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.
> 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.
I would honestly like to read a treatise on why investment comes with Apple platforms first even though other platforms were there first, but we see it time and time again. Vision Pro is probably the first time that has faltered.
My guess would be it's a combination of Apple users spend more money, some chauvinism among investors (they all use Apple platforms), and that it's the largest single development target (android fragmentation is still real when it comes to messier stuff like hardware access and background tasks)
Apple Watch was at least as much as a platform failure as Vision Pro, though much of the story for the latter is yet to be written.
I think there have been many small, successful hardware products. It's just that they look like relative failures or accessories to mobile phones in comparison because iPhone (and to a lesser degree smartphones in general) is just a colossal success and uniquely able to absorb so much new functionality.
Lots of opportunity in third-party AirPlay support. Smartwatch - we just saw the Pebble announcement. NFC emulation opens up for lots of payment scenarios. Background execution opens up access to all kinds of services that do not support APNS or need long-lived connections, and services like sync that had to rely on unreliable hacks like geofencing that get randomly denied by App Store approval. etc etc
Did you mean that hundreds or thousands of start ups would use these features?
I don’t see how these changes will be the deciding factor for whether a start up could exist or not. To use your own example with pebble - it does exist despite the changes not being available.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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"
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.
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.
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.
To comply, for every item in that list, Apple can decide to enable it world wide, or only enable it for devices sold in the EU.
The latter would cost them more, both to initially implement and to maintain.
It'd be interesting to see which items they'd decide are not worth the forking cost and would be enabled world wide then, and what they consider enough of crown jewels to be limited to the EU.
This brings back memories of the bad old days on Microsoft Windows where only Microsoft applications had access to secret APIs. Nobody defended MS back then. Surprised to see comments defending Apple now.
Lived through it and while it might be similar, Microsoft had monopoly at that point (90% and higher share in personal computers - depending on the market). Apple is nowhere near that.
Apple is a monopoly due to their closed ecosystem. They do have a monopoly on headphones that properly work with iphones, operating systems that properly work with apple computers, operating systems and application delivery mechanisms that work with iphones, etc. They could get rid of their legal problems by being more open and supporting open standards, but they don't want to. So as a monopoly, they have to be forced...
"They should add a simple new heuristic to determine an abusive monopoly. If a company is imposing a volume surcharge instead of a volume discount to its biggest customers, it means there exists an abusive monopoly and regulatory intervention is needed.
There is absolutely no reason in a well functioning market for this to occur."
it seems awfully similar.. MS using their dominance in the OS market to establish dominance in the application software market vs apple using their mobile phone to establish dominance in smart watches, etc.. the scale is a bit different since we have the duopoly in the mobile market, but it still doesn't seem like something we want.
It was around the time Apple was about to go bankrupt when Microsoft had about 95% share.
Compare this to iPhone activations of new phones which is at 33% and declining [1]. Which means Android's market share of 70%+ is going to get larger over time.
No, the article you linked specifically says this is because of increased quality and fewer new features reducing the rate at which users upgrade. Apple still has roughly 60% of the installed user base in the US.
It's not about a monopoly. That word never occurs in the document. It's about interoperability and nurturing a market.
I quote from the EU document
> connected devices of all brands will work better on iPhones. Device manufacturers will have new opportunities to bring innovative products to the market, improving the user experience for consumers based in Europe.
About developers:
> The measures will accelerate their ability to offer a wider choice to European consumers of innovative services and hardware that interoperate with iPhones and iPads.
The DMA defines gatekeepers as "large digital platforms providing so called core platform services, such as for example online search engines, app stores, messenger services" and lists their obligations prohibitions. Apple is one of them because it's sufficiently large.
Smaller companies are not gatekeepers and are out of the scope of the DMA.
AirDrop has 100% monopoly on iPhone. iPhone has 0% other ways to share files via bluetooth than AirDrop.
As a user, I must be able to switch platforms at the end of the lifespan of a phone or Mac. So, buy a non-mac computer and then later a non-iPhone phone. So things need to interoperate.
That position from the EU is genius because it’s capitalism at its highest form. (Next is, all Windows apps must work on Macs, sounds like a joke but you’ll notice we already live in a world where they’re all webapp/electron, so it’s literally not a problem).
This is really funny. Seriously? Sharing files _over a particular protocol_ is the scope of your monopoly? Going further: your claim isn't even true. Any app can write data to a bluetooth connection. So the monopoly is even narrower than that.
There’s a difference. Microsoft competed unfairly because it sold software like Word that apparently internally used secret system calls only Microsoft devs knew about. They gave their other software divisions a big advantage, extending their dominance in OS to apps.
Apple software, like Pages, apparently only uses the same set of system calls available to everyone else.
right.. but Apple watches and headphones get to use secret/enhanced calls. Apple payment software as well, basically all the things on the EU's list are using some form of the same idea to restrict any other vendor from having comparable functionality.
Agree with you on the watch and AirPods. For other services no. They either do provide some API, like for payments, iCloud files or Auth, or can’t do so safely, AirDrop and iMessage. And for those alternatives do exist. Just not as system integrate.
For those curious: It's somewhat documented if you read between the lines that the "secret APIs" that everyone was afraid of were really things like string management and what-have-you in a shared library among many different Microsoft products.
Meanwhile, Apple has a habit of hiding functionality behind a lot of obscure API calls that aren't documented and require special entitlements to call.
> "Today's decisions wrap us in red tape, slowing down Apple's ability to innovate for users in Europe" the company said in an email.
Authored by Apple Intelligence? Certainly enough training material exists, considering all prior statements bemoaning the EU/EC. Here's Apple sounding the alarm on the evils of USB-C [0]
"When it was introduced in September 2021, an Apple representative told BBC News: "Strict regulation mandating just one type of connector stifles innovation rather than encouraging it, which in turn will harm consumers in Europe and around the world."
- The EU’s interpretation of the DMA is vastly different from what they actually wrote on paper.
- If Apple were asking hardware vendors to access iOS through these methods it would be deemed anticompetitive.
- There is now an opportunity for Apple to not support standards, forcing vendors to use their methods or not have access to the platform: making it more costly for hardware vendors to access the full market.
I imagine this was already in the works before the recent prison shanking of transatlantic relations.
Get ready for a raft of new and extremely principled anti-monopoly regulations from former allies, I'm sure they're just getting started on writing those.
Is there a location for the actual order? The linked article doesn't have a link to the order (SHAME Reuters) and the details on the actual order are sparse.
The actual implementation requirements are insane. You thought your clueless product manager asked for unreasonable timelines? Well now get ready to write code to politicians’ specs!
Plagiarizing my own comment from a few months ago below.
We need to ensure maximum interoperability and no differentiation across different computing platforms and applications. And politicians are, of course, the most knowledgeable about these things. Perhaps they should also consider enforcing the following suggestions to open up the marketplace:
— All applications that expect to be in scope for EU regulations should be written in one of the programming languages approved by the Secretariat on Digital Interoperability. The Division of Programming Languages and Operating Systems within the aforementioned agency will also be tasked with adding, removing, or otherwise modifying the list of approved languages and runtimes. In the future, it may even design and release a new language of its own in order to minimize arbitrary uniqueness among digital services within the bloc.
— Companies must submit their feature plans to the Bureau for Open Competition before releasing them to their customers. The BOC will then convene a task force comprising of the submitter's competitors to ensure that the proposed feature would not unfairly harm them in the marketplace.
— Gatekeepers under the DMA must make their source code (extensively documented) available to any other gatekeeper upon request. This will ensure maximum competition in the marketplace.
— Non-EU compliant Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) are hereby banned from being used by gatekeeper and future-gatekeeper companies. Compliant IDEs will enforce policies that discourage and prohibit anti-competitive practices as part of the bloc’s Shift-Left initiative. This will enable digital service providers to prevent tendencies that might harm their competitors.
I know you're joking, but none of these things actually foster fair competition so it's not making it into the language of a real bill. It's possible to enforce meaningful interoperability without forcing source code disclosure or enforcing a particular IDE/language.
Know the difference between big-shot news agency journalism and small-scale journalism? The latter links to the exact resource that is the source to establish their credibility. The former relies on its brand and treats the source URL as a trade secret.
So tired of this. How do we get out of this? Regulations?
Does anyone have a link to the actual court order?
I am suddenly seeing why EU has many fewer startups than US. Get successful enough and you are forced to give your work away to everyone. What clearly took millions of hours of work to perfect becomes public property with no compensation to you. Why is AirDrop better than Android Beam? Probably much work on polishing and designing it right. It uses a very clever custom peer-to-peer wifi mode that "magically" coexists with existing WiFi connectivity to make it work in all cases, something google never invented, Apple did. And yet... now Apple is forced to give the design away (because interop requires implementing the same design on both side).
I hate GDPR and cookie warnings, but I think the EU has done some real good regulating Apple. We now have almost universal USB-C plugs thanks to the EU.
Also, DMA specifically targets monopolies and it will most likely encourage innovation. I mean, let's be honest, legislation isn't the reason for why Apple's AI sucks.
Nevertheless, US's Big Tech can either comply or GTFO.
Can you explain which part of the AI Act killed what exactly?
If you bother to read it, it's just common sense such as saying that a company can't just delegate all decision making to "AI" and hide behide it for critical things. For instance, in the US healthcare companies use "algorithm" as the excuse for letting people die, this would be illegal under the AI Act.
That doesn't in any way impact any AI startups selling "AI", nor companies buying/doing AI. Hell, there's AI in healthcare in France already.
>>>It's bad for our products and for our European users. We will continue to work with the European Commission to help them understand our concerns on behalf of our users,
... surely consumers don't like interoperability on hardware or software. They like to get locked in(i.e. use a different charger for each single device and use their devices only with apple services<i.e. iCloud>).
I think Apple should correct that statement into " We will continue to work with the European Commission to help them understand our concerns on behalf of our *shareholders*".
It's not about whether consumers like interoperability or not.
If scenario-1 - is no interoperability but superior user experience]
scenario-2 - is interoperability with subpar user experience
there are those that would rather have the former than the latter. Pretty sure Apple can provide a better user experience without the constraint of interoperability than otherwise.
I keep seeing this being touted by Apple users (and only by Apple users, whose vendor has been telling them this for decades now). Genuinely wondering if you have any source for this besides Apple saying so. Are there any examples of this? Where a better experience was explicitly possible because of a vendor lock-in? Or where one company, that competes in e.g. the market for watches or headphones while already controlling a large share of another market (like phones), was forced to open up their system and give competitors the same access, and then the market-controlling party's product somehow got worse by giving competitors the same access?
Let me rephrase Apple's argument: "If we can't make the Apple Experience™ exclusive to Apple products only, then we will actively harm that user experience so our competitors can't ride our coat-tails."
You absolutely can make interoperability a good user experience, it's just work Apple doesn't want to do. Apple wants you to think their competitors are scary; they want the Internet to be a slum so that their walled garden looks safer.
I'm a dyed-in-the-wool kool-aid-drinking Apple fanboy, and think you're being too kind: it's a shibboleth, cargo-cult thinking, a thought-terminating cliche: most simply, utterly irrational and meaningless as rendered.
I'm more than happy to entertain it when there's specifics, but it's most kindly described as lazy, the way I see it deployed these days.
interoperability with subpar user experience is just an excuse for poor engineering or low resources. I.e, my x-wifi-network card doesn't work in Linux. No one is spending time making it work / too many devices to test properly. It is the manufacturers responsibility to make it work with linux and they don't care so there are a few people that make it work and write generic drivers that may or may not be optimized to the specific manufature. Same story for all " interoperability subpar user experience"
I actually do like being locked in and knowing everyone that uses an iPhone has the same features as me
When you’re a startup they call this building an ecosystem and it’s cheered on, when you’re Apple and everyone wants a piece of the pie you’ve built, they call it something else
Believe it or not there are other people that are perfectly competent with technology that disagree with you
Like anything, some things should be opened up and don’t necessarily have to be - it’s ludicrous to have to use a lightning cable to charge only one device, but it’s not pressing to allow other garbage software onto the platform
Well played by Apple, I guess. I really thought there would have been consequences for so blatantly ignoring the DMA. Instead they got to do so for over a year for absolutely free, and since I'm seeing no kind of timeline for implementation of this decision, I'm guessing that Apple managed to squeeze out an extra 18-24 months of benefit from the uneven playing field.
There were no monetary penalties for doing that. The measures imposed appear to not be onerous in any way, but the pure minimum that Apple would have needed to do from the start. If this is the way DMA is going to be enforced, why would any company try to be compliant in good faith?
This isn't true. They complied with most of it. This is a guidance in EU-DMA parlance, where EU is specifying[1] how it wants Apple to comply, not that apple hasnt complied and getting punished. Those woudl have been fines.
From the document itself, strangely, EU also announced expectations on how long every part should take.
> Apple must follow a structured timeline for handling interoperability requests. Eligibility assessments must be completed within 20 working days, project plans communicated within 40 working days, and development cycles must be completed within 6, 12, or 18 months, depending on complexity.
> After development, solutions must be released in the next relevant iOS or iPadOS update, with, in any case, a maximum total timeline of 24 months. Solutions requiring minor or mild engineering efforts will be included in the next interim (“dot”) release, while more complex solutions will be part of the next major release.
This is for third party requests. As Apple is required to comply with every reasonable interoperability requests it gets.
Your source does not support the claim of the EU having announced a fine. It's an anonymous source saying that the EU will fine Apple and Meta later this month.
You'd expect any fines to be announced along with the corrective measures. Here we only got the corrective measures, which implies that (at least for the domains that these decisions are scoped to, i.e. wearables and the process for handling interop requests) that's all we're getting.
Enlighten us. The DMA is about improving competition by forcing gatekeepers to share their toys and play nicely with other companies.
Imposing a fee on your direct competitors that you don't have to pay when competing in the same segment is exactly the kind of anti-competitive behavior the DMA is meant to address. There's a separate ongoing investigation into the Core technology fee.
Mostly it seems to me that the DMA is about Spotify being upset they don’t have an even bigger monopoly on music streaming and EU bureaucrats feeling annoyed that tech companies didn’t take them out to nice dinners in Brussels before releasing products.
Spotify pays Apple no money for inventing and distributing the product upon which their entire business is premised (internet connected mobile computer). That seems pretty unfair to Apple, though quite pro-competition!
I wish the EU was a little less short sighted with this regulation.
It's completely fair to request that Apple provide APIs for interoperability purposes. And these requests obviously need to come initially from third party hardware developers.
But there needs to be some mechanism for protecting the privacy and security of users that is evaluated by experts and not EU regulators. It's very obvious that companies e.g. Meta are trying to abuse the DMA in order to try to get more user data and not for interoperability purposes. And it's not what the world needs right now.
Apple forfeited the right to be safety arbiter for their users when they used it as a cudgel to extract supra-competitive profits from customers. Same reason why we drenched the US phone system in red tape back in the 80s and 90s to make phone service competitive. It led to a shitton of funny scams but it also is the only reason why we got home Internet service at all. The phone companies were screaming up and down about how dial-up Internet was going to kill the phone network, but we didn't listen and made them work around it.
As for Facebook[0] "abusing the DMA", the correct solution for that is for the EU to put interoperability restrictions on Facebook that let us use Facebook without their shitty apps. Apple should be allowed to write a third-party Facebook client so that people can uninstall Facebook without losing access to their friends still using it.
[0] It is always ethical to deadname corporations.
Meta has been requesting things like access to all Messages, Photos, Call Logs etc under the guise of interoperability but which would be an unprecedented gift of private data.
Meta already profiles and molests the data of iOS users in Safari. Apple can try to play superhero net-nanny for their userbase, but the choice to give a company your data is a deliberate choice. After all, you can't use either MacOS or iOS without agreeing to Apple's own EULA. It's facetious to pretend that Facebook users aren't aware of what they're getting into post Cambridge Analytica.
Apple has no right to moderate what iPhone users run on their hardware any more than they can on Mac. That includes borderline malware like Avast Antivirus and the Facebook app.
They buy it from your telecom provider for pennies on the dollar, then connect your phone number to the shadow profile associated with your identity scraped from your friend's posts, photos and uploaded contact info.
Very common in regulatory derelict-states like the US. The solution is consumer protections, not begging for a stronger corporate nanny.
That's how APIs should be. Apple doesn't treat HTML as an endpoint that needs discriminatory features to prevent users from sending private information. That's how all of their software should work, as it already does on Mac.
Apple absolutely does treat the web as an endpoint that needs discriminatory features to protect users. See tighter controls of:
1. location data
2. notifications
3. long term state
4. background processing
5. photo access
6. web access on local network
7. sensor access (e.g. accelerometer)
8. state sharing with other parties (e.g. 3rd party cookies)
There is no regulatory body that can apply economic penalties to security and privacy abuses on the open web. The App Store model on the other hand requires a real identity verification to sign up as a developer, static applications which can be verified by review, and real penalties for abuses (refusing to publish new versions, removal from the store, potential legal action by Apple for contract violation).
As an example - an API for reading the personal contacts database can only have a gate for access with no limits on abuse once access is granted. The App Store model lets Apple apply real penalties for abusive behaviors of such an API. The web does not have a regulator, so the hypothetical UX for sharing a contact is designed to be much more restrictive with a higher barrier of user consent.
Privacy is not solved by trusting one corporation's service over another, either. Apple cannot exercise private entitlements to deny competitors fair access to their features. Therefore, the current entitlements they use need to be secured for them to be ready for third-party users.
I am not saying this is a panacea. I am acknowledging that Apple has to reconsider what their security model looks like in the face of new demands.
Well, I hope you enjoyed your diatribe. I was addressing security, not privacy. No corporation has the right or ability to promise privacy to any free persons in a free society. I thought that was assumed on a site like Hacker News.
>No corporation has the right or ability to promise privacy to any free persons in a free society. I thought that was assumed on a site like Hacker News.
You're back to arguing against your own imagination.
> there needs to be some mechanism for protecting the privacy and security of users
Apple is not in a position to be the one evaluating security of 3rd party offers. Apple markets itself as one but the reality is that it’s a conflict of interest for them to perform this function.
It’s also not up to Apple to decide what privacy is and later change their minds because for example Apple Intelligence needs access to “personal context” or they receive information requests from the US government, or similar.
All companies operating within the EU are subject to privacy and consumer protection regulations and allowing for interoperability doesn’t change any of that.
https://ec.europa.eu/competition/digital_markets_act/cases/2...
https://ec.europa.eu/competition/digital_markets_act/cases/2...