Right, but they still swivelled well after it was clearly understood that no one was paying attention to their microUSB understanding.
They didn't swivel. T
he MOU was renewed twice and finally expired in 2014 - the year the USB-C standard was published.
The first USB-C phone appeared in 2015. The MOU ran its course, and by the 2010s all the major smartphone makers (except Apple) were using microUSB. Whether that would have happened without the MOU we'll never know - but somehow none of Samsung/Google/HTC etc. (except Apple) tried to cash in by making a proprietary connector (which was standard operating practice before microUSB). The one thing the MOU
didn't cover was fast charging standards - and, surprise surprise,
that turned into a pot-luck mixture of actual incompatibility and "only use our charger" FUD.
The most important reason for adopting USB-C is not the connector itself, but the USB Power Delivery Standard - which is both extensible and backwards-compatible - and should avoid the "OK you can trickle charge with a standard adapter, but need to use ours for fast charging" problem with MicroUSB.
Who has swivelled/pivoted? Well, Apple launched Lightning as the "connector for the next decade" in 2012 yet 3 years later they started using USB-C in Macs and 6 years later had to switch to USB-C for the iPad Pro.
With the entire tech world already using USB-C by 2022 and Apple merely waiting for the decade of lightning to run it’s course in 2023, what, exactly, did the EU accomplish by setting a date for the end of 2024?
The adoption of USB-C by the EU has been discussed since at least 2018, the proposal was published in 2021 and passed in 2022 - so it would have been an influence on manufacturers switching to USB-C. 2024 was just the final deadline for implementation. Lightning's "decade" ran out in 2022 - not that anybody would have seriously held them to that.
Why Apple needed to keep pushing Lightning for a decade is still a mystery (unless, you know, they were pulling in juicy cash from selling chargers, cables and MFI licensing) - especially once they started pushing USB-C on Macs. Biggest mystery is why they ever put Lightning on the Magic Peripherals which were released 6 months after the USB-C only 12" Macbook...
es, the EU saw that microUSB was a losing battle
Enjoy your alternative reality. MicroUSB was accepted (by everybody but Apple) as the standard for years. The real question is why did Apple have to be (apparently)
forced to use the very USB-C connector
that they themselves helped to design & promote. (Actually, I think they're just briar-patching. so that they can blame the EU for a change that was going to happen anyway).
It's only Apple evangelists who have a problem with the idea of a standardised charger.
The world didn’t need the EU’s “approval” to use a connector that was already gaining mass adoption around the world
The directive helps dissuade any of the large phone-manufacturers with popular phone models from adopting a gratuitously incompatible connector and/or charging protocol in order to lock consumers into buying proprietary chargers and cables.... a practice which
was endemic pre-USB, continued into miniUSB (I think HTC had odd not-quite-miniUSB connectors), still happened with fast charging protocols in the microUSB era and which, of course Apple have been doing with lightning from ~2017 (when they could have gone to USB-C to match the Mac) until - by some strange coincidence - the EU deadline.