On one hand it was obvious, Apple surely did see it coming and decided to play the dumb strategy instead, so I'm so glad the EU didn't just give up. That would have been an horrible precedent from all perspective. And this is opening the way to the other legislation to pass reasonably close requirements (e.g. Japan) without undue burden on Apple.

On the other hand, I understand the process isn't supposed to be fast, but as a consumer it looks like it takes so much time. At least the regulators are willing to hint at where the discussion will be going instead of keeping it secret for a year just for an effect of surprise. If the dust settles in three years, I get the feeling the market will have half moved on to the next big thing and Apple will already have ripped most of their transgressions' benefits.

On the third hand, I can't deny some amount of schadenfreude looking at Apple having to deal with the same "do the work first, we'll judge if it meets our review standard afterwards" treatment as they do to developers.

PS: the weirdest part to me is, looking at this year's WWDC lack of bigger features, it's obvious Apple had to use significant resource to deal with the EU requirements, the APIs for alternate browsers for instance didn't come by magic. And obviously the replacement of the default apps on the lock screen is also in line with the DMA.

Why then play it dumb when it costs them so much to do needless back and forths.