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Comment by ankit219 | Hacker News Reader

Are we learning the wrong lessons? Integrated always works better than modular components. Here, Apple is being asked to enable their versions of software for third party devices, which do not have the same hardware assumptions as Apple did. (Apple will not release the exact hardware spec for airpods anyway). This means the newer version will be designed modularly, with some tradeoffs to enable the "same" kind of access to third party. Then there is a caveat that it there is even a bit of experience change from 1st party to third party access, it will be complained about and investigated. so, the way fwd is designing with third party in mind, and that almost always leads to bloat and substandard experience for end user.

Probably better would have been just simpler access, even if not the integrated experience like. But that would lead to complains from third party manufacturers.

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The lesson being learned is that Apple could’ve avoided all this trouble if they had used or produced standards for the connection between their components. The whole concept of a gatekeeper was created in response to Apple-likes being difficult and simply hostile to interop opportunities even though they’re defacto the phone company and there is no way around them.

So if the solution is not optimal, that circles back to Apple who are responsible for coming up with a solution that works. Then choosing to prioritise platform lock-in is a business strategy, leaving regulation the only recourse.

A company making an integrated experience would inevitably provide a better experience/performance than a company asked to build for 100s of devices with different spec. That Apple did not want to open it up is a separate discussion.

My contention is this: expecting a third party provider to be able to provide the same experience as the first party is an impractical goal. Even pushing companies towards that means a lot of second order effects where everyone ends up like Intel or Windows for that matter. We already have android on that level.

You can have a reasonable requirement where Apple should not be able to block other companies from providing similar services based on an iphone. But clearly the directive here is that Apple's competing products should not be better based on better integration, which can only go in one direction. Apple degrades its own products to comply. Yes, competition wins, but consumers lose. In this case specifically - consumers who would want to choose Apple, better experiences would not be able to simply because Apple cannot ensure the level of software/hardware alignment as it works today if the same software is written with modular hardware in mind.

> You can have a reasonable requirement where Apple should not be able to block other companies from providing similar services based on an iphone.

This is what the requirement is. The EU isn’t demanding that Apple provide the same experience for 3rd Party and 1st Party products. It only requires that Apple allow 3rd Parties access to the same capabilities as 1st Party products, so 3rd Parties could build 1st Party quality experiences.

Nobody is asking Apple to degrade their own products. They’re just demanding that Apple don’t artificially degrade other people’s products.

> That Apple did not want to open it up is a separate discussion.

This is the only point of discussion here. Because all the EU requires is that Apple open up their internal protocols so others can implement them.

> This is the only point of discussion here. Because all the EU requires is that Apple open up their internal protocols so others can implement them.

Apple supports Bluetooth just like Android phones do and does not degrade that.

A fair way of dealing with this is to ask Apple to license its technology to third parties, not be forced to give it away for free.

We’re talking about a UI interface here. How exactly would you ask Apple to “license its technology” there? Apple needs tell people how to trigger that interface, and Apple needs to support 3rd parties trigging that interface.

Apple could “license its technology”, but what use would that be. Having other phone manufacturers implement the same UI doesn’t change the market distorting effects of the iPhone.

Device manufacturers could pay Apple to register their devices to be recognized by the iPhone that they know how to use the advanced features it is capable of, for example.

Also, device manufacturers can create apps for their devices and trigger those apps when a device is close by.

I am against the idea of having a company spend resources on designing and implementing features for its devices and then being forced to give them away for free.

> Device manufacturers could pay Apple to register their devices to be recognized by the iPhone that they know how to use the advanced features it is capable of, for example.

Maybe if Apple actually offered that at a reasonable price, and to be clear they have never offered this at any price, the EU wouldn’t have felt compelled to act. AirPods have been around for a decade now, the DSA has been in the works for five years. So it’s not like Apple hasn’t had time to act. They chose to do nothing, so now the EU is removing their right to choose.

> Also, device manufacturers can create apps for their devices and trigger those apps when a device is close by.

This would require support from Apple, which notably, it doesn’t provide.

> I am against the idea of having a company spend resources on designing and implementing features for its devices and then being forced to give them away for free.

We’re talking about Apple here, one of the richest companies on the planet. I think it can survive. The DSA only applies to companies that achieve gatekeeper status, which basically means they’re an effective monopoly in a market that many people are forced to participate in (in this case smartphones). It’s a heck of bar to cross, and something that only been achieved by unbelievably profitable companies.

I am going to comment on the last part of your post: No one is forcing people to buy or use Apple products. You can buy a Pixel, a Samsung or one of the other lesser known Android brands and be on your merry way. And you can buy earbuds for those devices too; Samsung offers their own brand for example.

There is an effective duopoly in the smartphone OS market. iOS and Android, that’s what’s makes Apple a gatekeeper.

Duopolies are just as dangerous as monopolies. Basically anything where there is a dozen or so competitors tends to be dangerous, as the US loves to demonstrate in as many industries as possible.

> A company making an integrated experience would inevitably provide a better experience/performance than a company asked to build for 100s of devices with different spec. That Apple did not want to open it up is a separate discussion.

I disagree, this is not a given. Usually the opposite is true.

Meaning, properly designed APIs and protocols for public use are more robust than one-off private protocols. Because there are expectations.

Apple could be malicious and make the API stupid, but if they were genuine then they wouldn't. They would make a good API, which is much more likely, I think, when the API is public versus some secret private API.

> Meaning, properly designed APIs and protocols for public use are more robust than one-off private protocols. Because there are expectations.

This is the polar opposite of my experience. Whether it's Bluetooth, PDF's, or a web audio JavaScript spec, actual products are plagued with inconsistencies and incompatibilities, as they implement the spec in different ways or brand A has bugs that brands B, C and D need to write special code for to get interoperability working. And brand C has other bugs brands A, B and D now need to also handle.

Whereas private protocols are much more likely to just work because there's only one implementation. There are no differing interpretations.

> A company making an integrated experience would inevitably provide a better experience/performance than a company asked to build for 100s of devices with different spec

This isn't given. For example the company that makes smart light switches doesn't provide a code entry pad and the company that makes the alarm doesn't provide a light switch. If they were interoperable I'd have a better system. Futhermore they'd both sell more widgets, as I'm holding off on further units in case I find a better third option and end up disposing of my current ones.

> We already have android on that level.

You're missing the point. Apple isn't in trouble beacuse of user's choice between iPhone and Android. They're in trouble because of 20-50 headphone makers who Apple prevents from truely competing Apple for 2 billion iPhone users.

It's the same with all of these issues Apple (and Google) are running into. It's not about the user's choice to buy iPhone or Android. It's about 100s of thousands of businesses ability to reach those billions of users without a gatekeeper.

I am saying that if you force Apple to move away from integrated devices to something which has to be generic (modular like Intel) which does not know which hardware it will pair up with and hence needs baseline performance, it turns into android to a large extent. Other businesses may have legit incentives to reach those customers, but unless Apple makes drastic changes to current setup, the software would not support other manufacturers to the same extent. So they will go to EU and then Apple will write a more generic code - to ensure all manufactures are similarly supported, and it takes them away from integrated system they currently have. Competition wins, but customers dont.

Apple is free to push for standards that support every feature they want.

> Apple degrades its own products to comply

Apple makes a choice here, they don’t degrade anything they just choose to be difficult and to have to be forced to do the right thing by “whomever has enough money to sue us”.

If you’re a user of Apple devices, I don’t know why you’re defending them because noting this corporation does is meant for you once they double dip on you buying their hardware and then signing up for their services.

There is no “produced standard” to allow three Bluetooth devices - each headphone and the case - to register as one Bluetooth device or to automatically register a Bluetooth device to all devices using the same cloud account.

Big disagree that integrated always works better than modular writ large, but in any case maybe they could just hire this guy to do it? https://github.com/kavishdevar/librepods

Its mostly true when the integrating company cares for the user experience. Which apple clearly does.

The example you shared is the opposite. I am imagining a kernel today written in a manner that airpods would be able to use it to extract the max out of it. Now, it has to support 10 other third party pods, so at the minimum, kernel would be more generalized.

A company that produces a wireless mouse that charges upside down really does not care about user experience.

Steve Jobs loved the iMac's terrible hockey puck mouse. Jony Ive is probably to blame for the terrible (yet very thin) butterfly keyboard making it into Apple laptops. However, these missteps do not prove that Apple doesn't care about user experience.

> told disgruntled iPhone 4 users that they were holding their phones wrong

That was never proven. Although their PR response was atrocious.

> That was never proven

“All phones have sensitive areas,” Jobs wrote. “Just avoid holding it in this way.”

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2010/06/jobs-on-iphone-4-ant...

https://www.macrumors.com/2010/06/24/steve-jobs-describes-ip...

Jobs wasn't exactly wrong - bridging the antenna with your finger was not a good way to hold the iPhone 4.

What's hilarious is how they "fixed" it in software - by changing the signal bar display curve, and then making the lower bars appear taller.

https://9to5mac.com/2025/10/08/a-15-year-mystery-solved-the-...

I guess if apple changes the way it works completely it would be different, with the kernel and such but like

Aren’t peripherals inherently modular kind of definitionally?

You should check that GitHub, it makes AirPod functionality mostly agnostic. The warts could (in some world) be mere bug reports for the manufacturer firmware team.

Personally, I think the Bluetooth standards suck a big one even recognizing how good it’s gotten and I _almost_ resent apple for not pushing this out as anither standard.

Modular in the sense you have to support multiple hardwares (of different kinds) instead of just one. Eventually you arrive at a place where software is good enough, and hardware + kernels cannot do the exact heavy lifting that is happening today in conjunction. Not the intel level but directionally similar kind of tradeoffs.

The components are modular under the hood, they have to be. Apple just doesn't let you take advantage of it.

iOS has a daemon that reads your notifications and ships them to Apple Watch. They have a daemon that scans for AirPods and gives you UI to pair them. But you as an app developer cannot do any of those things. There was no public API for notification stream access, scanning for specific Bluetooth devices, floating UI widgets, or even just persistent daemons. All of those capabilities more or less exist on Android, which is why multiple smartwatch ecosystems have been built on top of it while iOS only supports the first-party option.

Back in the 2000s, when Apple was just getting into mobile devices, the app development landscape was far less bleak. iTunes on Windows could happily index your entire music and video collection and sync it to an iPod and there was nothing Microsoft could do to stop them. Everything is just finding the appropriate file and connecting to the appropriate USB device to transfer it. And that's more or less how things still work today, except now on smartphones all of that is put into isolated containers and walled off behind private APIs.

modular does not mean in terms of how the library is architected, but in terms of how many vendors/customers it needs to support. Airpods' hardware is built and then kernels are written in a way to compliment each other and get the most out of the system. With another set of headphones with a different chip, there is a very good chance that code written today would not be optimal because other builders could manufacture different things based on the same spec. You cannot bring everything to software, nor can you have hardware doing everything. Tradeoffs would be needed.

The issue comes in second order effects. If third party headphones are given access and then the experience is not as good, they complain that Apple hasnt open up the spec enough, and it just results in Apple being forced to be modular in their approach.

> If third party headphones are given access

Third-party headphones already have access. Bluetooth audio is a standard that is well-supported both by iOS and headphones of any kind[0]. The problem is that the process for pairing a device on iOS (or, for that matter, Android) is a pain in the ass for knowledgeable users and completely untenable for everyone else.

Apple recognized that this was a problem, and made their phone detect if you were trying to pair new headphones and pop up a notification for it. But only for Apple's headphones. Which is stupid.

[0] In fact, this is why I use AirPods Pro on an Android phone.

I disagree with the premise. For me, "works better" means that I can swap out one of the devices in my fleet with a different brand and still have a functioning setup.

But even ignoring that, I think your claim can be true while forcing Apple to be compatible is still the right thing to do, because optimizing for personal convenience and user experience only is not the best outcome if it comes at the expense of market failure due to vendor lock-in.

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