Apple ordered by EU antitrust regulators to open up to rivals

This is a weird take. By the time you have enough market dominance for this to affect you, you should be able to afford to make these changes.

IANAL but the impression I got wasn't that they are requiring Apple to deliver interoperability, just that Apple can't block it. I.e. they can't create APIs that enable those things and not allow third parties to invoke them.

well they could force them to split up like the US did for standard oil and bell. but the US doesn't do that any more cause they've been bought out.

I mean headphones is obviously using control of one market to impact another segment for control.

Don't worry, you have a higher chance of getting hit by an meteorite while doing jumping jacks while riding a giraffe than getting big enough to be covered by DMA/DSA.

> Proximity pairing

Bluetooth?

> AirPlay

Chromecast exists and is quite open, this is not rocket science.

> AirDrop

Bluetooth and the new thing where you can just send to a nearby Android phone exist, again, really not rocket science.

And etc etc etc. None of these are some prorpietary unsolvable issues (like if the EU had said that they have to allow anyone to build their own M-chips), it's just that Apple choose to only make them work with their ecosystem.

If you've become a de-facto standard ("get big enough") then making that standard be open so that other things can interoperate with you is a good thing.

The NFC, background execution and documentation for private symbols... those seem fairly specific and I feel like the competitors who've asked/demanded these, are among the last people who should have these features.

Notifications and Smartwatch integration, seems reasonable to me. AirDrop, sure I use it, but I doubt many care.

The weird missing one is iMessage.

Multipoint is part of the bluetooth standard already, Apple just has to provide a means for the headphones to determine which stream to play.

> Proximity pairing (I also don't know that this is possible with any standard technology...)

Fast Pair exists for Android and allows third parties to implement it. It's not a standard but it doesn't have to be, Apple just has to make the proprietary capability available for mfgs to implement if they want. The fact that Google+random OEMs can do it on android using off-the-shelf BT chips should show that its feasible for Apple as well.

You can sell hardware just fine without having to disclose anything .

When you want your "hardware" to become a "platform" and offer a lot of other services on it (including distributing third party software) then you have to provide a level playing field.

And you being very large means that you can afford to add another API to the documentation.

Maybe this will finally give Apple something to do with their $100 billion cash on hand.

Then don't.

I am certain other companies would be fine occupying that space.

Are they asking for real open standards?

Or just Apple publishing an interface that Apple controls, which is much preferable to a company that doesn't want to play well with others, and is also vulnerable to malicious compliance.

(Which isn't to say that open standards aren't sometimes heavily biased towards one particular company. But even then, a company has to battle for their preferred standard, within in an industry consortium or a more public standards organization, or they often try to create a foundation with governance that at least has the appearance of not being totally captive to the one company. But an open standard is different than just tossing out whatever interface you want, and saying, "Here's an interface, which might or might not be suitable, but our obligation is satisfied, and try to convince a judge if you disagree, we can tie that up until our competitors go out of business.")

Consider 20th century AT&T. They were the phone company in America, owning approximately all telecommunications hardware, including the physical handsets in consumer's homes (they were rented).

Competition with AT&T was in no uncertain terms entirely impossible. The cost to lay down even a fraction of the cables that AT&T owned was so astronomical that only government entities like cities could afford it. The main problem being that most of the cables are on other people's property and negotiating easments is incredibly expensive and unbelievably slow.

How could any competition be possible? AT&T owns the wires to 98% of all telco customers, and running new wires is all but impossible.

The US government forced AT&T to allow other telecom companies to use their wires. The Bell subsidiaries had to physically built out their COs to accommodate new equipment owned by other companies. This prompted hundreds or thousands of new companies to pop up and started market competition overnight.

AT&T got slapped down hard, but the net result for consumers was more choice, better prices, new and better services. The only reason consumers got DSL was as a scheme to sidestep the charge for handling a "call" over the shared wires. If the wires weren't shared and exploited, Bell would have kept everyone on dialup much longer.

So yeah, I think if you get big enough, your services become so vital that they become a public good. The telephone system went from a private monopoly to a public utility and the benefits to consumers and society is incalculable.

If Apple is the low bar, then MPEG-LA should be counting their days. The technology to read (legally) a whole slew of formats is stuck behind patent encumberment, but these formats make up the de facto standard for their industries -- see also Qualcomm (who owns 95% or so of the 5G standard) and Broadcom (who for a long time was The Name in 802.11 since they owned so many patents).

Yes, IMO when you hit some amount of market saturation your patents should be invalidated and your work made open.

But each of these is just "Apple's Implementation" of stuff that has been around elsewhere: AirPlay (Miracast/Google Cast), Airdrop (Bluetooth OBEX transfer + BTLE peer discovery), notifications/smartwatch integrations (Android had it first with Pebble and such), headphone handoff (BTLE multidevice hand off), Proximity Pairing (BTLE, again), NFC emulation (Windows Mobile 10 had support before Android/iOS), background execution (this isn't even special, it's just something only Apple gets but others don't).

> Anyone who's maintained a private vs. a public API knows that one is orders of magnitude more expensive than the other.

And yet Microsoft manages to do it for the most part. Apple doesn't release the documentation for a large amount of their API. Think of it less like forcing Apple to open things up but making sure Apple and everyone else has to play by the same rules.

Apple is a top-tier member of the Bluetooth SIG. If standard Bluetooth doesn't support certain features, Apple is empowered to influence that.

The reason that's a bad thing is because the standards are filled with nuance to suit a range of scenarios that extend well beyond the custom methods that Apple have built to match the limits they chose for their particular accessories.

Due to Apple's size, this removes power from the decision making bodies and hands it over to Apple's entirely private process. It also hamstrings development for standards that would have emulated certain Apple features, since the "why bother" factor comes into play.

Meanwhile I don't actually hold much hope out for these changes to "increase competition". To use AirPods as an example. The only difference between setting up and using the AirPods versus a set of standard bluetooth earphones is the flashy set up process. Yes the Apple process is faster, but the normal process is not at all inconvenient, and Apple did not make any changes to add friction to that process. In every other way the devices will function identically. The popularity of the AirPods instead comes from the decent sound, range, battery life and stable connection - these aren't things Apple can fix for junky competitors.

The EU seems unable to discern the difference between success from merit versus success from lack of competition, their clumsy and ineffectual attempts to change the market for their advantage demonstrate that, meanwhile everyone has to deal with the unintended consequences.

Anti-monopoly laws should work, the law is already a year old, and Apple will probably appeal to Court to gain some more years of more monopoly.

This constantly gets reframed in the wrong way, and I start to wonder if this intentional or not.

The listed features are all functionalities that Apple is using to gain an unfair advantage for ADJACENT products and services. It is not an issue that iOS has such features, the EU doesn't care.

It is an issue that OTHER Apple products like Headphones, Smart Watches etc. are using them exclusively while competing with other vendors for the same customer.

The EU DMA has identified that Apple created a closed market of significant size, made themselves the gatekeeper and invited companies to compete there. But Apple decided to enter the market also as a player, and skew the playing field in their favor.

So it's an unjust market where forces are unable to flow freely, and the EU is attempting to rectify that.

Compare this to iPhone activations of new phones which is at 33% and declining [1]. Which means Android's market share of 70%+ is going to get larger over time.

https://9to5mac.com/2024/04/24/iphone-market-share-new-low-a...

As a user, I must be able to switch platforms at the end of the lifespan of a phone or Mac. So, buy a non-mac computer and then later a non-iPhone phone. So things need to interoperate.

That position from the EU is genius because it’s capitalism at its highest form. (Next is, all Windows apps must work on Macs, sounds like a joke but you’ll notice we already live in a world where they’re all webapp/electron, so it’s literally not a problem).

I quote from the EU document

> connected devices of all brands will work better on iPhones. Device manufacturers will have new opportunities to bring innovative products to the market, improving the user experience for consumers based in Europe.

About developers:

> The measures will accelerate their ability to offer a wider choice to European consumers of innovative services and hardware that interoperate with iPhones and iPads.

The DMA defines gatekeepers as "large digital platforms providing so called core platform services, such as for example online search engines, app stores, messenger services" and lists their obligations prohibitions. Apple is one of them because it's sufficiently large.

Smaller companies are not gatekeepers and are out of the scope of the DMA.

Meanwhile, Apple has a habit of hiding functionality behind a lot of obscure API calls that aren't documented and require special entitlements to call.

But I want Reuters/etc to include these links.

Only if they use the same version

it directly leads to subpar UX when they can't communicate with others, can't share files/battery/photos/cables.

I keep seeing this being touted by Apple users (and only by Apple users, whose vendor has been telling them this for decades now). Genuinely wondering if you have any source for this besides Apple saying so. Are there any examples of this? Where a better experience was explicitly possible because of a vendor lock-in? Or where one company, that competes in e.g. the market for watches or headphones while already controlling a large share of another market (like phones), was forced to open up their system and give competitors the same access, and then the market-controlling party's product somehow got worse by giving competitors the same access?

If you comply with "most of" a law, you can still be complicit in ignoring it.

They are still charging the Core technology fee for alternative app stores which undermines the very essence of what the DMA is about.

You'd expect any fines to be announced along with the corrective measures. Here we only got the corrective measures, which implies that (at least for the domains that these decisions are scoped to, i.e. wearables and the process for handling interop requests) that's all we're getting.

Meta has been requesting things like access to all Messages, Photos, Call Logs etc under the guise of interoperability but which would be an unprecedented gift of private data.

Securing an API has no impact on whether the data being provided via that API is private or not.