrary special case and a hoop to jump through to get the functionality you wanted in the first place. Neither case is improved in the end.

and yet, Microsoft still get purchased without licitation at the comission and all other branches. because of the same reason. lol

This really bothers me because Apple doesn't need to do that, it's a short term rent seeking that will bite them the long run.

Why? because Apple is perfectly capable of selling very good experiences at premium prices but instead they try to lock down the users so they can sell the sub-par experience that users might not purchase if given a choice.

Personally, I'm very fond of the App Store model and I like the ease of use and the guarantees Apple gives about it but Apple's lock down combined with Apple's editorial makes the iPhone lag behind.

For example, in UK I used Apple Pay for everything but Apple Pay isn't available in some of the countries I spend long time and Apple doesn't let the banks to implement their payment systems and doesn't let the city transit to implement their payment systems and effectively I'm getting a worse experience than Android here.

Also, the lockdown doesn't let anything niche and creative to flourish. People should be able to build experiences beyond what we got in 2008 with the iPhone revolution so that we can get beyond this overly commercialised super addictive way of using smartphones. Some nerds should be able to come up with new ideas and try them out with people interested in this.

Somewhere in China/Russia/Africa where iPhones are not dominant, they will come up with something and we will find ourselves stuck in these old ways. It will be like the Japanese who used to have the most advanced tech in smartphones getting obliterated with iPhone.

I also don't have a problem with the %30 cut Apple takes, I think its a fair cut for the services given. What I'm concerned is strictly about stalling the progress and degrading the user experience.

you confuse cause and effect.

had apple not locked in earlier customers with such tactics since forever (they never had any standard port or media for example) they wouldn't have had the marketing budgets required to convince you that they can deliver experiences for 60x markup.

see, you're the next batch paying for the marketing that will come for things like vr

I really like Apple. I’m a big fan of their stuff.

They have gotten really really drunk on the App Store and Smurfberry/lootbox cash.

They think they just have to release an App Store and developers will flock to it, but it hasn’t really worked outside of the iPhone.

They think developers owe them for the privilege of being allowed to develop for an Apple platform. 30% is a “bargain”.

They’ve had a million chances to cut back on rates, expand what developers can do, etc. they’ve ignored them all and often doubled-down on kafkaesque app review weirdness.

They need a humility check. And only world governments are big enough to do it. Sadly I don’t think they’ll learn until this happens a couple of times. “The EU just doesn’t get it”.

I don’t want the iPhone thrown totally open. I like some of what Apple says they do. But they’re so out of whack they’ll lose it and be worse off than if they just had some humility.

I don't have a problem with the %30 cut, I agree that its a good deal. The problem is, Apple is also an editor and dictates what Apps are supposed to do like the days before iPhone when the carriers used to dictate what phones can, can't and should do. Where are they now with their MMS and ringtones?

Yeah. 30% was a good deal at the start compared to having to negotiate with carriers. But they kind of changed the world.

If they want 30%, ok. But they are not earning anywhere close to 30%. Make it worth it.

I'd have slight more time for apples app store if it was any good, but it does such a bad job of curation it's next to useless.

When I recently got an iPad I thought app store will be great to find good games for the kids, but it just suggests so much junk

As a developer, the experience is terrible because it's so random and arbitrary, you can have a feature in an app for years and then try to release an urgent bug fix and suddenly a reviewer is fixated on some tiny detail that's never changed

As an Android user iOS is kind of bizarre to me.

There are so many weird limitations compared to Android. E.g. I cannot choose a different default navigation app. When I attach a location to a calendar event in the Apple calendar app, I can only open it in Apple Maps. Android asks me which app I want to use.

Same with browser engines, NFC payment providers, etc. Everything is unchangeably linked to the Apple ecosystem. Every user has to jump through hoops to get their favorite apps/user cases connected with each other.

What you're describing probably just doesn't matter to 99.99% of users I'd imagine. I'm in tech, sometimes care about these things, and even I don't care about it when using iOS.

And that's illegal under federal law in the United States, hence the antitrust suit.

I find the same problem with gmail on my iPhone. Every time I clock a link it asks me to use Chrome or the default browser. I set a default browser for a reason dammit, just use that one.

And this is the improved situation! The original iPhone did not permit installing an alternate browser.

It also did not allow Flash in 2010, and this was during the height of its popularity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoughts_on_Flash

Same thing with other plugins or interpreters that would sidestep the app store: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12972802/appstore-ios-ap...

These are not technical limitations, they are business, building a walled garden to enshrine the app economy.

I thought it’s widely accepted that it’s a good thing the original iPhone didn’t use Flash? Because this decision helped the web move away from Flash which many felt was a deeply flawed in terms of security and battery utilization.

Are there people around today who criticize Apple’s non-adoption of Flash? I would be interested to hear their perspectives.

In any case back in 2010 I deliberately purchased an Android phone that had Flash installed on it so I could have Flash on my phone. But I remember even just a handful of years later almost no Android phones offered Flash anymore…

While I think Flash deserved to be put in its place and NOT have the Internet built on it, should that really have been up to one platform vendor?

My post was really about the early mindset from Apple in removing so many of a user's options. Everyone on the platform now has a Stockholm Syndrome vibe, justifying why they are not entitled to choices, or control of their device.

> The original iPhone did not permit installing an alternate browser.

It didn't permit installing anything at all.

And even when it did allow app installs, I get why they wouldn't want people installing browsers: it's a great opportunity for third parties to absolutely wreck the device UX with garbage third party software. Banishing Flash from the platform was a genius move, because bad flash apps absolutely dragged the web to a crawl in the early/mid 2000s. Banning the worst offenders from the platform gave them a huge leg up in performance.

The thing with the iPhone is that a subset of boffins really want it to be a Mac or a Windows computer, when from day 1 it was always a Nintendo Switch. Consumers voted with their wallets and it won in a landslide. Now it's become so advanced that people confuse it with a general purpose computer, but that was never the deal, never the business model. Europe is basically trying to take Apple's platform and force them to give it to third parties gratis. They're mad because Apple is complying with the letter of the law, but not the spirit of the law which is for Apple to depart the EU market entirely.

> It also did not allow Flash in 2010, and this was during the height of its popularity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoughts_on_Flash

They deserve every penny they get just for this.

You’re not wrong, but… while you can’t choose a default navigation app, it will always ask you which one you want to use unless you delete Apple Maps (which you can do). browser engines also are changeable. NFC is linked (no but’s or butts).

Nonetheless your point isn’t less valid, as this is all coming from a European Apple user and even so most of these features have not existed for us very long.

I also (coming from Android) really miss APKs, though not used by the majority, by far one of the best features. Now I have to sign my Apps every 7 days via my Mac or pay for a dev license so I can sign my apps for (I’m not sure but) 30 days?

I thought they were still no other browser engines available then WebKit (Safari)? You can only install other browsers, but they have to use Webkit under the hood. I think alternatives are now legally possible in the EU, but not a single browser developer has made theirs available that way because of the impossible restrictions around it.

> I cannot choose a different default navigation app.

This is apparently changing for iOS 18, but so far only for EU users.

https://9to5mac.com/2024/03/07/apple-planning-default-naviga...

I use Mac, iPhone, iPad, Apple TV and I just love how everything works so well together right out of the box. You have to remember 99% users don’t care much about concerns like yours, they just want a smooth, hustle free, near zero learning curve experience.

I've said for years you're always better off settling with regulators on negotiated terms than having that regulator taking you to court. And Apple have been holding on too tightly to their App Store monopoly. It simply creates too much money now that we're way past covering costs. It's a massive cash cow. And everybody knows it.

Like when Apple offered to allow third-party payment processors but would only reduce its cut from 30% to 27%.

So Apple has two big problems now:

1. It's going to have to justify that 30% and it can't; and

2. It will come out that for certain companies, Apple charges significantly less than 30%. By picking favorites, particularly in markets Apple itself competes in, it's going to be a problem.

I suspect we will end up with Apple (and Google):

1. Being allowed to charge 10%;

2. Allowing third-payment payment processors;

3. In-app purchses through third-party mpayment processors yielding 0% for Apple. Think Amazon digital purchases like Kindle books and movies or Netflix subscriptions;

4. Purchase of apps charging less but I honestly don't think this matters because apps have largely moved away from upfront purchases in favor in in-app purchases and I see this trend continuing.

The big question is: will Apple have to allow third-party app stores? That's really what Apple wants to avoid.

The European Union wants third party app stores and they control the rules of a market bigger than the United States.

The United States market by GDP is about $10T bigger than the EU. Apple's Americas revenue is about 41% of total revenues while Europe is about 26%.

To me this just means that apple has a lot of growth opportunity in Europe.

Glad to hear that apple did not get away with this. I just hope that they can end up actually allowing sideloading, meaning we can install any ipa, just like you can run any executable on a mac. Is the mac less secure because of this? No.

https://archive.ph/1WQu3

I do personally think the core technology fee is abhorrent. However, playing devil's advocate, is it actually wrong? Aren't there plenty of examples of platform holders monetising things released on the platform by other publishers? I'm thinking of games consoles as one obvious example. I'm pretty sure you would have to pay per copy produced, even back before the monolithic digital stores we have today.

> I'm thinking of games consoles as one obvious example.

Yes but games consoles are not on the arbitrarily list of products that can be considered monopolists... sorry, I meant to say "gatekeepers", so it's totally ok for them to be monopolists, I mean "gatekeepers".

And, you see, it completely logical and ethical for that list to not include consoles because consoles are not general purpose computers (even though they use the same CPUs, memory, storage and input peripherals as general purpose computers) because the manufacturers of said devices defined them as not general purpose computers. Which is totally different from what Apple did in defining the iPhone as not a general purpose computer because... well, you know why, don't you?

In other news, isn't it just grand that Europe doesn't have corruption?

It's not about that they are made of, it's about how people use them and what their market penetration is.

> it's about how people use them

Lol. "How people use them" is entirely a question of "how the manufacturer lets people use them".

Somehow it is ok that Sony and Nintendo have defined their consoles as "not a general purpose computer", while it is not ok for Apple to define their device as "not a general purpose computer".

What you are actually asking for is that companies should impose more restrictions on what people can do, lest they be targeted as gatekeepers.

> market penetration is.

Yet "hometown" companies like Spotify are mysteriously absent from the list of gatekeepers. And iPad OS, despite not meeting the thresholds defined for gatekeepers has been added "because we felt like it".

Can you explain why Spotify must be a gatekeeper?

Spotify has a smaller share than Android, there 2 similar companys offering similar service and you can export your data, playlist.

Deezer offers a service to transfer all data.

All I'm saying is people don't pay their taxes using an Xbox.

I'm all for opening up consoles too. But Apple is a much more important target in the fight for consumer rights.

Game consoles do have game exclusives, meaning that there's some real competition and deals to attract game developers. When was the last app exclusive?

Clubhouse was iOS-only at its peak. Too bad I made an unofficial Android app in 1.5 days lol

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