"Apple opening up every feature to third party manufacturers prevents them from being able to attract consumers with their own exclusive feature sets"
No, it's exactly the opposite! If they opened up their features MORE consumers would be able to benefit from them!
No, it's not. That sort of thinking might sound good on paper, but it shows absolutely no awareness to how business, innovation, and competition actually work, which is probably strongly related to why EU bureaucrats think it's a good idea.
Forcing a platform to “open up every feature” (like Live Translation, Mirroring, Find My, Continuity handoff, AirDrop protocols, etc.) removes the levers companies use to compete. If any new feature must be given away to rivals on day one, you’ve created a free-rider problem. ROI on R&D drops, so you get fewer ambitious bets and more timid, committee-approved "innovation" that won't cost too much and definitely won't fail.
So sure "if everyone has access to the same tools that means they'll have to compete harder" might sound reasonable on paper, but you've actually just incentivized less innovation. Let's look at the example we're all arguing about: AirPod Live Translation.
Why would Apple sink time and money into training models, optimizing latency, and designing a seamless UX if, on day one, they were required to make that feature available to every $20 knock-off earbud on Amazon? The ROI disappears. Apple takes on all the risk, competitors get the reward. So yes, in theory if Apple is forced to give it to everyone “more consumers benefit” in the short term, but what actually happens is rather than give it to everyone, it just doesn't get built at all. Regulations like the DMA disincentivizes anyone from pushing the envelope.
And the irony is that features usually do spread once they prove essential. Noise cancellation started in premium headphones and filtered down. Same with tons of Apple-developed features (Easy pairing of BT devices, Portrait Mode, Find My networks). Competitors reacted to Apple, and quickly implemented those features in their devices. The difference is, they spread because competitors were forced to innovate their own versions, not because regulators stripped away the advantage from the first mover. And Apple can be forced to respond in the market. If my friend's Bose headphones pair seamlessly with his Android tablet, and then I go out and buy a pair, but I have to go into settings and use clunky pairing codes, then my iPhone is less attractive. So Apple introduces the feature, gets to profit from it, but a few years down the road they have to expand it because of competition they initiated. But in the EU's world, that easy pairing never gets built.
If you mandate that every proprietary feature be shared instantly, you don’t get faster diffusion, you get companies holding back, or worse, never building it at all.
Consumers don’t end up with “more benefit,” they end up with less innovation to benefit from.
You are ignoring the fact that phones and their SW are a commodity now, part of everyday life for a lot of people (at least 60% of the world's population, so probably >85% of adults). Commodities need to have a certain set of common standards and features. We accept without question that a cell/mobile phone from one manufacturer must be able to make/accept calls to/from phones of another manufacturer, but even exchanging messages seemed too much for Apple until they were forced to allow this. Apple need to grow up. Life is different from 20+ years ago.
Gasoline is a commodity; cars aren't. Electricity is a commodity; appliances are allowed to compete on design and features. Wireless spectrum is a commodity; phones and their software are absolutely not commodities.
An iPhone that only runs Apple-approved apps isn't missing its core value proposition - it's still a fully functional smartphone with millions of available apps. Users explicitly choose iOS knowing its limitations, often
because of the curated approach. Your "commodity" argument falls apart when consumers clearly are paying premiums for different approaches to the same basic functionality.
Under your logic, all cars should be forced to accept any competitors' infotainment system and all game consoles should run its competitors' games. The existence of competition in how platforms curate their ecosystems is the market working, not failing.
The DMA isn't correcting a market failure - it's mandating a specific business model that many consumers explicitly don't want. If platform openness were universally valued, Android's market share would be 100%. The fact that it isn't suggests consumers have diverse preferences that regulation is now overriding.
