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AirPods Live Translation Blocked for EU Users With EU Apple Accounts
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Android is open. If iOS is really limiting Bose’s ability to compete, then Bose can build an amazing experience on Android that isn’t possible on iOS and point to Apple’s rules as to why it doesn’t work on iOS. But Bose shouldn’t be given access to Apple’s translation tech for free.
Imagine the EU told pharmaceutical companies they have to immediately share any breakthrough drug formula with competitors the moment they discover it. No patents, no exclusivity period to recoup R&D costs, just instant forced sharing. Obviously no one would invest billions in drug development under those conditions. But it’s not going to harm innovation if we do with tech companies? Come on!
Standards development works best when companies first innovate independently, prove what actually works in the real world, and then contribute those learnings to future standards. The Bluetooth SIG needed Apple to show them how wireless audio should actually function before they could create LE Audio. If Apple had been forced to hand over their improvements immediately through something like the DMA, we’d probably still be stuck with committee-designed mediocrity.
Remember how terrible committee-designed micro-USB was until Apple showed everyone how connectors should work with Lightening, and then contributed to the group that gave us USB-C?
I agree that not all market regulation is harmful to innovation. For example, as much as I disagree with the DMA’s third-party App Store requirement, I don’t think it significantly harms innovation. But the “immediately give access to any software feature to your competitors, for free” part of the DMA definitely harms it.
And it’s not just about current gatekeepers. Every company now has to consider “what happens if we become too successful?” Before investing in major R&D projects, companies have to ask whether they want to risk becoming big enough to trigger DMA obligations. It creates a perverse incentive where companies might deliberately limit their growth, skip the EU market, or avoid breakthrough innovations to stay under the regulatory radar. The result is less innovation across the entire ecosystem, not just from the biggest players.
Apple’s Bluetooth improvements led to better wireless audio for the entire industry, but only because they got to benefit from their investment first. Under the DMA’s logic, those improvements would have AT BEST been delayed by YEARS and most likely would have never been developed because the incentive structure would be completely broken.
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What are you talking about here? Apple supports AAC over LC3. Neither are proprietary.
This is a very comprehensive article about the current state of Bluetooth Audio (LE) on iDevices:
How Bluetooth LE Audio could amp up the next generation of AirPods
Bluetooth audio is about to level up with LE Audio and the LC3 codec. We can only hope these technologies are coming to AirPods and iPhones soon.
www.macworld.com
The article was written in 2022, and iOS still does not support the superior Bluetooth LE Audio modes.
Check the article I posted above about Bluetooth LE Audio. It's Apple who is dragging their feet by not implementing it in iOS. Is this how dominant tech companies should behave to keep competitors at a distance? I'm sure you know the "embrace, extend, and extinguish" strategy Microsoft has become known for. What Apple is doing in the audio accessory space is very similar in my opinion.
I don't think anyone is asking Apple to give other companies access to the translation feature. Any interested competitor would have to come up with their own way to do the on-device audio processing and actual translation. Unless of course Apple decides to provide API access to third-party apps.
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So three years later Apple is not only “not behind” but flourishing as well. So much for those prognostications.This is a very comprehensive article about the current state of Bluetooth Audio (LE) on iDevices:
How Bluetooth LE Audio could amp up the next generation of AirPods
Bluetooth audio is about to level up with LE Audio and the LC3 codec. We can only hope these technologies are coming to AirPods and iPhones soon.
The article was written in 2022, and iOS still does not support the superior Bluetooth LE Audio modes.
The DMA literally requires Apple to give access to any “hardware or software” feature iOS uses. That’s the almost certainly why Apple isn’t releasing it the EU.
The gatekeeper shall allow providers of services and providers of hardware, free of charge, effective interoperability with, and access for the purposes of interoperability to, the same hardware and software features accessed or controlled via the operating system or virtual assistant listed in the designation decision pursuant to Article 3(9) as are available to services or hardware provided by the gatekeeper.
If the translation is done on the phone (which it is) the DMA compels Apple to offer API access to the feature for free if a hardware company asks for it. Apple doesn’t even get a short exclusivity period - they’d be required to offer a third-party API today (iOS 26 release day to anyone reading in the future) or be out of compliance and risk fines.
Even if Apple has always been planning to and will eventually release a third-party API for access to the feature (like they did for the “easy pairing” feature), they can’t release it in the EU until that third-party API is available, or the EU gives them assurances they’re not going to interpret the law to require it.
Is your interpretation of that part of the law different? Honest question.
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That article doesn't address my point. The only part of the spec that Apple doesn't currently support is the LC3 codec, because Apple prefers AAC. Which is not proprietary.This is a very comprehensive article about the current state of Bluetooth Audio (LE) on iDevices:
How Bluetooth LE Audio could amp up the next generation of AirPods
Bluetooth audio is about to level up with LE Audio and the LC3 codec. We can only hope these technologies are coming to AirPods and iPhones soon.
The article was written in 2022, and iOS still does not support the superior Bluetooth LE Audio modes.
I think you did not understand the article I linked to. Bluetooth LE Audio (released in 2020) is a new spec that supersedes the old Bluetooth Audio Profiles. It's much more sophisticated and allows many use cases that were not possible with legacy Bluetooth. LC3 is just one very tiny part of the new spec.
This is a lot of legalese and IANAL. My interpretation of the above would be, that Apple has to give access to the APIs used by the translation app, but not the translation service itself.
If a third party would like to offer a live translation service, it should have access to the same (or equivalent) operating system API as Apple's solution. This is deemed necessary, because otherwise third-party services would be at a disadvantage from the get-go, which would not be fair competition.
We agreed, that Apple uses some proprietary protocols to communicate with AirPods to enable real-time audio communication. This is necessary, because the old Classic Bluetooth Profiles have audio quality and latency issues.
Now to comply with the DMA, Apple could allow third parties to use the proprietary Bluetooth extensions, or preferably, implement Bluetooth Audio LE, which is the industry standard that provides most of the advantages of Apple's proprietary Bluetooth tech.
Repeating what Bluetooth LE Audio is for the third time doesn't contradict what I said. LC3 is the audio codec used with Bluetooth LE Audio. Apple chose to continue to support AAC instead of supporting LC3.
The codec choice is not really relevant here. LC3 is the new baseline codec for Bluetooth LE Audio. It's a replacement for SBC and Apple will most likely support it for compatibility reasons. Apple can still prefer AAC over BLE Audio, if they chose so.
From your article: "LE Audio requires a new low complexity codec, LC3." Again, Apple is choosing AAC over LC3 (and therefore LE Audio.) My point was simply that the choice Apple is making isn't proprietary vs non-proprietary. It's between two non-proprietary codecs. Most likely do to quality and hardware decoding efficiency if I were to guess.
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How does Apple’s dominance (far less than half the market, but still) in cellular phones hamper competition in “headphones” in general? The number of products in the EU that make use of wireless headphones are ENORMOUS, far dwarfing the Apple based use case of “1 family of phones”.
How is anyone buying a wireless headphones for the massive number of Windows laptops and the enormous number of Android phones hampered by AirPods working well with the iPhone (which, again, is nowhere near even the majority of phones used in the EU, much less the number of products that wireless headphones work with in the EU)?
I am also not a lawyer, and definitely not a European one, but "access to the same software features" sounds to me like API access to that feature. Not "APIs so Bose can build a similar feature." (Particularly given those features ALREADY exist in third-party apps). Especially when you consider some of the requirements the EU has already placed on Apple under the DMA (notifications on third-party smart watches, easy bluetooth pairing for headphones and other devices, etc.). The EU specifically requires that "all features on Apple will have to enable interoperability for any type of connected device, free of charge, via complete, accurate and well-documented frameworks and APIs."
So when Apple's lawyers looked at the translation feature, I suspect they reasonably concluded the DMA would require them to provide the same level of access to competitors that Apple's own apps get: meaning access to the translation service, not just telling competitors to build their own.
Assuming I am correct in my interpretation, would you agree that forcing Apple to give Bose or Samsung or whoever access to the translation service as an API is an overreach? And that if the choice Apple truly has is "give API access to the service to third-parties" or "not introduce the service in the EU" that Apple choosing not to introduce the service is a reasonable decision, even if you personally prefer they had made a different one? Or do you think Apple being forced to give access is justifiable? If so, what is the justification?
Of course it's fair competition. Apple built both devices and the OS. They did the hard work to create that integrated platform. Yes, Apple controls iOS, but they earned that position by investing billions in R&D to build something users actually want.
The real question is: should companies be penalized for successful innovation? Apple's tight hardware-software integration is their competitive advantage, just like Spotify's recommendation algorithm, or Bose's sound quality. The EU deciding "integration advantages aren't allowed here" is picking winners and losers based on regulatory preference, not market competition. If users didn't want Apple's integrated approach, they'd buy Android phones (and over 70% of EU users do). There's a place in the market for a tightly integrated approach, and the mindset of banning successful integration because it doesn't fit regulators' definition of what "fair competition" is explains why the EU struggles with tech innovation. We don't say "Spotify's recommendation algorithm is too good, so Apple Music should get access to it for free because otherwise they're at a disadvantage and it's not fair competition." But that's what the EU has done to Apple with the DMA.
The EU's concept of "fairness" reminds me of my 4-year-old. If he sees another kid get a cookie after school, he will say something like "Timmy got a cookie so I should get a cookie too, but my teacher said no. It's not fair!" without understanding that Timmy got the cookie as a treat for behaving well all day. If I come in and tell the teacher to give my son a cookie even though he's been behaving terribly, it's not actually "fair" even though both boys get a cookie. It's unfair to Timmy, who learns he could have acted out all day and still gotten the cookie. I'd argue it's also unfair to my son, who learns all the wrong lessons.
Apple "got the cookie" by investing billions in R&D and creating something users love. Giving competitors the same advantages for free doesn't create fairness, but rather punishes the "good behavior" of innovation that led to the things users love. It really does explain why the continent has such an innovation problem when their government thinks "giving others' work away for free" is going to incentivize innovation.
I really don't think this has anything to do with what we're actually arguing about, but I'll just say again that if the DMA were in place prior to AirPods being released, the Bluetooth LE Audio standard wouldn't exist. (I also suspect AirPods wouldn't be available in the EU either, or would have come way later.) The Bluetooth LE Audio standard came years after Apple had already solved these problems with their proprietary work with AirPods. And Apple contributed that knowledge to the standard! This is exactly how innovation should work: Apple invested in solving hard technical problems first, benefited from their innovations, and then contributed to industry standards that everyone could use.
But under the DMA's logic, Apple would have been forced to hand over their Bluetooth improvements immediately after developing them, which completely changes the ROI calculation for solving hard problems. When companies know they'll be forced to give away breakthrough technologies for free the moment they're successful, they'll invest far less in R&D and focus on incremental improvements instead of revolutionary ones.
We'd likely have gotten mediocre Bluetooth improvements at best, not the kind of major breakthroughs that actually fixed wireless audio. Kinda like how the USB standards group thought Micro-USB was a good design until Apple showed them otherwise and participated in the USB-C design process.
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And the path between both users can also be an issue. If it all can be done on device and strong encrypted Bluetooth connection between the two phones, it could work. But, I don’t think the GDPR is the biggest problem. The EU is pushing for legislation that enforces monitoring all conversations on chat services - live translation is basically a chat service too.
I don't have time to answer all your points, sorry. We are also going around in circles a bit in this discussion.
I'll just add this. After looking at the details how "Live Translation" is implemented in iOS 26, it's a little bit clearer to me what the holdup is about. Confusingly Live Translation seems to be an umbrella term for several integrations across many first-party apps. You can not only use it for translating live speech using AirPods, but also inside the Messages and FaceTime apps. This of course makes integrating third-party translation service more complicated and requires more effort than I originally thought.
Live Translation is really a good feature and in my opinion has the potential to be much more popular than mirroring. My bet would be that it's in Apple's own interest to comply with the law to everyone's satisfaction as quickly as possible 🤞.
I had the opportunity to test it out on my AirPods Pro 2. It was actually pretty great. Th delay is about 3 seconds, but you can read the translation on the iPhone and it’s almost instant. It works pretty well to be honest.
Agree we're going in circles. A shame the EU is keeping this feature away from its citizens because either it doesn't believe in intellectual property or have any idea how business works.
In short, EU iPhone users will never get the Live Translation feature. That is unless some third party writes their own app and gets it on the iOS App Store.
Saw the demonstration bu Justine and yeah, it was surprisingly good.
There’s already apps out there. There’s even one where you share your AirPod with someone else so both get the audio translation.
What’s more critical is that Live Translation, even on non-iPhones will only be provided in the EU by non-EU devices with non-EU OS’s. The EU market NEEDS US devices (created in the US laissez-faire market economy) and they’re hopeful that the US government won’t prevent the sale of US devices in the region. Because, buying US made devices is the best outcome for them and their families.
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I'm looking at the big picture and am quite happy with the way our political system and economy is managed at the EU level. There are really more important issues than fretting about the lack of certain features on my smartphone.
If you're happier with a laissez-faire type of market economy, and think that this leads to the best outcomes for you and your family, then I have nothing against that. You're definitely living in the right country then, as far as I can tell.
As an American, I am envious of so many parts of European life. I have considered making a move.
Given all the many conditions, for both parties involved, the vagaries of 'phone based Beta applications combined with the frustration of meticulously meeting these conditions and finding it simply doesn't work, I know for sure that learning a language, even the basics, is much more fun and much less clumsy. And you can go back and turn of SIRI.