This is huge. Forcing Apple to allow app side-loading, third-party payments, etc is going to wrest away control of the iOS ecosystem (and eat pretty heavily into their revenues [1]
> "Are you really sure?", "Apple takes no responsibility not warranty"
Sounds good to me. As a techie who maintains several phones for several family members at a variety of tech-literate levels, I certainly hope this experience sucks and is difficult to figure out.
No, they don't just "Find an obscure setting". A website tells them exactly where to look, exactly what to do, and they have motive to do it because they want whatever this app is promising. These kinds of scams are all over the place.
Open up your browser's developer console while on Facebook and you'll see FB's desperate attempt to get you to not start typing in commands.
How many Linux users run arbitrary shell commands they find online while trying to fix or install something? What about some curl command somewhere that downloads and executes whole scripts? And Linux users tend to be very technically oriented.
This is not FUD. We're there. This is happening today.
That's why it's FUD. It's happening today. There will never be a perfect circumstance where a determined enough attacker cannot get a determined enough sucker to give them their savings.
They can’t even follow how to call me up through facebook, do you honestly believe they will accidentally turn on the equivalent of Android dev mode? If Apple want to make it hard to access, they can.
And it can happen today as well via a website. That’s why some countries mandate two-factor authentication for example, which is a proper solution, not this “let’s sell overpriced tamagotchis” security theater.
Well, get them to install AppleSafe™, which will give them the curated Apple experience by locking out all sideloading, and requires them to call Apple and go through menus in order to remove it.
This works for me. I trust Apple a lot more than I trust some third party rando and I enjoyed watching Facebook whine about losing data tracking revenues and whiplash into Meta on their way to more people discovering that the world can live without them.
The concern is not a voided warranty. The concern is tech-illiterate users being able to install some random app they found on the web. They find a special version of Facebook and install it, and now their phone is compromised.
>They find a special version of Facebook and install it, and now their phone is compromised.
The Android ecosystem is a bit of a cesspool, but surely even it isn't having major issues with swaths of people having their phone compromised, right? My parents aren't going to sideload an apk.
I saw a friend go through all the motions of sideloading an apk of a fake DHL app he got through a 'track your delivery' fishing email. He did the whole thing while complaining about 'How stupid DHL is', and 'How orwellian it is' for DHL to ask for screen record permission ...
The solution to that is teaching tech illiterate people not to do that. At some point you have to accept the reality that not every advanced system can be made safe. The approach to not have advanced systems is not sustainable. You end up with Candy Crush OS that negatively affects everyone. In my opinion people get scammed by that too.
In reality Apple could just implement a dummy mode. I bet a lot of people would decide against that an be completely fine.
They backed out from these tricks in the Netherland standoff. As you guessed, it started with horrible wording, and has now became something way saner (albeit they kept their fees requirements)
They didn't back out on these: They were forced to give them up in the Netherlands. And then, when South Korea passed a similar law... Apple has announced the same tricks the Netherlands refused to accept as their plan to comply with the South Korean law.
You can bet they'll start playing the same games with the EU once this goes into effect. Regulating big tech requires not just passing the law, but a heavy handed enforcement that doesn't put up with delays and antics.
Yes, but there's few entities out there actually enforcing these kinds of laws. For example, if you ever use the manufacturer-sanctioned bootloader unlock on a Samsung phone, that blows a fuse in the phone that says "my warranty is void". Samsung refuses to service phones that have ever had their bootloaders unlocked, regardless of what was actually done to them. As far as I'm aware nobody has bothered to sue Samsung over this feature.
This had me thinking. This might be a weird take, but if nobody was bothered enough to file an official complaint against Samsung, and have it reviewed and pushed through the process, is it a significant issue in the first place ?
(Basically, I am making a "if a tree falls in a forest" argument)
I don’t think fucking around with EU regulators is something Apple should do here. They’ll probably revenge even with stronger further regulations later.
Definitely -- I can imagine them making it some kind of faustian bargain, where in exchange for enabling sideloading, you void your warranty, never get any software updates again, can't connect to any Apple online services whatsoever, etc.
Tech companies seem to believe that it is a neat trick to mislead regulators, in my opinion this is a serious mistake: regulators hold the power to destroy you and playing 'clever' may give you bragging rights but ultimately it can doom your company. Underestimating the power of nation states is a pretty dumb strategy for any company that relies on the cooperation of the countries they intend to do business with.
There have always been Android users who don’t want Google services, spurring the creation of Cyanogen and Replicant and the like. Are you sure there are no equivalent users on iOS?
You know the walled garden is put up with good reason -- to keep fraud and abuse out? And that very few are actually capable of doing such a job, and the software industry has continually demonstrated the lack of that capability.
You can request and get a full copy of your data anywhere, and be fully deleted if you want. Every company has become aware and afraid of data leaks because they are required to report them.
The impact is: far fewer data breaches in the EU than before, fewer of them wiped under the carpet, security no longer seen as a cost but as an important element in the IT strategy and with a seat at the table during design, operation and decommission (and in many cases: at the C level). On the whole the change has been remarkable, the last four years have seen a sea change in how corporations look at data, security and compliance.
If all you associate with the GDPR is cookie consent dialogs then maybe these discussions are not for you?
That all sounds pretty rosy, and my BS-meter is pegged. I think it's just as likely that the corporations have figured out how to skirt the law and get everything they wanted anyway.
> If all you associate with the GDPR is cookie consent dialogs then maybe these discussions are not for you?
You realize that you are the unique one? Most people don't care about abstract concepts of digital privacy and just hit whatever button on that dialog that makes it go away. Who knows what they're opting in to, and they don't really care.
These are definitely the sorts of things we should factor into regulation lest we continue to pave that road to hell with shiny good intentions.
> > If all you associate with the GDPR is cookie consent dialogs then maybe these discussions are not for you?
> You realize that you are the unique one? Most people don't care about abstract concepts of digital privacy and just hit whatever button on that dialog that makes it go away. Who knows what they're opting in to, and they don't really care.
His point just went straight over your head. GDPR has nothing to do with cookie consent dialogues. That you think otherwise demonstrates that you don't know much about this topic, hence: "maybe these discussions are not for you?"
Incidentally, in my observation cookie consent dialogues is a pet peeve of people on forums like this, but not with the general public. It's something techies bitch about.
Cookie consent is not compliant with GDPR - I need an ability to retract my consent as easily as I gave it, which zero of those sites actually provide.
If the EU ever actually starts enforcing GDPR, I expect a quick reckoning.
Apple's greed (in maintaining the egregious 30% commission for so long) is going to undermine their entire ecosystem.
If Apple moved voluntarily to 10% or 15% for all, there never would have been the industry pressure for this sort of regulation.
The EU would have been better to just mandate a maximum % commission for all digital marketplaces above a certain level of revenue. This new solution will get poked full of holes by Apple and lead to an inferior experience for consumers.
> Apple simply chose to pay a $5.5 million fine every week for months in the Netherlands instead of obey orders from the Authority for Consumers and Markets
How to piss off the EU political system in one simple step.
This ruling is no surprise after such behaviour from Apple. They made their own bed.
Fines, at least for corporations, really need to have increase exponentially without limit for repeat offenses so that violating the law can never just be shrugged off as the cost of doing business.
This is what beats the heck outta me. A company that is sitting on nearly 150B in cash somehow feels the need to pinch 30% commissions from developers till date. I understand this as an initial business model. I mean a 15% reduction in app revenues is not even a rounding error in Apple's P&L. What the hell are they thinking. The goodwill that they'd earn from devs will go a long long way and if they signal that their share will eventually go to zero over a period of 10+ years, that'll get more devs to embrace iOS. I fail to understand the current leadership at Apple.
So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision making forums, and the companies forget what it means to make great products. The product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies that have no conception of a good product versus a bad product.
They have no conception of the craftsmanship that's required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product. And they really have no feeling in their hearts, usually, about wanting to really help the customers.
> This is what beats the heck outta me. A company that is sitting on nearly 150B in cash somehow feels the need to pinch 30% commissions from developers till date.
The rich don’t become rich by being generous and giving money away.
They are there to earn money for their share holders (which to be clear isn't just rich people, it's pensions including pensions for fire departments etc). They must act in their share holders interests. Cutting their fees with no justifiable reason is not something they are going to do.
There's no conspiracy, companies are there to make money, that's it.
I see this, and it just makes me think that if they had, we'd be seeing posts that say, "Apple's greed (in maintaining the egregious 10% commission for so long) is going to undermine their entire ecosystem. If Apple moved voluntarily to 5% or 3% for all, ...".
30% is almost 1/3 of the app price! It is higher than income tax in most countries. It is stealing money from developers because their app is not successful due to being released on App Store, it is successful because it is a great product and people would buy it on whatever store it would be available. Developers were just unable to publish it in another store or use a different payment processor with lower fees.
The scale of the App Store, or iphone-vs-android in general, or even other markets such as semiconductor lithography - is just so mind-bogglingly massive in scale and cost, that the entire human race only has one or two entrants. It's not currently possible for new entrants to break in at all. Competition is simply non-existent.
If the barriers-to-entry are so high that you can't have real market competition, then regulation is the only option left.
Is "the market" going to magically provide all the substantial benefits of an Apple-run store for apps, too?
No. It's not. "The market" is going to say: sorry users, fuck that, y'all can just magically research all this and provide your own security and privacy from here on out.
Which is impossible, of course.
Result: much poorer user experience for the vast majority of users. Which is why Apple did it their way in the first place. No, it was not because of revenue. Anyone who says that is either lying or is incredibly lazy and hasn't looked up where Apple actually makes its money.
> The devices and platforms help Apple lock-in the consumer into its ecosystem. First, Apple achieves hardware lock-in with the devices. Then, it achieves software lock-in with operating system software, application software, and third-party software and apps. Then, iCloud helps Apple achieve the data lock-in.
As stated elsewhere on this thread, the 30% isn’t entirely going to Apple’s pockets — they have costs such as App Store bandwidth costs, support costs for purchases made, and the likes.
Let's say Apple pockets all 30% as profit. Who is to say Apple should or shouldn't profit that much from the App Store? Who decides how much they should profit? I find the discussion around commissions shallow and entitled. We should discuss the fundamentals: market definition, competition, abuse of power, etc.
PS: In case I couldn't make it clear, my questions are not directed to parent comment.
> Let's say Apple pockets all 30% as profit. Who is to say Apple should or shouldn't profit that much from the App Store?
All of us. The very same society that gave Apple exclusive control over their "intellectual property" in the first place which allows them to pocket that profit without having to compete for it. The same society that pays for enforcing that exclusivity. Corporations like Apple and their business models are only allowed to exist because we think that suits us - and we should continuously reevaluate that decision and correct it when corporations do more harm than good.
I don't think Apple rests on any intellectual property or exclusivity rights in regard to App Store, but I agree with the general idea that society should be free to exercise its right to change course. Still, I don't think it's right to decide to use this right based on a company's gross margin. The decision should be based on society's fundamental goals.
We already have rules about how much control a single company can have over a market and what defines a market. The app store is clearly a market. Apple has an aggressive chokehold on it that artificially inflates prices and prevents competition.
As an obvious check - Amazon can't sell me ebooks through it's kindle app without Apple being involved and taking a 30% cut. That is market control and abuse.
Let's say you want to build a direct competitor to an Apple product. You can't because Apple actually won't let you do the things it's apps do if you want to be listed in the store. That's called market abuse.
> We already have rules about how much control a single company can have over a market and what defines a market.
I don't know of such rules. Can you point me to them?
To the contrary, there's Epic Games v. Apple case in which definition of the market is pretty narrow (digital mobile gaming transactions) compared to what you suggest (App Store in general) [0].
> That is market control and abuse.
In the same case, judge decided that Apple is not a monopoly, saying “Success is not illegal.” [1]
> Apple has an aggressive chokehold on it that artificially inflates prices and prevents competition.
Almost all apps are free. What inflated prices are you talking about?
But they're not billing on the basis of how much it technically costs them to provide these services. If we had a competitive ecosystem then we would expect Apple's prices for payment processing to be at least within an order of magnitude of (for example) Stripe's.
Of course security screening is expensive, but it's also not that expensive (e.g. a typical software company might have a 10-30% profit margin, so in some cases apple accounts for roughly half the operational expenses of a company – i.e. the company pays as much, or more, money to apple as it does to its entire payroll)
How many people do you think Apple employees whose job is solely or primarily-centered around iOS developer relations, tools, support, store infrastructure etc. etc?
If iPhones had different app stores with 15% fees, then consumers would decide. I think the real issue here is consumers are gona get hyper confused and it wont be a better experience for anyone.
Every single app creator out there will now want their own "app store" and it's going to be a mess. 30% fee initially to capture that market was what our company factored in and grew exponentially with. A 15% fee is nothing if the market is fragmented.
> Every single app creator out there will now want their own "app store" and it's going to be a mess.
This is such an oft-repeated argument, yet overlooks that Android already allows sideloading and alternative app stores. If everyone-creating-their-own-app-store hasn't happened on Android, why would iOS be different?
Full devils advocate here, but the argument I've always heard is that the play store is a lot less arbitrary and restrictive than the App Store, so there's less reason to want to go outside of it.
Apple locks out so many useful kinds of software that there actually may be enough momentum for real alternate app stores to proliferate.
For someone who doesn't have a personal Android phone, what useful software is out there that I can get on an iPhone?
Related: What mass-market software is out there that isn't available on the iPhone? I don't mean *nix tools and niche game emulators. Things that would make many people actually care about alt stores?
> Unofficial clients for websites such as YouTube that add features that official client doesn't have.
I'm sure Google can send a cease-and-desist to all sorts of other stores instead of just Apple.
> Tools to disable advertisements in applications.
This would be breaking the sandbox model of the system, I don't think the regulation requires dismantling system security
> Programs licensed under GPL as Apple App Store bans those.
No such rule. VLC on App Store is the first example that comes to mind. There are also GPLv2 components (such as WebKit) shipping in iOS itself.
The FSF has said there are (IMHO bureaucratic) issues with GPL on an App Store, specifically that e.g. Apple takes on certain responsibilities, rather than the developer.
For that reason, it's possible a contributor may shoot down publication, which IIRC caused VLC to have to rewrite certain components before launch.
> I'm sure Google can send a cease-and-desist to all sorts of other stores instead of just Apple.
Google may dislike those applications and refuse to host them on Google Play, but they aren't doing anything illegal, so they cannot do anything about programs like https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.schabi.newpipe/ on other stores.
> This would be breaking the sandbox model of the system, I don't think the regulation requires dismantling system security
I don't think it is breaking the sandbox, it could be implemented using NEAppProxyProvider, however this particular API is not available for App Store applications.
> Programs licensed under GPL as Apple App Store bans those.
iPhone version of VLC is licensed under MPL2 specifically for that reason. WebKit is LGPL2.1.
1) Completely false for uBlock Origin; zero relationship
2) It's fully open-source so the above is verifiable
3) AdGuard and every single other (proprietary) adblocker for Mac and iOS includes content blockers, but also includes web extensions that request access to "all web page contents", including credit card numbers you type in, allegedly for the purposes of custom element blocking etc. (not open source, we can't check). Try installing it and see. Apple still allows web extensions that have complete access to all webpage contents (which is necessary for many legit extensions), they just block specific WebExtensions APIs that uBlock Origin requires. Literally zero benefit to privacy whatsoever, yet everyone buys the BS.
That's uBlock you were thinking about, which is owned by AdBlock. I'm 98.9% certain that Raymond Gorhill's project which I can build from source and install is not doing that.
> You do understand that uBlock Origin has private, profit-generating relationships with advertisers.
That's uBlock without Origin. Careful where you download your ad blockers from.
Edit: I'd also love a DaisyDisk that works on iOS. It will never get permission to get on the app store. Of course, that kind of app IS a huge security issue so I'd be very careful where I get it from.
In addition to everything the others mentioned already, anything that's not a web browser that might at some point show NSFW content. Applications like Discord and Tumblr been forced to make ux-degrading changes to comply with this Victorian-era prudishness.
(and before you mention an application you know of that doesn't have this problem, remember that Apple's enforcement and reading of the rules compares unfavorably with nuclear particle decay)
Haha speaking of Apple stuff being Disney-ified, my phone stopped charging wirelessly. The solution to that is to restart it, but Apple hid that option under 3 layers of menus and I can never find it, so I asked Siri to "turn off this f--ing phone". She said "That's not nice" and did not turn off the phone.
And it would be better if Microsoft had total control over what you're allowed to run? Give them that power in 1990, and the web never exists outside of a research project.
And we would never have all the innovations in the market that Steam has brought to us if windows only allowed game installs through some Microsoft Games Market. Are you saying that would be preferable?
More likely, some apps will simply bypass the whole app store concept entirely. There are a lot of downsides to requiring every app install be intermediated by a third party, especially for internal or very niche apps where the app store isn't really adding any value because the provider is a trusted/known brand to the customer already (e.g. they may have a negotiated contract).
For consumer apps, there doesn't seem to be much appetite to do this on Android at least, though Telegram can be installed outside of app stores. It rolls its own update system and that seems to work fine.
Unfortunately, the App Stores tend to bundle both the store (i.e. curation and discovery) part and the on device package management part somewhat so apps installed outside the store will need to provide their own update mechanism. There is of course no real reason why there can't be a standard way to provide update channels that can be managed in a central package manager application without also requiring the store part, just so far no incentives for platform holders to separate these two.
And AFAIK Apple charges 15% if you earn less than a million in your net revenue, yet noone mentions that. Which, by the way, could be considered a sweetheart deal of its own, just like Steams tiered system. As for the Switch it's still 30% and to the developer it doesn't matter whether there's 5 percent going to the customer or not.
Apple only made that change after incredible pushback from their community, and it still doesn't address the real problem: Apple could be charging 2% and they would still have a monopoly on app distribution that deserves to be broken up. Steam isn't comparable, since it charges that 30% fee and competes against other distributors. Despite that, developers continue to choose Steam over alternative platforms like Itch.io or EGS. Likewise, Apple is free to charge whatever they want for their app store, they just need to compete with other service providers to ensure they're providing a fair deal.
More like "after Tim Sweeney suddenly became obsessed with Apple and started demanding things".
"...they would still have a monopoly on app distribution..." on the platform that they've created, supported and maintained over the years, in the market that already has alternatives.
"Steam isn't comparable..." ah, so Steam charging the same percentage is a whole different thing...i see.
"...competes against other distributors." on the Windows, Linux and MacOS operating systems, operating on a platform that is not exclusive to any manufacturer in partucular.
"...they just need to compete with other service providers to ensure they're providing a fair deal." They already do compete, look up alternative iOS stores.
Someone needs a tutorial on what "monopoly" means.
Controlling app distribution solely within your own platform is not a monopoly. You might wish it were. You might not like it; you might want it changed. But that doesn't magically mean you can call it a monopoly. It's not a monopoly.
If you open a market in the city, prevent any others from opening a market in the city, force all sellers to pay 10-30% to you, force all product makers to comply to your dictates about what can be sold or get kicked out then it's an effective and abusive monopoly.
Thankfully the EU in their wisdom has decided that Apple has abused their dominant position and we don't need to agree with your definition.
Except iOS devices aren't "markets in the city". It's a good thing that you decided to pick that as an example for this comparison (even though it's a bad example) as you have (on accident, i presume) contradicted yourself in a spectacular way. See, the aformentioned market is in...well, "the city" and chances are that that market is regulated by the city council/county laws/the laws of the country the market is in. The city provides infrastructure for the market as well as customers, perhaps some advertising...you get the idea. Hm, it seems that in that relationship, while AppStore is sure a market, the city that the market belongs to is...Apple? Whoops.
I hope that the wise EU is also going to decide that European car manufacturers and their infotainment systems are "abusing" their dominant position in their respective markets of manufacturer and model specific systems! Or that non-European companies should be able to provide "alternative software" to multi-billion euro manufacturing lines of European mega-manufacturers with the same disregard for any potential consequences, just to avoid any sort of "anti-consumer" behaviour. I sure hope so!!!(couldn't care less)
It originates from publishers. When Amazon was pressuring all the publishers to sell cheaper e-book versions for their Kindle, they were aggressively cutting prices to win consumers from competition. They'd then use their classic "70% of your purchases come through us, so lower your prices for Amazon or we will cut you from our store" to get more profits. The publishers obviously hated this, and especially seeing the brand damage of their brand new flagship type books on sale since it made them seem like they were in the bargain bin for not selling well. Since Amazon was a reseller, they could do whatever they wanted with the pricing.
Apple came in as a "savior" for the publishers and said that the publishers can set their own prices and take as much profit as they wanted... just as long as Apple got 30%. This 30% originally came from the music publishing industry (where they did set the price themselves, remember $0.99 songs?), went through books and now has been legacy'd onto apps. If nothing changes here it'll probably exist for metaverse stuff if they go there.
Steam's commision has also been (IMO rightfully) criticised but the situation is hardly the same because Steam doesn't (and can't) prevent other stores or direct app installations on the platforms it runs on so that 30% is much more justifiable as something the "free" market is willing to pay for the services Steam provides. Apple on the other hand doesn't even let anyone compete.
(Of course, Steam still greatly benefits from first mover advantage and network effects that IMO mean they should also be subject to more regulation, including being required to support alternate clients for all Steam services as well as federation for their social network and communication channels.)
They can't, because the platform it runs on doesn't belong to anyone in particular. It's absolutely not the same situation that Apple/console makers have.
No they shouldn't. Steam wasn't the first in digital distribution of videogames as some consoles offered similar system way before Steam. An argument can be made that "on demand" gaming options of the past can be considered the Steam of the past. And enforcing regulations for no reasons other than regulating on companies that are widely recognized as pioneers of their respective industries is the very definition of "punishing success".
Are you just reading the summary? It does force them to allow 3rd party apps and app stores too:
>A covered company that controls the operating system or operating system configuration on which its app store operates shall allow and provide readily accessible means for users of that operating system to choose third-party apps or app stores as defaults for categories appropriate to the app or app store
Remember that App Store revenue is also generated in the EU.
Let's assume that 15% of App Store revenue is from the EU. That would leave an additional $12.7 billion hole in Apple's pocket.
Worse, it would mean Apple's third-party developers lose about $30 billion in revenue. (Apple takes a 30% cut, so the total App Store sales volume is about $283B). Those developers would also lose all access to their existing users in those countries. It would be a massive black stain on Apple's reputation.
It's the kind of drastic move that you simply can't do as a platform provider unless your hand is absolutely forced by something like international sanctions.
And more importantly it would further erode their market share. It would be an absolutely insane move.
Much more likely they'll go the route of malicious compliance. You can side load apps but you can't add them to your home screen. You can set a third party voice assistant but it can't launch apps. Etc.
Will be very interesting to see how this plays out!
> You can set a third party voice assistant but it can't launch apps
Facebook and Google are going to love this.
They can build a voice assistant app which will provide them with all of the apps people use the most, people they contact, places they visit, searches they do etc.
I don't think so. The EU market is pretty huge and financially strong. Maybe they will only allow sideloading and payment freedom for the EU with special iOS builds.
This would be very consistent with their prior actions. Apple's "opening move" with prior rulings and laws on in-app payment processing has been to require separate binaries locked to specific jurisdictions. The company genuinely believes that competition is consumer-hostile at best and outright dangerous at worst.
The question is, how far will Apple go to keep Americans from turning on "EU mode"? Will it just be the usual country toggle? Will sideloaded apps be geofenced to the EU with Location Services? Or will they start adding bootloader fuses for each jurisdiction so that you can't install the "EU sideloading firmware" on US-purchased iPads? Or all of the above? I hope the EU is ready to litigate whatever hoops Apple makes people jump through - because Apple loves inventing new hoops.
depends on the company really. some might think a bit more about offering their products to eu countries considering (some of) these rules. which imo are quite serious, and some even ridiculous.
Considering how far backwards companies bend over to make business in China and some Arabic countries I don't expect a single company with some profitable business in the EU to leave that market.
So what? Nobody is obliged to serve any market, or a markets obliges to open for individual companies. If company A won't, companies B and C propably will.
If by market leader you mean creating monopolies, or oligopolies, there are rules againstt that in place. So there seems to be some concensus of seeing those outcomes as non desireable. And those rules cover consumer protection and choice, Microsoft has some experience with that when it comes to Internet Explorer.
i foresee a fiasco in general, but a few stand out:
> Share data and metrics with developers and competitors, including marketing and advertising performance data.
with competitors? :))
> Allow developers to integrate their apps and digital services directly with those belonging to a gatekeeper. This includes making messaging, voice-calling, and video-calling services interoperable with third-party services upon request.
could have been solved easily if they proposed a working group to come up with the next video and messaging standard. right now i foresee the discussions we had back in mid 00s: we use our own video encoder. they use h263. and those other guys use vp9. good luck to the team writing a transcoder that works real time :))
> The Digital Services Act (DSA), which requires platforms to do more to police the internet for illegal content, has also been approved.
I don’t see why you are surprised by the sharing with competitors and the obligation of interoperability. That’s in line with what’s imposed on dominant player in an unbalanced market. Basically Europe is saying to gatekeepers that they can keep their platform but it will come with a lot of caveat from now on.
Asking for data sharing without specifying exactly which data is included and exactly which data is exempt is ridiculous. The standard for laws need to be far higher. Which metrics? Which data? If the lawmakers mean all data they are going to discover very quickly a lot of that data is subject to privacy standards. You can't for example share the data you use to train a personal assistant without sharing queries people have made of that assistant.
That's pretty much the point of the regulation. If you're okay with being preyed upon by billion-dollar companies, stay in the US. If you'd like to be protected as a customer, come to the EU.
Besides, the DMA has specific exemptions for small companies. Once a company reaches the "gatekeeper" level, they will have had all the necessary time to figure out how to comply with the law.
Oh please. Are any of these billion-dollar companies going to deliberately issue malware that allows them to record my passwords and empty my bank account? Side-loading will be a huge gift for scammers.
It doesn't. The parent premise - that Apple is going to be severely harmed financially by any of this - is something far beyond silly.
Apple will barely see a dent from it. Their profit juggernaut will keep rolling on almost exactly the same.
The parent comment in question - "and eat pretty heavily into their revenues" - is confusing their personal projected wishful thinking (obviously desperately wanting big tech to falter) with actual reality (the one where Apple has no serious competitive threats in smartphones for what they do, and as such they'll keep marching on just the same).
Apple clearly does have serious competitive threats to what they do, it doesn't even have majority market share in the EU. But it also won't threaten their revenues much. On platforms where users and developers do have a choice from day one (Android), the app store is sufficiently useful that most devs do choose to stick with it. It seems unlikely that Apple can't make the app store competitive on its own terms.
That would be a strategic mistake even if it made short-term sense (which it probably doesn't) because it would leave a big hole for to fill that could be leveraged to compete with them later in the US.
First time they're out of compliance, the fine is 10% of their global annual revenue. Then 5% of their daily average revenue until they comply.
Second time they're out of compliance, the fine doubles.
If they still breach compliance, they get investigated for systematic non-compliance. The Commission can then impose structural and behavioral changes.
Or Apple can stop providing service in the EU. But they're not going to say goodbye to a fourth of their global revenue. They will comply.
They still (rightfully, IMO) can charge third parties for getting access to their customers, just as super markets charge for getting stuff on their shelves, or as amusement parks take a cut for the right to sell ice cream.
Now, as to what’s reasonable there? That will be a separate discussion. So far, Apple has put the bar at over 20% for countries that have passed similar legislation, likely on the argument that payment processing need not cost more than credit card companies charge (a few percent, in the EU)
> They still (rightfully, IMO) can charge third parties for getting access to their customers, just as super markets charge for getting stuff on their shelves, or as amusement parks take a cut for the right to sell ice cream.
Super markets charge for use of shelf space and logistics. The customers don't belong to anyone. The super market can't prevent you from opening a store next door to sell to the same customers directly. Similarly, I don't see any problem with Apple charching for hosting, downloads, payment, curation etc. but it should not be their place to sell permission fro what you are allowed to install on your own device just as it would be ridiculous for Ikea to control what you can put on your shelf.
It won't eat into any revenues. In the Netherlands Apple charges 27% commission on any revenues paid into external payment systems [1]. And what is the EU exactly going to do - ban Apple from charging for access to their software APIs [2]? That seems like one step from banning charging for software as a whole.
[2] Yes, APIs themselves are not copyrightable, but what developer is going to spend the resources to reimplement all of iOS' APIs, with no documentation of how the underlying hardware works?
Lol shit loads of psps have super simple native SDKs: PayPal, stripe, adyen….
They’re all waiting for the day developers switch to their apis. And developers usually work with them over the web, they just didn’t do so on ios because of apple policy
I don't mean payment providers, I mean Apple device APIs like HealthKit, WeatherKit, SwiftUI, CoreML, ARKit, etc. Nobody is stripping all that out (there aren't even real competitors for a lot of these things).
Apple will likely do as little as possible as late as possible, and try to stall as much as possible. It will be interesting to see how it will play out.
There's still plenty of money to be made until the law comes into effect, the regulatory bodies become active, the cases are prepared, rulings are made, all of the layers of appeals have gone through, the regulators have decided whether the new measures are in compliance, it becomes a repeat offense, etc.
For many (most?) users, Apple's restrictions, especially sideloading, protect users from bad actor app owners (looking at you, Facebook). To me, allowing sideloading is like allowing chemical weapons to be used in war. Yes, it's a new tool and capability at your disposal, but it's also available to every powerful and unscrupulous participant.
Millions of people downloading .exe files everywhere are why we have an infosec industry. I trust indie developers on the App Store because of the restrictions and the review process. I’ll never side load a small developer’s app. And I worry that major players (I.e. Facebook) will require side loading so they can be free of the App Store rules about privacy.
If you got a job at Best Buy's Geek Squad for a week, you'd quickly realize just how irresponsible most people are with what they install on their devices.
So people with Android where sideloading has been a normal thing for many years have been dangerous? Could they harm other people by creating their own app and installing it on their Android without paying anyone a yearly subscription?
It used to be normal in the past that people would OWN a computer and they would run ANY software on it. Why should we allow a greedy company like Apple to change that? Both android and ios implement sandboxes and apps can't gain complete access over the device in most cases so I don't see any security benefit.
More like a chemistry lab to everyone. Most won't even touch the thing because it requires too much knowledge and is intimidating. Some will doubtlessly use it to "make meth" and get burnt or blown up. But some will also use it to produce better understanding or accomplish a task on their own using their own expertise.
As soon as side loading or their own app stores are allowed, all sorts of companies may require that. Maybe most big companies will stick with Apple's.
As an iOS developer, hardening the 10k-ish apis that exist in iOS will be mostly impossible to do in a short term given the attack vectors would now be outside of Apple's control, probably resulting in incompatibilities and bugs. Android is a horrible platform already given the myriad of different OS versions that exist (and often are not updated by the users) that you have to support.
I also wonder what the law requires as to switchover to the new rules, new OS releases or going back X versions or something? Is there are time frame?
Imagine also being an app developer and having to build/test releases for multiple app stores that include different payment gateways. Without a solid and secure API environment in the OS, how do you manage that with screwing up? iOS has always been easy to do since you only have to support one major OS back. A couple jobs (like 7 years) back our Android app was a nightmare to manage, as we had multiple OS release/phone suppliers that rarely got bug fixes in at all and never at the same time, making fixing/testing some things a nightmare. Might be better today, but I remember how much of a pain it was.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/10/apple-implies-it-generated-r...
I hope some of these regulations spill over into the U.S. and the rest of the world.