Yes, the EU. It forces Apple to allow sideloading - that means installing apps with no restrictions, from any sources such as any random website. A store is just an app, thus there will be no way for Apple to force alternative stores to anything.
There doesn't even need to be a person that could be held responsible, or they could be easily masked behind anonymity of the web or layers of white horses / phished identities.
I definitely can see a “store is just an app, you must allow third party apps” as a sort of maximal approach. But treating app stores as a sort of special thing that requires extra permission and coordination doesn’t seem totally impossible.
It could be sort of nice if each store was isolated inside a different sandbox and had it’s own filesystem. (I wouldn’t be that surprised if something like that happened because it is both justifiable from a security point of view, and also mildly annoying for people who want to use third party stores, which I guess Apple would prefer).
It's what they did, the law is approved and will come into effect soon. A store is just an app like any other apps - e.g. your browser. If you can download an app from the web, you can download a store, and the store can download other apps.
I find it weird that this comment was downvoted while my comment up two was upvoted. If you agree that a store should be something other than just another app, then you ought to agree that it is unfortunate if this is their plan.
If you agree but downvoted because you think it isn’t their plan, maybe you can show us why the person I responded to here was wrong? That would be reassuring!
But from my perspective sideloading is not necessarily a separate on-device store.
An on-device store would be equivalent to Steam which first need to be installed on the device for example via the regular iOS App Store or sideloading or another already installed app store.
Sideloading would be downloading from a web page or secondary device or similar method.
Separate stores would be a decent middle-ground for my part when less tech-savvy people inevitably ask me "can I trust this app" I can reply with "are you about to install it from store X or Y or download elsewhere?". If the answer is "that store from Epic Games" I could sigh quietly and say "it's likely okay".
Yes, and you if sideload a store app from a website (a random one, or Facebook, MS, etc), Apple is out of control in that case. They could ban the altstore from their own App Store, but not from the web.
My problem is exactly with these "safe stores from well known companies". Apple helps me. EpicStore and MetaStore helps them sidestep the anti-tracking and anti-spam rules of App Store.
That's a bit of a stretch. Apple, much like every other business, cares about you insofar as you're a paying customer. That's why they don't let you use... well, stuff like third-party payment processors.
That’s not quite true, lots of other businesses don’t care about you insofar as you’re a paying customer, they care about insofar as you are eyeballs for their actual customers.
Apple’s business model is mostly: give money, get services and devices. That they are able to sell this as a nice special plus is a huge indictment of the computer and OS market.
Which is great, I much prefer Apple Pay and their overview of all subscriptions etc and them actually enforcing what changes I make there, as opposed to the situation on Android where I was charged by custom payment gateway implementations after cancelling the subscription many times and Google just told me to take it up with the app vendor who never responded.
Hey, more power to you. The good news is that after the DMA rolls out, Apple doesn't have to stop offering any of that. You can keep using it until Apple stops providing the function, same as you would have without the DMA.
I'm glad we have passionate Apple enthusiasts helping us prove how harmless market regulation actually is.
The problem is that app vendors will no longer be forced to use it. That seriously hurts my sense of security as a user of the platform - the very thing why I chose it.
But it doesn't affect Apple's 1P app store, app review process, or other security processes at all, so if you are content exclusively using Apple's App Store then there's no impact. If you look at the Android ecosystem, there have been all kinds of app stores for years. Some run by hardware OEMs, some open source (FDroid), and some that are run by app review sites that basically function as sideloading hubs for pre-GA versions of apps. Arguably, things generally work and overall I don't believe system security has been negatively affected.
The real issues here are with the payment processing captured by Apple & Google, and why their gatekeeping (net negative to competition) should be a profit center for them while at the same time being a net negative (arguable) to consumers.
So what did you say? You actually want access to others' inboxes? I don't understand what that means. That's usually password protected and considered private data.
They highlighted that the original logic was somewhat faulty, and could be applied to say "Non-apple users should not be allowed to send emails to Apple users, because they have not paid Apple to maintain the iCloud email infrastructure!".
> Nobody forces you to use iMessage/Telegram/WhatsApp/...
The EU strongly disagrees with this statement in case of the the latter two, which is why they are being targetted by the DMA and must provide interopability so that you cannot continue to be forced to use them.
If iMessage had users in the EU, the same would have applied there.
Being forced to use something does not mean you are being held at gunpoint or that no other options exist. For messaging apps, being in a location where your entire social network uses one app is indeed a case where the average person ends up forced to use that app as picking another option means not talking to your social network (unwanted) or having to convert everyone else (unreasonable). This harms both competition and users.
The EU strongly disagreed about many things that it later admitted were wrong (or just quietly changed its stance on), for example nuclear energy policy or biofuel additives. It also kind of does its own thing without really consulting the general population. Practically nobody even knows what's happening there in my country.
"They have previously been wrong, therefore they cannot be right" and "I do not know what they are doing, therefore they cannot be doing the right thing"?
I think that clearly marks the end of any useful discussion.
I don't think your arguing in good faith. I dont like to throw around the word "shill" but it gets hard sometimes.
Assuming you are just misunderstanding. The comment about iCloud email is talking about interoperability. Where someone with a gmail account should be able to send an email to someone with iCloud account. And vice versa.
The argument is that it is not OK to prevent this sort of interoperability, and requiring this does not mean you have serve the users of other services with servers and hosting, you just have to allow WhatsApp to send messages to imessage and vice versa. Just like email
You don't. You get no-fee access to iMessage with your Apple devices (phones, tablets, laptops, desktops). Why is that relevant though? Why should Apple be forced to support apps on their competitor's platform?
They say they don't do that. Here's one way it could have happened:
Suppose Apple had plans to monetise iMessage at the time it was developed and eventually decided against it for whatever reason. This would leave the company with a an app running on most phones. What to do? I can easily imaging someone standing up in a meeting and suggesting: "Well, running it costs very little, why don't we just minimise the cost of running it and keep providing it for as long as the cost is low?"
You mean that whenever an organisation pays for a loss-making operation using income from its hardware sales, that operation is monetised via hardware sales?
That doesn't make sense to me. It makes monetisation be a synonym of funding.
Surely, monetisation means that you do x in order to earn income from hardware sales. That is to say, your motivation counts, or rationale. The rationale is of course only known to people who attend the relevant budget meetings.
I don't know, it doesn't to me. To me it sounds like they provide a convenient free service like many other free services (Telegram, WhatsApp, ...), but limit it to their actual customers so it stays limited in scope and they don't need to start selling data and ad space like others do to support it.
This might be true in Europe, but not in America. In Europe, nobody uses iMessage, because WhatsApp got there first. iMessage is locked down and therefore less useful than WhatsApp. Despite the fact that iMessage is pre-installed in iPhones, and you can't change your default messaging app, and everything about the iPhone encourages you to use it, people still download WhatsApp instead. That's how things are supposed to be; the more useful, more open, more technically capable service won out. And no, WhatsApp does not have ads, nor does it collect your data due to its E2E encryption.
In America, iMessage got there first. Even though it's technically worse than WhatsApp, enough people use it (a majority) that it doesn't matter that it handicaps its own users with SMS and green bubbles. People think it's all the other phones' fault rather than the iPhone's fault. It's a massive driver of iPhone sales, and Apple execs are on the record acknowledging that.
That's not how it's supposed to work. The better messaging platforms should be competitive. Apple stock would tank if they were forced to open up the iMessage API.
> Apple stock would tank if they were forced to open up the iMessage API.
If I were on the board of Apple, that's precisely why I'd be pushing for it to be open. I would be terrified if my company's value were in a stupid chatting protocol. It's the difference between accidentally driving off a cliff and purposely driving off a cliff with a parachute. I'd choose the parachute and make money/goodwill from the exposure vs. losing everything because the "blue sheeple" woke up.
I don't think you can use 1Password passkey without turning on the default password manager; at least, you cannot login using apple account passkey on the computer with 1Password.
Not OP but one that is usually contentions is the ability to act as an SMS client. Facebook's Messenger can or at least used to be able to do this on Android. It cannot on iOS.
When a service reaches a certain size, it is not just a small free service for its users. This is the point of gatekeeper regulations: Ensuring that services large enough to have significant impact on people are well-behaved and compatible.
The argument that iMessage is a service provided by Apple for Apple products and that they should be allowed to do whatever with their products is the same argument they've used to restrict App Store, force developers to use their payment systems and charge outrageous cuts of every payment a user might make through there.
iMessage plays quite a notable role in this, as a user whose friends use iMessage (more prevalent in parts of the U.S. I think) might feel unable to move away in order to be connected to their iMessage-using friends, in turn ensuring that they keep buying iPhones and paying Apple a 30% cut of all their app subscriptions from Duolingo to Disney+.
free in that case, being subsidized by other purchases and the value of lock-in on those users. Doesn't sound like free. Sounds likes a calculated offering where users are paying, not in terms of their data, but their inability to change platforms and guarantee of future purchases being spent on Apple products.
Because the EU specifically wrote a law requiring (among other people) Apple to support apps on their competitor's platform, as a response to a bunch of anti-competitive nonsense the tech industry does with messaging apps.
To clarify: The Digital Markets Act includes a requirement for large message services to be interoperable (e.g., that you can chat with a WhatsApp user from Telegram), but Apple argues that iMessage does not have enough users in the EU to qualify.
Apple might be correct in this regard, as iMessage is not very popular in EU specifically. For this to apply here, either Apple would have to be caught lying about their numbers (not impossible), the EU would have to lower the minimums, or the US would have to create their own counterpart as iMessage is much more popular in the US.
Everybody really use WhatsApp to send messages to friends here, especially in group chats. I'm using Telegram with some friends and for some groups but WhatsApp is bigger. Anything else is a rounding error.
It's not even easy to know who's got an iPhone now: it's just a big phone with lots of cameras as any other one. However it's likely that two close friends, families, etc all using iPhones could decide to use iMessage for their own messages. Same as for... (had to google it) FaceTime.
There doesn't even need to be a person that could be held responsible, or they could be easily masked behind anonymity of the web or layers of white horses / phished identities.