It’s fascinating the kind of cool features we can have when products are made to be useful, with their target user in mind. Go EU!
So until there will be more incentive to make it globally, the UX is intentionally crippled not only by making the minimal viable but also by region locking.
Imagine pairing headphones working great in EU and then you’re traveling somewhere and it’s broken.
And when "comply with local laws" means "unbrick bluetooth pairing for third-party devices" then a company in good faith could just, you know, not brick the functionality in the first place. There's no law against products that "just work".
Plenty of other markets and businesses operate just fine while operating in an environment that makes protecting individual innovation functionally impossible. Just look at any related to fast fashion (not that I think the fast fashion market is a healthy phenomenon) or any commodities market. Or for that matter, most of the software industry.
The incentive for creating features should be to remain relevant and competitive. It shouldn’t be to build moats and war chests.
Or to put it another way, find an alternative.
The general problem is that there must be a line.
Vendors don’t create lock-ins because they are malicious, they create it because it makes them money.
Now, if we limit these lock-ins, it will reduce their ability to make money and yes, it will impact some features - short term.
But looking at it long terms, vendor lock-ins are actually a reason to stop innovating: your customers are locked in anyway.
So, overall, I would say this is good for innovation in general.
If Apple knew they would need to expand this feature past their gear, possible they’d never have implemented.
We may never know what stays unimplemented due to this.
(This is a neutral take - note I do not have a personal opinion formed in this “debate”.)
And this is EXACTLY why they need to open up more core access to their devices. So someone else can innovate.
I'm not seeing an incentive structure for them to change being the only source of good workflows for their users - it's their whole thing "It just works" - regardless of if it's true in practice or not.
It’s just less obvious / measurable that immediate benefits.
And also, short term, isn’t it that other EarPods are getting better, rather than AirPods getting worse?
Medium term, I don’t think that Apple will stop innovating on AirPods just because of the EU market and this one feature not being exclusive to AirPods anymore. But it’s a possibility, I agree.
You're basically saying Apple would be disincentivized to innovate on the Apple Watch because Apple would need to release the underlying APIs that make those work with the phone to competing solutions. But the status quo is that competing solutions that are already better than the Apple Watch straight up aren't allowed on the platform, and the Apple Watch generally costs more than its competitors.
You are unintentionally saying that if Apple had to allow third parties to use their private APIs, that the Apple Watch would have to cost less and/or innovate more in order to convince us all to buy it instead of buying a watch from Samsung or Google.
What you are describing is a more competitive and open market where consumers benefit from lower prices and more of an incentive to innovate and justify high prices.
I would also dispute the notion that merely releasing these APIs would somehow give away all your secret sauce. Competitors still have to build the experience on top of that.
They've done extra work to cripple competing devices. It's obnoxious.
EDIT: Downvotes for what? That’s literally what the DMA is for. If you don’t like it, take it up with your representatives - it’s nothing to do with me.
So if a company creates a widget and sells that widget, thereby creating a market, they are automatically a monopoly? how is anything invented without creating a monopoly?
Also why is it an iOS market and not a mobile phone market? if we compare features of devices then there’s not a lot of difference between modern phones, so segregating them by what OS they run seems odd.
https://gs.statcounter.com/vendor-market-share/mobile/europe
A government mandating standards in electricity transmission or gasoline composition may disincentivize the development of features that make some people's devices incompatible with charging at certain locations or cars that can only use gas from certain gas stations but that is the opposite of a bad thing.
We live in a much better world because people in the past decided that all telephones should be able to make calls to each other and that people don't really have to think about messing up putting fuel in their car because the size of the nozzles at pumps are standardized.
There are absolutely more opportunities for governments to make small but objectively measurable improvements in society with well placed regulations on interoperability.