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Comment by spogbiper | Hacker News Reader

Interesting that they are creating a separate team just for the EU app store, presumably because the EU is forcing Apple to make some changes. It seems like the investigations in the US, UK, Japan, etc will eventually lead to them being required to make similar changes everywhere.

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It's unlikely that the US will force Apple to make EU-style changes. It's been 26 years since the DOJ went after Microsoft and lost, and corporate regulation has only grown weaker.

Have you been following the news on this topic lately? Antitrust enforcement has had a huge resurgence under Biden, and it's actually looking like Google may get broken up soon. See: https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/11/24216760/google-trial-mon...

What Google's rivals want and what this judge ends up deciding to do and what actually gets enforced in the end are three entirely different things.

I have, and I don't believe that higher courts will ever go along with it. Microsoft lost their initial case too, and was ordered to break up at the time. Appeals courts prevent real change like that from happening--see the fate of the recent non-compete ban. Precedent suggests the antitrust cases will end in a small fine or a procedural change, at most.

"Alphabet extrudes smaller, useles Google to satisfy regulators"

--- start quote ---

users will get new default settings for dialing phone numbers, sending messages, translating text, navigation, managing passwords, keyboards, and call spam filters

Additionally, the App Store, Messages, Photos, Camera, and Safari apps will now be deletable for users in the EU.

--- end quote ---

https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=zglax7gc

Instead being on top of things and pre-empting the inevitable, they are just reacting.

It’s not a separate team for the EU App Store, it’s a separate team for other app stores in the EU.

As in one team for the Apple first party store in all countries and a second team for third party stores, which just happens to be in the EU.

Geo-fenced app stores could align with geo-fenced networks bounded by GFC-style inspection and filtering of network packets.

I’m very happy for Apple to geofence the EU cryptography backdoors they’re going to have to put in eventually.

It's already happening. You can save money on the firewall if you can convince FAANGs to enforce things for you though.

Creating a separate store just to be able to get away with anti consume anti competitive practices everywhere else is just so dishonest and unethical. I don’t understand why consumers give Apple the benefit of the doubt, trusting such a powerful entity to be benevolent. But I guess maybe it is because the everyday user isn’t visibly affected by those practices and they don’t know that they could benefit from change?

The alternative here is Google/Samsung.

I'm not sure what you expect consumers to do, but my other halfs Pixel phones have been absolutely rubbish with a significant flaw each generation.

My Fitbit has been degrading ever since Google picked them up.

Samsung at least gives me working reliable hardware, but are still stuck with Android and Googles forcing of shitty extras.

Other Android providers exist, but after being burnt several times by providers abandoning updates and my work VPN refusing to run with old versions with security flaws, I dont blame people for just going down the route that mostly works.

We need an alternative to Android, but that would require companies to make web pages again instead of apps.

I don’t give Apple the benefit of the doubt, but Google didn’t encrypt my phone back when I was using it, and living in a city where mugging is frequent, this is criminal.

Also I’ve always been disappointed with every single feature of Android, but that’s on the side of my choice matrix.

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