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Comment by bri3d | Hacker News Reader

On first read, this seems ridiculously onerous to me. They're trying to compel Apple to deliver interoperability for basically every unique Apple feature:

* AirPlay

* AirDrop

* Notifications + Smartwatch integration

* Headphone smart handoff (I don't even think this is possible with any standard technology, so I'm not sure what they're looking for here compliance wise)

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

* NFC Emulation

* Background Execution

Also,

* API documentation for all private symbols (?!)

I get the push for openness in devices but I'd never want to sell hardware in Europe, honestly. If you get big enough, they swoop in and make you turn everything you've invented into an open standard? Anyone who's maintained a private vs. a public API knows that one is orders of magnitude more expensive than the other.

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> Headphone smart handoff (I don't even think this is possible with any standard technology, so I'm not sure what they're looking for here compliance wise)

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.

The unintended consequence of this is that it effectively elevates Apple's protocols and methods to standards, without any kind of industry consultation.

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.

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

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

I’d rather Apple continue returning excess cash flow to investors than to waste it on boondoggle regulatory requirements cooked up by people without a clue (Seriously? AirDrop alternatives? Who is asking for this?) which also have unintended consequences for other product development priorities.

Ok, I would rather they put the users first.

None of their users asked for this! It’s a list of demands come up by a small group of appointed bureaucrats. I can’t think of a single regular person who pines for AirDrop protocol alternatives. The loudest advocates for these changes are companies who distribute on Apple’s platform and developers who don’t want to wite native apps.

Actually there are a lot of users asking for exactly this.

That Apple are using their monopoly to further their position is a classic, illegal tactic and these bureaucrats should have come after them a long, long time ago.

> Actually there are a lot of users asking for exactly this.

Can you point me to evidence that Apple users want AirDrop protocol alternatives?

Absolutely something I want.

That Apple has removed the functionality to interoperate between different operating systems is ridiculous.

It used to be easy to transfer files over Bluetooth. I’m talking functionality that was there 20 years ago. Apple are using their monopoly against users who don’t know any better.

> If you get big enough, they swoop in and make you turn everything you've invented into an open standard?

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.

The AT+T analogy is so different that there is a clear term for it in economics: "natural monopoly." It is quite obvious to me that natural monopolies require strict regulation.

I do not believe that smartphone handsets are a natural monopoly (besides carrier locking, which is orthogonal to this conversation). If a customer believes that the more "open" hardware+software ecosystem is superior, they can buy that ecosystem (as most Europeans do; I don't think Apple even have close to majority market share in Europe!)

Put differently: what favorable, exclusive land leases did Apple negotiate from the European Union to gain its "monopoly" in the smartphone market? What multibillion dollar private/public partnership led to iPhone?

> 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.

Even worse, Ma Bell probably would have forbade home modem use if they had the choice. There were significant downsides to funneling packet-switched traffic over a circuit-switched medium; dial-up Internet calls could last hours tying up circuits with almost completely dead air.

You might be interested in this CRD video, it covers basically the entire dial-up Internet era and almost every regulatory hurdle involved with setting up an ISP here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ympjaibY6to

The intention is to not allow hardware vendors to give themselves an edge on said hardware when it comes to software and services.

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.

> If you get big enough

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.

> Proximity pairing

> Bluetooth?

It's not in or around the standard at all. Android/Google has Fast Pair. I guess Apple get to make their own Fast Pair now.

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

Chromecast is not open at all. Google provide SDKs for specific platforms, but you can't just go make a Chromecast receiver device.

> I get the push for openness in devices but I'd never want to sell hardware in Europe, honestly

Then don't.

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

Ironically, this would be the best thing that could happen to EU, reducing its reliance further from US by building in house technologies.

Exactly. I am hoping that the EU tightens the screws until all of Big Tech cannot operate in EU anymore.

I believe we can do fine without massive US ad-surveillance companies and a manufacturer of luxury tech toys.

Wouldn't other companies run into similar issues given they know whatever they make could be used by other companies for free if they become big enough?

I'm sure that every would-be entrepreneur is extremely anxious about the regulation they'll have to contend with when they reach $billions in annual turnover, reach dozens of millions customers, corner their market to the point they can seek rent from every other business on the continent, and make it onto the list of companies so short it can easily fit on a business card.

You can take an obviously obtuse and extreme interpretation to what I said.

What i mean is simply this: Today, there is an implicit social contract that if i build a better tech or innovate in a niche, i get to monetize it anyway i like. In free markets, people pay for it if its useful, else they dont. What EU is doing is breaking that. Incentive flips to not to bank on innovation as a differentiator, but move fast to capture the market with patchwork so that when regulators notice, you have already made enough money. This leads to standardization, and the ultimate losers here are the end users and customers.

You would think if Apple knew that they would force share (for free) every innovation they did, they would have invested in creating an ecosystem like this. Or like qualcomm woudl invest billions in r&d for better chips if they cant reap the benefits.

> They're trying to compel Apple to deliver interoperability for basically every unique Apple feature

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.

> they can't create APIs that enable those things and not allow third parties to invoke them.

Entertainingly the same reason microsoft didn't lock down the kernel interfaces that lead to crowdstriking everything. MS wanted to be the only security product in the kernel.

Exactly… and look where that got us. Sometimes platform makers really do know best.

Just because something is beneficial to the business (exclusivity) doesn't mean it's not also simultaneously beneficial to users.

Each feature I listed comes with a clause equal to "Apple shall implement an interoperability solution that provides third parties with access to the same AirPlay feature described in the preceding paragraph as available to Apple, in a way that is equally effective as the solution available to Apple."

Even each sub-functionality (for example, AirDrop Contacts Only mode) is enumerated as "shall implement."

I read the "shall implement an interoperability solution that...in a way that is equally effective as the solution available to Apple." a bit differently. Apple must ensure interoperability, but they are allowed to implement a separate solution to Apple's internal one if they feel it is better to do so.

So far it seems like a lot of the requirements could be satisfied by Apple just opening their APIs given that an identical solution would in fact be equally effective. The EU could have mandated that the solutions be identical but that would be more restrictive to Apple despite the requirement seeming like it would be less work.

> If you get big enough, they swoop in and make you turn everything you've invented into an open standard?

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.

> 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.

AirDrop and AirPlay seem pretty benign from this standpoint; I guess you could argue they're using their ~30% market share in phones to try to unfairly influence the personal computer market with a feature that... transfers files? And, no remote playback solution is open at all for DRM reasons. AirPlay is no different in this regard: you either make some sort of "agreement" with Apple and they give you a certificate and a binary blob to run on your hardware, or you reverse engineer it. That's the same way Google Cast and everything else on the market works.

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

I see the EU's stance here. I just think it's not true for these specific features. I think that many of the App Store considerations addressed separately with the DMA are generally reasonable: in that case Apple have truly created a closed market in an adjacent space in which they are also a player, and leveraged their position to shut out competition inside of their walled garden.

I guess I see "phones and phone accessories" as a reasonable market segment in and of itself, with ample competition. I can choose to buy the Apple Phone Package (iPhone, Watch, AirPods) or the Google-based Phone Package (Android Phone, some random watch, some random earbuds). Not only are these packages already cross-compatible in most ways, but neither package has a dominant market position. If Apple had 90% market share and wouldn't let their phone pair with anything but an AirPod, I'd feel differently, but that's just not the state of reality.

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

People who disagree with me are part of a conspiracy! I know it!

It's not a matter of disagreeing, it's a matter of reframing the topic like Apple is forced to turn everything into an open standard.

> I see the EU's stance here. I just think it's not true for these specific features.

Understood. Nonetheless it is objectively true that those features only work with other devices of Apple. DMA is not an Apple-regulation, it's a set of agnostic criterias that have been met by those features.

I think you consider Phone+Watch+Earbuds an inseparable set of one experience. But this is actually a perception created by Apple.

Now Apple is still free to do all that going forward, but they are not allowed to restrict i.e. an Earbuds competitor from challenging that experience.

Right now they do that, because no matter how great i.e. Garmin is making a smartwatch, they are technically restricted from matching the features of an Apple Watch. Technically restricted by Apple themselves.

Without commenting on the broader topic:

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

> If you get big enough, they swoop in and make you turn everything you've invented into an open standard?

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.")

Doesn't Google offer interoperability for the equivalent features in Android? (well maybe not private symbols in the closed source parts). So I don't see why it should be a big problem for Apple to comply. Except of course that it will weaken the lock-in in their platform, but that's kind of the point.

It's fascinating to me that people have a mis-conception that Google are universally more open about these features, and therefore things will be easy for Apple. I do think they're more open, but the equivalent features are absolutely not "just standardized protocols" on the Google side. Because they're hard engineering problems to make into open protocols!

* Bluetooth auto-pairing: Google Fast Pair is a "regulated standard" type interoperability where Google act as a regulatory body and there's extensive certification testing.

* AirDrop: Samsung Quick Share (totally proprietary) got combined into Google Quick Share which is semi-proprietary: the protocol documentation isn't open, and there's no first-party MacOS or Linux client support, only reverse engineered stuff - just like AirDrop! But, pieces are hiding in the Chromium source tree and an unofficial Google project called "nearby." Actually, the state of this is really strange to me, honestly; Google try to claim it's both not a Google product and a flagship Android feature at the same time.

* AirPlay: Not really, Google Cast supports more devices so people feel it's more open, but it works the same way as AirPlay - for access as a device sink, you enter a "business agreement" with Google and get a blob and a certificate, or reverse engineer it.

* Device handoff: I don't know of anyone else who has as extensive an out-of-band device-state signaling system as Apple. Microsoft Phone Link tries but Android doesn't really expose some features at a low enough level for it to be 1:1 with what Apple have done either. There is again, notionally, some aspect of this in "Google Nearby Presence," which is in this not-a-Google-product Google product superposition.

* Notifications and background tasks. In this space Android is definitely and provably more interoperable, at the cost that background tasks can spam you and wreak havoc on your device. This will be the hardest thing for Apple IMO; right now, their internal background task and notification sync capability revolves around internal trust and QA, and to expose it externally without degrading user experience will require quite a bit of engineering lift IMO.

The point is that you can do those things, even if they are not as easy as you wish or require more investment than thought.

In the case of Apple, you cannot, regardless of how much you want to invest in supporting those features.

Nobody is asking Apple to fund the development of other companies; however, it is required of them that they let access to those functionalities to other companies, fairly.

If Apple had a more open system where they would let their customers decide what to run and what to install on their phone, the problem wouldn't even exist. With jailbreaking you could potentially implement all of this (basically just put support for the Android version and voila) but it's illegal and user can't do that easily.

The problem is Apple want their cake and eat it too. It's like with power and responsibility, the more of the first you get the more of the second you have, that's pretty much it.

So, they can choose to keep their system completely closed and provide a way for competitors to access those features or they can choose to fully open up.

Of course they are going to choose the first option, because they are still making a shit ton of money by fully controlling the system allowing them to have software/services that nobody can compete with.

> but I'd never want to sell hardware in Europe

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.

> If you get big enough, they swoop in and make you turn everything you've invented into an open standard?

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.

Apple has a market share of about 25% and dropping each year.

They are not a standard by any definition.

Is that true in the EU? I think you are looking at global numbers.

iPhone market share is around 25% in the EU

I was talking about the dropping year by year claim. I should have been more clear, sorry.

It would be difficult to argue Apple is a de-facto standard, given most people don't run Apple devices.

As a user, that all sounds great to me. I should be able to run whatever software I want on my hardware, not just what the manufacturer deems so.

I'm all for openness and interoperability, but not all of these are the same category of requests. AirPlay, literally no damage to Apples business opening that protocol, because everyone still suck at creating the receiving devices, or could use the ChromeCast protocol. The only risk is having Android owners buying HomePods or an AppleTV.

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.

> The weird missing one is iMessage.

https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/mex_24...

> the Commission found that iMessage, Bing, Edge and Microsoft Advertising do not qualify as gatekeeper services.

I wonder why AirPlay is a gatekeeper service, but iMessage isn't?

iOS is the gatekeeper. AirPlay is how iOS plays media wirelessly.

iMessage isn't a gatekeeper because it isn't popular enough in Europe. It comes with iOS, but most European iOS users don't use it for enough of their messaging for the regulators to give it that classification.

background execution is a pretty normal one for e.g. smartwatches. Being able to reliably have interactions with accessory devices in both directions is kind of important to a good experience. For instance, the Find My Phone feature on fitbit devices breaks if you close out of the fitbit app on your iPhone.

nfc is more niche and Apple Wallet already covers a lot of use cases so idk what the use case is there.

documentation for private symbols is because the EU is also introducing a process to request access to private APIs.

> The Commission considers that developers may benefit from having access to a high-level description of iOS and iPadOS components to enable a broad understanding of available features and functionalities, which can then be useful and sufficient for clearly identifying the relevant components within a developer’s interoperability request.

"If you get big enough, they swoop in and make you turn everything you've invented into an open standard?"

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.

> If you get big enough, they swoop in and make you turn everything you've invented into an open standard?

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.

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

I actually agree with this much more than I agree with the notion that if a company is able to vertically integrate a hardware and software stack, they are no longer allowed to differentiate by using software. I'd be way more in favor of a Qualcomm fair licensing settlement (and, if you look at countries in Asia with successful mobile chipset competition, sure enough, they all already did this...), and I think it would be significantly more meaningful, as well, given Apple's market share in the EU versus Qualcomm's patent-share on 4G/5G.

> BTLE multidevice hand off

What is this? I'm genuinely curious. I know that Bluetooth supports multipoint, but as far as I know there is no standard for a phone to send a BLE notification or advertisement that says "yo, swap streams, I got a phone call" in the way Apple do.

> Proximity Pairing (BTLE, again)

This isn't a standard, but rather a more-open Google thing (GFPS).

> Miracast/Google Cast

These are both almost as closed as AirPlay. The receiver side works basically the same way, you give the standards owner money and they give you a big binary blob and a device certificate.

> NFC emulation (Windows Mobile 10 had support before Android/iOS)

I remember using this, it was really cool and a surprisingly complete implementation. Windows Phone was so far ahead of its time in so many ways...

> background execution (this isn't even special, it's just something only Apple gets but others don't)

For this exact reason, I feel like this is one of the more difficult ones for Apple to give other people access to in a good way, honestly. Right now their in-house apps basically get to run in the background and operate on some combination of the honor system and internal QA to make sure they stay within power/timeslice budget (or don't, given Apple's recent quality woes). Now they have to come up with a way to regulate third-party timeslice and API consumption that doesn't also upset the regulators.

BTLE Device Handoff is another name for the BTLE Audio multi-device stream control. Read a little about it at the Bluetooth LE website[0] -- you're looking at a combination of the Audio Stream Control Service and Telephony Bearer/Call Control working with the Coordinated Devices setup.

One of the goals of BTLE Audio is that you could be listening to music at an airport from your laptop and an announcement can chime in over your music to tell you that your flight has been delayed once again, then hand off the audio stream to your phone when you get a phone call from your significant other asking if you're going to make it home in time for dinner (you aren't)

Miracast is an open standard, and there's multiple open source libre DIY implementations of it -- you can even use it from Wayland now.

AS for how to handle background execution, if it really is that hard to handle scheduling background tasks, how is it that Microsoft once again figured it out over a decade ago with Win10 mobile, which had a "get in, get out, and if you take too long, we might knock a few times before giving you the boot"

[0] https://www.bluetooth.com/learn-about-bluetooth/feature-enha...

Android had NFC support in 2010, with the Nexus S. Windows 10 came out in 2015

It's a big ask for a region that only represents about 7% of Apple revenue. I don't see how Apple leaves the EU, or how they will comply with all of these demands.

7% for Europe seemed unlikely to me so I googled it.

First link I opened says Europe is the second biggest market for Apple at 24% after the US at 42%. https://www.bullfincher.io/companies/apple/revenue-by-geogra...

Could you post your source for the 7% or explain how you got that number?

24% is for Europe which includes many countries that are not in the EU. That said, the 7% is EU App Store revenue so I don't think we know the actual revenue number for the EU. It stands to reason that its not crazy far off from 7% though assuming EU customers buy things in the app store at similar rates to elsewhere.

https://sixcolors.com/post/2024/02/this-is-tim-transcript-of...

It seems more like 25%, a bigger market than US and with a lot of progression margin because of android dominance.

Half of that is already open standart they don't allow because they don't want and android supports it

Not only are they onerous, but also they are really random. What innovation is being held back by AirDrop being proprietary?

To be frank I think Apple should be able to provide a superior experience on the stack they directly control, but given that Google has been raked through the coals for much less, it's only fair to be consistent.

Good thing they have the money then

> If you get big enough, they swoop in and make you turn everything you've invented into an open standard?

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.

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