Apple threatens to stop selling iPhones in the EU
pluralistic.net
pluralistic.net
It'll also take a lot for Apple to be able to spin this as "the EU is banning us from selling iPhones" when it's their decision.
I'm not sure why you thought your point was such a checkmate, as if I have a problem with the company itself, rather than the practice.
One of the only reasons I use the damn device.
Because mobile phones are not gaming consoles, and are an essential device for everyday life?
Because Steam doesn't prevent you from installing and using games from any other store and doesn't claim it is entitled to a cut?
Yeah I can almost guarantee that people are going to be mad at Apple.
This time they are having a bit of a hard time as a lot of people are clearly sick of their shenaningans. However, we are in a bubble of our own, and it's hard to say what the general public will think of it.
That law axed a lot of the second-hand grey market for cheap Apple cables of poor build quality (something Apple also worked towards because their official cables have had poor build quality since forever), and is generally seen as a positive for most people, since everyone who's ever had an Apple device is also familiar with the growing collection of cheap chargers that are varying degrees of functional that comes with it; instead a USB-C charger can often be repurposed to charge e-readers, tablets, lights and so on, while Apple chargers could only be used to charge Apple devices. It also eliminated all the problems with audio docks, where before you had to pick between buying one for Apple and one for Android/everything else.
Basically it's made less e-waste people directly have to engage with, and is generally seen as a good thing... but Apple kept whining about it, so their reputation as a customer-friendly company is in the gutter as a result; even most Apple users I know of still don't even bother trying to defend the company on how bad they are at interoperability/standardization.
I had the 1,5G iPod (10GB variant) which was sold with all the accessories, including a carrying pouch, very nice quality remote (that could be used with any headphones, not just the ones included) and a very nice FireWire cable. It was literally one of the best quality cable I ever used.
The first iPhone also had a pretty decent quality cable (and included a dock). Back then, iBooks/PowerBooks also included many adaptors for the various video-out standard of the time, that is to be contrasted with their all USB-C release MacBooks, where they basically told their customers: "fuck you, buy the necessary dongles at a nasty markup".
It all went to shit when Apple became very successful with the iPhone and the bean counter fully took over, saving pennies everywhere he could (at scale it does makes a lot of money).
And this is what feels so bad with Apple today, you pay a premium price, only to be taken for a fool and have a mediocre experience in the name of "ecology" (who are they kidding, seriously).
Only Apple can be Apple.
The office suite is very strong. You may not see it like that, but for some it doesn't really have any proper equivalent, a lot like some Adobe software. Some get close, but still come up short in many ways.
And Microsoft is pricing their stuff very well. I think that's actually the problem, they can use their hegemony that gives them insane volumes and allows them to set prices at a level so competitive no young outsider can meaningfully compete.
Network effects in computing/software are really nasty since there is a very real lock in effect. We can force format standardization (we dit that!) but that's only one part of the equation. One still has to build the software and that requires a lot of upfront capital cost (to pay the devs) before you can even sell your first unit.
And if we look at what Apple has done with their own Office suite, it's not even close. It's "pretty" but nowhere near a true replacement. It's actually sad that with all the cash Apple has, they are unwilling/unable to really invest in a proper competitive alternative.
They didn't blink when it came to the GDPR either for big tech (most of the problems on the level of the EU for GDPR have been that they themselves are subject to it, leading to the occasional "egg on face" situation + the EU/US privacy laws being fundamentally incompatible.)
The blog post cites an article from The Guardian, with the headline "Apple calls for changes to anti-monopoly laws and says it may stop shipping to the EU". In that article, nothing is mentioned about ceasing iPhone sales. It does say: "warning that unless it is amended the company could stop shipping some products and services to the 27-country bloc" and elsewhere: "It did not specify which products could in future be prevented from being distributed in the EU, but said that the Apple Watch, first released a decade ago, might not be released today in the EU"
The actual press release from Apple seems to be https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/09/the-digital-markets-a... and if there's anything in there that supports the headline of this HN submission, it's too subtle for me to find. I think this submission is unreasonably sensationalized, with the predictable effect that the comments here are mostly knee-jerk reactions to the (false) headline instead of discussion of the validity or lack thereof of any specific complaints from Apple.
What's news to me is apparently the European Commission is required to conduct a review of the DMA every three years, including collecting feedback from the public (both users and businesses). So Apple's complaints aren't coming out of the blue; they're part of that feedback process.
That's still about withholding specific features, not about abandoning entire product lines in the EU. And it's quite the opposite of a threat from Apple to the EU.
Hasn't Apple been pretty consistent in choosing to ship with fewer features where necessary rather than not ship at all? Given that, the "If we shared them any sooner" bit only makes sense as an explanation for why Apple's choosing their usual course of action, not as a threat to change course and pull out of the EU market.
So far they’ve chosen to go with a simple feature flag but eventually it may require a pullout. Especially if the EU fines them for not releasing features in the EU.
Isn't that entirely your speculation, not supported by anything Apple has actually said or done?
As far as I can recall, the most notable example of an Apple product getting a limited rather than global release was the Vision Pro—and that was just a slow roll-out to new countries, not exclusion from the entire EU. And on the other hand, there's a long list of products where Apple has shipped with regional differences in features, both software and hardware.
> Especially if the EU fines them for not releasing features in the EU.
Has the EU actually made that threat yet? Because it would be quite a stretch to accuse Apple of making a threat to the EU in response to a threat from the EU that hasn't actually been stated.
MS would later re-sell Nokia to HMD in 2016, who still release some feature-phones, including ones running an "S30+" OS that has nothing to do with Symbian.
I'm nowhere near a 2 year upgrade cycle but the fact that you think a 18 year old phone serves you "very well", and therefore Nokia phones aren't crappy shows how out of touch you are. There's zero chance the average person would think the same.
Enlighten me:
Do us a solid and just ignore each other for today?
As for what people are buying and not buying, according to statcounter [0], the smartphone market in the EU is a third Apple, a third Samsung, and then the final third is a scattershot of other Android devices, primarily Xiaomi.
This is in contrast with a 57.27% foothold in the US. It's a different world.
To put it into perhaps an even more grappling perspective, that whole green bubble vs blue bubble thing? I've first heard of it only just a few years ago from Marques Brownlee on YouTube. Never encountered it in real life prior or since.
[0] https://gs.statcounter.com/vendor-market-share/mobile/europe
Funny you're invoking that when the fact that someone chose to buy apple at all means they thought it was the best option, according to their opinion. By banning apple you're necessarily making those people buy a crappier phone.
You do realize by the way that this would mean the majority of people here then consider iphones the crappier option by your logic?
And that's fine. Most people don't but Porches or Subarus. That doesn't mean they're "crappier"
What is driving your motivated reasoning? Why are you so invested in the ability for Apple to continue to have the ability to keep their app store locked down? How do you benefit from this decision?
Honestly even if Google somehow decided to stop selling Android to Europe, something which seems extremely unlikely, it would swiftly be replaced by Chinese alternatives with no obvious loss of functionality.
Apple has zero leverage with the "we will stop selling" strategy. It’s just there so they look less pathetic when it comes to what they are actually doing: bribing Trump so he intervenes for them. We really have come a long way from the "Think different" company.
Exactly, it would be a brutal self own of Apple and Google and losing control over whole European market due to refusing to implement mild regulations. Pure bluff on Apple's and Google's side.
They are calling the EU's bluff, and it's possibly a smart business decision to do so.
I mean, realistically, most of the loud words are just that.
Part of this is China being a far more dynamic, high risk, Wild West-style capitalist system that’s communist only in very specific areas.
The other part being, you don’t really have to write stuff down as much when you can just manipulate subjects of your authoritarian regime at will.
That creates a web of implicit rules that need to be complied with just as much as if they were written down, while having the downside of unclear boundaries and exceptions. An environment with more rules, but with them written in ink and with lawyers that can be consulted to interpret them is preferable.
Or built by Nokia, a European firm that was bought by Microsoft?
And he's still Finish as well as far as I know.
I don't think so... EU is only 7% of their revenue globally according to their CFO, and DMA can fine them up to 10% of global revenue, so it may actually be cheaper to just leave the market.
I hardly believe that a wealthy continent with a population of 450 million is just 7% of their revenue.
France? Their debt is killing their country and causing escalating political crises.
Germany? Energy costs are killing their competitiveness. Hard to compete with energy costs of $0.44 per kWh on average; before labor costs.
Italy? Need I say more? Their economy is notoriously stagnant.
The remaining 24 EU countries make up less than 50% of the EU's GDP. Meanwhile, US and EU GDP went from almost 1:1 in 2008, to 1:0.65 and still declining.
To give you a sense of how severe Germany's problems are, the US state of Mississippi is almost ready to pass Germany's GDP per capita.
2. None of that says that the EU isn't rich
3. None of that proves that the bullshit about revenue
Do you know how I know that? Because that "7%" comes from this quote: "Just to keep it in context, the changes apply to the EU market, which represents roughly 7% of our global App Store revenue."
App Store revenue is not all of Apple's revenue. Oh, and those same execs claim they don't even know if App Store makes money or loses it, so how would they know.
I've actually lived on both sides of the Atlantic. And there is wealth on both sides and there is poverty on both sides. But the gap between rich and poor is much more pronounced on the US side than in the EU. Energy costs are a small fraction of the total expenses. Mississippi is not a good comparison to Germany (last I checked half of Mississippi was not living under the russian boot for 50 years) and if you just stare at the GDP you will miss a lot of quality-of-life indicators that would make me choose to live in Germany long before I would want to live in a backwater state in the USA. And that's assuming the USA will survive the current onslaught on its institutions.
So stop bullshitting and start thinking about what the real world differences are between countries and then strive to improve the one you can have an effect on rather than just seeing this as a numerical game of put-downs that make absolutely no sense at all.
As opposed to comparing a country of 340M with countries with populations anywhere between 33k to 143M?
You could compare the USA to Switzerland or the Netherlands on a per-capita basis or you could pick Romania or Bulgaria and come away with a completely different impression. The main difference is that countries that have been living under the Russian boot for 50 odd years are still recovering and the remainder is far wealthier than the USA and has a smaller wealth gap between rich and poor. This goes in particular for Germany which is still to this day spending large amounts of money to fund the recovery of the eastern part of Germany, but fortunately, unlike Poland, Bulgaria, Romania and the Baltics they have a large enough industrial base to be able to do so. To lump that all together makes zero sense and shows a lack of appreciation of both history and statistics.
You can make the same granularity arguments at the country level as well, for instance Germany vs California or Missouri. Does that mean cross country comparisons are bunk as well? What makes "country" the level of subdivision that's acceptable compared to neighborhood, city, county, state, country, or continent?
But EU countries are closer to US states, except that any two US states are still far more homogeneous than any two EU countries are.
One good basic principle for arguing about stuff is to agree on the meaning of certain words. If you want to compare countries then do so. If you want to compare states with countries, you're welcome to do so too, but you have to take into account the whole range then. But you can't just lump 27 countries on a pile, compute an average and draw a conclusion when comparing it to a single continent sized country.
Besides that, if you take out California the US picture skews downwards considerably, so on that scale other US states have their work cut out for them. No need to compete with Switzerland or the Netherlands for GDP, compete with California first. And that whole discussion still ignores massive wealth generated in China, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore and other places.
The whole idea that you can just collapse a very complex comparison to a single number and call it a day is fatally flawed.
>...
>The whole idea that you can just collapse a very complex comparison to a single number and call it a day is fatally flawed.
So you reject being able to compare EU member countries to either US (as a whole) or US states?
Leaning on GDP as this all-encompassing metric is rather absurd, GDP was adopted because it's an easy metric to calculate, not because it provides the most insights on how life is at some place on Earth.
Given the threat of securities fraud lawsuits, I'm liable to believe them over some random commenter casting doubt with zero evidence.
It was taken out of context by some random blogger, whereas the gp was implying company executives were lying. My point that we should trust company executives over random internet commenters still holds.
No you. You're well aware that wasn't my point and are trying to put words in my mouth in a pathetic attempt to save face.
> After all, you chose to believe the random blogger before.
I made no such implication. In fact I specifically quoted the part that I was responding to.
> "Given the threat of securities fraud lawsuits, I'm liable to believe them over some random commenter casting doubt with zero evidence."
That was your statement, but - surprise - no exec made the claim that you chose to believe. And if you had thought for 10 seconds you'd have realized that no such claim could have been made because the figure is clearly non-sensical. Oh, and US execs fairly routinely lie, both in court and outside of it. The fact that they get away with it is not proof that they're not doing it.
I suggest you read over the comment chain more carefully and note the authors. I jumped in at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45405359 and was specifically objecting to the part of the comment that was claiming the executive was lying with no evidence. I made no such claims or arguments based on the 7% figure.
--- start quote ---
Apple willfully violated a 2021 injunction that came out of the Epic Games case, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers said in a court filing on Wednesday.
She wrote that Apple Vice President of Finance Alex Roman “outright lied” to the court about when Apple had decided to levy a 27% fee on some purchases linked to its App Store.
“Neither Apple, nor its counsel, corrected the, now obvious, lies,” Rogers wrote, saying that she considers Apple to “to have adopted the lies and misrepresentations to this Court.”
Rogers added that she referred the matter to U.S. attorneys to investigate whether to pursue criminal contempt proceedings on both Roman and Apple.
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/30/court-finds-apple-executive-...
--- end quote ---
Apple's execs literally lie under oath in a court of law. I trust them about as far as I can throw them. They are the same people claiming they don't know if AppStore is profitable or not.
https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/01/apple-says-eu-represents-7...
> Apple says EU represents 7% of global App Store revenue
Europe (not EU, but close enough) represents about a quarter of the total Apple revenue. (https://www.visualcapitalist.com/charted-how-apple-makes-its...)
https://daringfireball.net/2024/03/eu_share_of_apples_revenu...
> But the EU represents only 7 percent of Apple’s revenue
He is very uncaring when it comes to defending Apple and to smearing EU.
Even when shown that his reading is incorrect, he wrote a long article basically saying "so what I was still right" https://daringfireball.net/2024/03/more_on_the_eus_market_mi...
Why would they be angry at Brussels? If Apple decides to pull out of the EU market that's on them. EU citizens will be a lot less angry at Brussels than Apple's shareholders will be.
In the end the EU consumer gains nothing from all of this but loses their beloved Apple devices.
'Beloved' lol. You can just tell American hands typed this.
"What if the Europeans can't consoom anymore? Won't they riot in the street when they have to use SMS over iMessage?"
> In the end the EU consumer gains nothing from all of this but loses their beloved Apple devices.
I don't think I have an emotional connection with my phone, it serves to call people, message them and to perform other useful functions and if it does not it gets replaced. I'm happy with it, it's a solid piece of gear and it has served me well. But emotional connections with brands or pieces of easily replaceable hardware are unhealthy.
Will they? They were never willing to talk it out to begin with. And now they completely walked out:
--- start quote ---
“Apple has simply contested every little bit of the DMA [Digital Markets Act] since its entry into application,” said Commission spokesperson Thomas Regnier. “This undermines the company’s narrative of wanting to be fully cooperative with the Commission.”
...
“Results of this positive engagement? After two months, Apple came back and asked us to scrap everything,” he said
https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-commission-apple-digital-...
--- end quote ---
Not particularly happy with Google for other reasons either. There are some days I want to go back to the days of Windows Mobile ROM kitchens and PalmOS. At least it wasn't such a monoculture back then.
This informs a lot of my choices. It's the reason my car is old, it's the reason my computer is running Linux, it is the reason why I don't wear branded apparel and it helped me decide where to bank. But I fear that it is a losing battle.
The monoculture that you refer to creates choke points and legislators love those. It gives an illusion of control, but actually it is just a massive security risk.
> their beloved Apple devices.
lmao the most American comment. Feeling love for a brand. Just pure ideology.
2. People will blame Apple, same like people blamed unstable drivers causing BSOD on Windows on Microsoft.
Anyway you could make exactly same argument for installation of 3rd party applications into the phone.
Here’s a comparison of iOS share in Russia (mobile OS) between August 2025 vs August 2023, using StatCounter data: • August 2025: iOS ~ 31.97 % • August 2023: iOS ~ 27 % (approximately) — StatCounter’s historical data shows iOS had around 26-28 % share in Russia in mid-2023
So between August 2023 and August 2025, iOS’s share in Russia appears to have increased by about 4–6 percentage points (from ~27% → ~32%).
Now compare tiny Russian market to European market. Apple is making obvious empty bluff.
If they can pull out of Russia and lose nothing why can’t they pull out of the EU?
If Apple left the EU they would lose nothing.
European market is 25% Apple's revenue (7% is just App Store revenue)
Russian market is tiny compared to Europe + they were forced to do it via sanctions or risk being sanctioned themselves, so it is easy for Apple to tell we have to leave this market (even that they really did not, otherwise Russians would not be able to i.e. pay for development licenses). Leaving Europe is entirely Apple's decision without somebody forcing their hand.
Anyway the point is, Apple lost 0 market share even after they pulled out.
Apple didn't exit the market. They keep providing services and complying with every whim of the Russian government: https://www.pcmag.com/news/apple-complies-with-russian-censo...
Public companies will happily can the entire management team if they cause as little as a 5% dip in stock price. Apples EU revenue is larger than China and Japan combined. Voluntarily forfeiting that is like the modern management equivalent of ritual self-sacrifice: afterwards, they would have so much unsold stock on their hands that it’s going to tank prices worldwide.
I think you've confused 'Europe' in Apple's reporting (which actually includes all of the middle east) for the EU (which notably excludes the UK, Norway, Russia, etc.)
Apple doesn't report it's EU revenue (and there's confusion about numbers reported on an analyst call in 2024.)
This is about Apple excluding features specifically in the EU.
Everything is a revenue calculation
> that has massive engineering implications for an ecosystem as vast as Apple’s.
That is Apple's problems. All Eu says is "do not deliberatly hamper competition and don't install artificial barriers to differentiate your products".
Apple has had no issues complying with every single request from any government.
> Simple features like Live Translation or iPhone Mirroring become 10x more complex to build when you need to test and support other vendor devices.
You don't have to test and support them on vendor devices. You either provide an API, or let "vendor devices" implement the same features. This has never been such big of an issue.
> In fact some features become downright impossible if you require interoperability.
Then those features are either not needed, or it's Apple's own fault (e.g. for preventing others from building the same feature set).
It's insane to me that Hacker News, of all places, would argue that walled gardens are good, actually. Ponder this article, for example: "Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones" https://ericmigi.com/blog/apple-restricts-pebble-from-being-...
> This is about slowing down the pace of development and adding engineering complexity to everything worldwide
The only ones insisting and making it so are Apple. A great example is this: https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/03/14/dma-compliance-default-ma... Apple lets users in the EU set their default maps and navigation app. But only in the EU. They literally made the whole thing more complex for themselves by restricting this feature just to the EU even though this clearly is a feature that benefits users.
It's the exact same thing with the rest of the "impossible features".
Some barriers are not artificial. I’m am an engineer and many of Apple’s engineering feats are only possible due to highly controlled interfaces. See for example audio applications that have very high performance requirements, such as low latency audio. It is literally impossible to build this on Android due to the interoperability layer being too slow. Many useful features on Apple devices take advantage of the highly tuned performance that can only happen on devices in the same ecosystem. Take for example Live Translation on AirPods. It’s very hard to get the same level of performance over a public API. Lots of Apple Silicon advantages in battery usage come about due to their deep integration with all parts of the hardware stack — that level of performance would be impossible over an interoperable stack. This is not about walled gardens, this is about building better performing devices with better experiences. It is much harder, near impossible, to build Apple-quality experiences over third party hardware.
I am completely against artificial walled gardens and artificial barriers but I believe many of Apple’s strict barriers are real engineering performance advantages.
The ones the EU is pointing at, and the ones that Apple is whining about, are completely artificial.
> Take for example Live Translation on AirPods. It’s very hard to get the same level of performance over a public API.
It's trivial to get the same performance. All you have to do is actually let others build the same functionality.
Apple both withholds the APIs and prohibits others from building the same functionality.
> I am completely against artificial walled gardens and artificial barriers but I believe
"... that Apple is completely entitled to any and all walled garden"
It’s literally impossible to build realtime audio apps with ultra low latency on Android. People have been trying for decades. Not trivial at all.
Microsoft and Google and open source devs have tried to build something as good as a MacBook Pro for decades and failed. Because the extremely high performance and polished experience comes from the highly integrated hardware and software stack that only Apple has. Precisely because it is not interoperable. I as an engineer prefer to support fewer devices and make the experience with those few devices better rather than support lots of devices and integrations but crappily.
That is not what Apple is told to do.
I've provided two links to examples of what Apple is asked to do, and you ignored both. Just like Apple. Pretending that people are asking it to do impossible and totally unrelated things.
Signed from my iPhone, with an iPad on the table next to me, and a Mac Studio and Apple TV at home.
Apple has far more leverage than the EU in this case. Millions of unhappy EU consumers are a much more powerful motivator than a few billion lost in revenue for a company as rich as Apple.
Apple would recoup most of the lost revenue through black market and secondhand sales anyway.
Eg. AirPods work better with iPhones than Bluetooth. Why? Because of software integration. Apple Photos works better than third party photo management apps because of the OS to application integration.
The EU should require hardware makers to define compatibility tests and anyone that passes the compatibility test can become a drop in replacement for the vendor’s own apps.
This would increase consumer choice, competition, and reduce ecosystem lock-in. All of which will make things better for consumers.
Are Macs next in the line?
I bet the investors and the stock price would LOVE that
The ease of implementation is not part of the question. Apple is just not allowed to hide these API:s (eg. Low latency audio and bluetooth pairing) and then block and punish any competitor who tries to use them.
Edit: the evidence for my claim - just look at how realtime audio apps with tight latency requirements can’t work on Android
You have no evidence for any of these two claims. From my professional experience it is 100% possible. Making a API public seldom, if ever, requires changes to called code behaviour. Not punishing competitors who tried to use your API is also not requiring any code changes, it is a policy decision.
Apple consumers have come to expect this level of quality from Apple products. It is unreasonable for the EU to demand interoperability with other products when the very thing that makes Apple products work well depends on tight integrations that are not interoperable.
So Apple has to sabotage their own devices performance and security to let other people use it. The EU has no business in this.
If Apple provided public APIs for their products their own mobile devices battery life and security would be worse due to crappy third party integrations. Apple achieves high performance experiences precisely because that is a ENGINEERING REQUIREMENT to build high quality products.
Where are they going to find 25% to cover this loss of revenue? Nowhere
Here’s a comparison of iOS share in Russia (mobile OS) between August 2025 vs August 2021, using StatCounter data:
• August 2025: iOS ~ 31.97 %
• August 2021: In 2021, the iOS share in Russia was about 27.52 % (for mobile OS) per StatCounter’s data.
It will actually help the EU companies to fill in the gap.
Good."
Imagine if the US was to regulate so-called "tech" companies and the surveillance "business model"
Would Apple threaten to stop selling computers with their pre-installed, crippled OS
If they did, what would be left
IMHO
FreeBSD (from which Apple took its UNIX userland) would be left
NetBSD would be left
OpenBSD would be left
Linux would be left (maybe)
To name a few
If these so-called "tech" companies like Apple gave up on surveillance because surveillance was regulated, then we would still have open source volunteer-operated OS projects
I suppose some HN commenter might try to argue
that these OS projects would disappear without certain "tech companies" that do surveillance as a "business" and
that contributions from these so-called "tech" companies are keeping these OS projects going
Apple's "threat" is not credible these Silicon Valley companies have lied too many times. No one is going to believe them
These companies are hell bent on using the internet to conduct surveillance, they cannot stop
AFAIK, those open source OS projects do not try to phone home. Even if they did, the public can remove the surveillance code and re-compile
There is no "app store", no corporate restrictions on what software the computer owner can run
IMHO the compiler toolchains are nicer than "Xcode"; and there's no "Apple Tax"
My love will turn to hate of they do this. That’s the danger with building something people love, it can flip to hatred. They should wield that responsibility carefully.
Sent from an iPhone 15 Pro.
Iphones will he gone, there will be an influx of meizu or whatever chinese alternatives are.
They'll simply loose some market share.
I can’t see any potential issues with that, China and Russia are great friends of Europe!
https://versus.com/en/news/the-rise-of-european-phone-brands
Nobody believes what Americans say, be that Trump, Elon or Apple. They're all full of shit, and they rarely do what they say. The average junkie is a more reliable source on what Apple will do than Apple itself.
“Stop. Don’t. Come back.”
Hahahahahahaha.