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Comment by jitl | Hacker News Reader

The issue with DMA is that the laws are very vague and appear to forbid basically any private API calls between products if your business is big. You basically need to turn every one of your systems into an AWS service; and then on top of that not favor your own system over those registered by competitors. This is supposed to level the playing field but making and maintaining public APIs like this is tons of work in terms of coordination and so stuff really does take a lot longer to build for EU to meet the requirements; or to confirm that it somehow doesn’t need to be a public API.

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Yeah this is exactly my impression of what makes the DMA suck for a company like Apple.

It makes it easier to not offer functionality in Europe. Because to offer the functionality in Europe you have to do the extra work of making sure any competitor who could go crying to the euro officials can plausibly inject a competing thing with equal integration.

If they want to offer functionality in Europe they should consider this from the beginning as cost of doing business.

They pride themselves as being privacy and security minded when releasing new products.

They already have mechanisms to trust some accessories and apps ("my watch" vs. "your watch"). Just offer the same to devices not made by them.

If the user then decides to install the (probably illegal) "Meta Spy Master 9000 App" then so be it.

They are adults after all.

The DMA very explicitly disagrees with the notion of "Apple knows best" and until the tech giants come to terms with that, their comments on the laws cannot be trusted.

I would love to see them cooperate because then, over time, their considerable technical knowledge could be used to work out the details.

Even for a big company like Apple or Google, a 10x increase in public API surface area sounds nuts to maintain in terms of cost but chiefly in terms of time: it will be so much slower to evolve a system once it’s festooned with previously private api surfaces that could change quickly, but now need to be public and offer backwards compatibility or you’ll get hit with a DMA fine.

That sounds wonderful, I wish it worked like that. Imagine Microsoft needing to fully document OneDrive integration points and APIs and make it possible for me to plug my NAS / ownCloud / NextCloud / whatever with the same level of integration.

I mean, sounds great to me. These devices are integral to our daily lives and so complete vendor lock-in and self preference shouldn't be a thing anymore.

One should be able to "mix and match ecosystems" so to speak and expect that any accessory will work to the same level, with the same features as a first party one.

Why shouldn't third parties be able to integrate using AWDL to enable bluetooth earbud device switching and AirDrop across operating systems, for example. Why shouldn't a WearOS watch be able to have the same notification handling and messaging capabilities as an Apple Watch on iOS? Let my windows PC have a shared clipboard with my iPhone just like my mac can, etc.

Wouldn't that bog development down to a crawl, since any new capability now has to have an entire public standard built around it?

Well, a public standard would be great but not necessary. In the Apple example they just need to document AWDL and let people use those APIs instead of keeping them private. The protocol and APIs already exist they are just gate kept by Apple.

The law would probably even allow them certify the vendor, for a reasonable fee, and verify their identity.

All they need to do is implement it in a way that still allows competitors to do their thing. Wha

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