It’s malicious because they’ve done more work than necessary to put limitations on the user.
They already know what region an account is in. If they just said “Ok, EU account, turn on the flags” that would be less engineering effort. Even if they increased verification of things like where you actually are relative your account at signup. But this is them engineering this solution to make sure the secret sauce doesn’t leak out of the EU. Everyone knows it’s malicious because it’s easy to intuitively grasp that they’ve gone through all this extra effort to make absolutely sure everyone outside of the EU has a worse experience no matter what
on the other hand.. apple is against third-party stores..
they do not want then, so they will only make then available were they are forced to..
only place they are forced to is EU, so they made sure the third-party stores only work on the places that they are required by law..
if apple had any say in this there would be no third-party stores anywhere..]
this is completely the opposite of other geo-fenced functions that apple want tom make available but cant because some reason or another, usually local laws.
like the ECG on the apple watch.. they did not had it available everywhere, but if you enabled the function in a country that allowed it to be enabled you could keep using in other countries that did not had it available yet because the law in those countries did not forced then to disable it. but there were countries where you could not enable it even if your watch supported.
same thing here but the other way around.. apple will enable third-party store only where they have to and disable everywhere else.. they could keep then enable when you leave but they do not want to, hell they do not want third-party stores at all even in EU, they only have it there because EU law forced then to have it..
Yep, I think this is a pretty clear-cut case of a "fuck you", they should be punished accordingly. By the EU inside the EU of course. Or just disallow this outright, which would require an Apple-specific law and all of the resources that brings in though, jeez.
