Just what is needed. EU bureaucrats forcing design on private companies 
People still have a choice not to buy don’t they?
People still have a choice not to buy don’t they?
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EU Planning to Force Apple to Give Developers Access to All Hardware and Software Features
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Well… you always could do that. Your car still needs to pass the safety inspection. That’s it.
Well no, you can creat a new fob to your car or frlash Linux on your fridge and still keep your warranty under law.
Why they can’t buy another phone is because it’s a question of ownership of your own property. EU apparently values private property of citizens more than the US, how ironic.
why not. they can buy Nokia as many as they want. EU please stop harass Apple, ask your EU ppl to buy Nokia, XiaoMi, Huawei, Microsoft Phone etc...no need attack a company and force them
AT this point in the thread I am discussing my own points and not someone else’s. So I am glad we agree that companies can decide to do business or not in any jurisdiction.
Well if you didn’t live in lala land or the poorly written article, this legislation affects every company. It’s not written against apple.
Whilst that might be the headline, I suspect that the nuance will be something like Apple having to make (more) APIs available. I might be getting this wrong but I get that the feeling here is that the EU will be forcing Apple to release all their code.
Your statement is little broad brushed. The law has also forced cars, (private companies again), to be designed, (mandatory seatbelts for example and I'm sure there will be many more), in certain ways.Just what is needed. EU bureaucrats forcing design on private companies
These Butterfly Keyboards really sucks, your shift key got stuck.
Well, think about it. It seems the choice is to stay in the EU to keep all of those potential customers... or allow EU regulators to gut and ruin the company. Apple can survive without the EU. But can they survive if they give away the primary reasons for buying Apple's products?
This is a well thought out post and I thank you for taking the time to post it. One argument against sideloading has always been potential piracy. This isn’t as big a problem on Android as it used to be because most games are F2P but it is the primary reason the games selection on iOS is about 1000x better than Android. It’s not like Apple’s tight control doesn’t have some advantages to it!Yeah, I'd imagine with all the chain rattling of the last few years Apple has probably already designed/developed a system for managing sideloading. Once it becomes clear that they can no longer fight it, it will be announced as a new feature.
I have mixed feelings about this, to be honest. As a dev I get that it would be kinda great to have access to the same resources that internal Apple devs have. But I also get that Apple kinda deserves an advantage for being the ones who actually designed and built the system in the first place. I mean, there are probably some internal APIs that are essentially private IP/trade secrets, which have just been wrapped up in API by one of the devs, for convenience—i.e., to allow other internal devs to benefit from the technique. I don't really see why Apple should be forced to open those things up. Mind you, if the EU forces their hand, Apple would probably just make these kinds of API closed source code, shared internally between Apple devs. Not sure how the EU could regulate that. On the other hand, it could be that opening up internal techniques like this to third-party devs would just become a further strength of the platform itself, making it harder, not easier, to compete with... could go either way, I suppose. (That is admittedly less likely, as it's hard to imagine a function so mysterious that third-party devs couldn't reverse engineer it. But at an extreme, I could see a situation whereby forcing Apple to reveal its hand could lead to bizarre forms of obfuscation—internal devs writing impenetrable functions with bizarre names, taking meaningless parameters, just to throw third-party devs off the scent! ? Or maybe they'd just make their already impenetrable documentation even worse... hahaha...)
Also, while it seems intuitively clear who the "gatekeeper" companies are, has an actual definition been proposed? I don't see any concrete definition in the document—it refers to high-level attributes of a gatekeeper, or conditions in which a gatekeeper might arise, but isn't very specific about what it actually is. It seems to be a matter of degree, as much as anything else, but the actual degree isn't specified (this may be an opening for Apple's lawyers). If, for example, a company becomes particularly dominant in a given vertical, and they have a hardware+software ecosystem to support that, do they automatically become gatekeepers? Should they? If I'm a small player, in a particular vertical/niche, then surely any bigger player with a closed hardware+software platform is a "gatekeeper" from my perspective, no? But that's also just how IP and competitive advantage work. The only instance in which that isn't the case is in the open source community.
And forcing everything to become open source surely isn't the solution, since it's not that uncommon for large corporations to have parasitic relationships to open source projects, using the tech without contributing in any meaningful way. You just further promote a slave labour class of unpaid devs producing and maintaining code for the corporate giants who had the advantage of filling their coffers first—kinda like how composers and musicians essentially subsidize Spotify with their part-time jobs and side-hustles.
Dunno. Seems like a quagmire, to me.
PS: I'm not against regulation, btw. I think regulating the big tech companies is almost essential, at this point. It's a matter of how it's done, and how to avoid falling into vaguely altruistic, hand-wavey forms of overreach.
I’ve always thought it like the games industry. Nintendo make much better games than any third party studio because of their tight hardware integration but it’s arguable whether they have anything that third parties don’t have beyond exceptionally talented developers.
I remain unconvinced however sideloading on iOS would ever be a problem. If we had it on the iPad it’s likely we might see more Mac app ports (or even a dedicated Mac OS emulator that just runs Mac apps) which would be a huge answer to a lot of complaints from users. I also do not believe it would be an issue on the iPhone because we had sideloading of jail broken apps in the months before Apple even launched the App Store.
RCS is superior to SMS in every way and yet networks worldwide are dragging their heals. If they have the bandwidth for WhatsApp and Telegram they have it for RCS.
Who would want to be able to SMS from whatsapp, signal or Telegram? no one; at least not outside the US where no one uses SMS anymore. In my case, being outside the US, most of my contacts -other than my immediate relatives- use non-Apple devices. I’d love to be able to send them HD photos, videos, audios, etc right from the messages app instead of needing whatsapp, telegram or signal. If you don’t get that you must be an american. The US is the only country where they couldn’t care less if Apple doesn’t open up imessage because most of them use iphones anyway.
Those markets are huge. Much larger than the US or the EU. Apple doesn’t bend easily. Especially not if they feel, like they do in this case, that they’d be compromising their platform.
You have always been free to do what you want with your property. When it comes to mass produced products for the consumer market these products all come with limitations and capabilities. Such as buying a Tesla with autopilot. You are of course free to do what you want with the product you bought but the manufacturer doesn’t have to help you. Like install g your own autopilot software. That’s capitalism at work, not nanny micromanaging regulations.
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The EU won’t apply these rules to Games Consoles because they all have other options for how you acquire software. You can buy new discs/cartridges, 2nd hand ones from shops or eBay, game codes from the likes of CDkeys or just swap them with your mates. If you want to you can buy a console and games all 2nd hand and never give a penny to Sony, Microsoft or Nintendo.
That said there can’t be many gamers who wouldn’t want to see Steam or the Epic store on their console.
You clearly never had to suffer the ignominy of the Windows store, did you?
It’s not about design, it’s about standards. We have GSM, British Scientific Standards, Weights and Measurements, recording of the passing of time and millions of other internationally agreed upon standards for millions of different things. Crucially none of these things are owned by one particular company. All (ALL) of them make life better. When we have competing standards we end up with, well you’ve had to buy a travel adaptor right?Just what is needed. EU bureaucrats forcing design on private companies
The EU forces the industry to adopt RCS? Everybody wins. The EU force all phone manufacturers to use USB-C? Everybody wins. The EU forces the multipurpose computer to be as open as your desktop? Desktops are great!
I’ll go one better and list Pixelmator, Menubutler, Twitterrific, Candybar, Quicksilver, Growl, Office, Firefox, Thunderbird, MacSaber, Photoshop, Transmission, VLC, Camino, AutoCAD etc etc as the many apps I’ve used over the years that didn’t come from the Mac App Store and never caused any issues on my Mac.
Even if you are fully in Apple's corner, it will ultimately be a better and more competitive and innovative Apple if they are forced to comply and compete and really grind.
Apple has gotten enormously fat and lazy relative to what they could be doing and the pace it could be coming at.
Apple has gotten enormously fat and lazy relative to what they could be doing and the pace it could be coming at.
Others have argued this much better than I can, but the FIRST thing that will happen is every idiot company (such as Epic) will create their own app store and make their app available only through that store on their terms. It'll be like the current streaming nightmare (20 services for essentially 1 product) because every greedy company wants their own store and payment terms. We'll end up choosing between not getting an app and using some scummy stores. Not surprisingly, not all these stores will be as secure as Apple's, not all will care about our privacy, not all will respect the current iPhone experience if we can install ANYTHING.
I reiterate: go away. You want to do all this stuff, buy an Android phone and enjoy that craptastic dumpster of a user experience. You don't NEED to make the iPhone as crappy and then to buy that. If it's about the choice to do whatever you want, you already have it. If Android isn't good enough, just build your own phone and software then. You're not entitled to dictate to hundreds of millions of happy iPhone users that their experience needs to be worse because you refuse to buy or build another phone, which you already have the option to do.
Well for starters, it's in the headline of the article:
"EU Planning to Force Apple to Give Developers Access to All Hardware and Software Features"
Yeah, and every unethical app developer who currently plays nice by Apple's rules but would immediately only allow their app to be downloaded through THEIR separate app store (like Epic) where it may use a less safe and private payment method and not respect as many Apple privacy and experience requirements currently in place - would that not be less "safe"? We have a "safety inspection" for apps now that the vast majority of users are happy with.
You don't like that you can't install random garbage on your iPhone? No pity from me - you knew what it was when you bought it. For your next phone you can get some trash Android phone, put as many random apps from multiple app stores on it as you want. You already have that choice. No, you have some perverse drive to make the iPhone worse for all of us that like it for the way it works now, you’ll only be happy when everyone else other than you is saddled with the burden of how unethical companies will start to act when this is possible. They'll withhold from the central app store and malware and junk apps will be as huge on iPhones as they are on Android.
Threaten to pull out Apple, it'll get sorted instantly and these whiners can go buy a flagship Android phone and have an ultra crappy experience for the entire time they own it but doing exactly what they want. Or, they can build their own phone - if this is SOOOOOOOOO necessary and SOOOOOOOOO many people want it then surely customers will flock to your totally open phone that lets companies force me to use THEIR store if I want their app and not Apple's.
Did anyone force you to buy an iPhone? You can do all of this on an Android phone. The choice already exists. If it's that important, and that valuable to everyone, they can just buy an Android phone. They buy the iPhone anyway because they find the experience Apple built to be more valuable. Now a bunch of what appear to be either paid shills or smooth brains want to make the iPhone as crappy as Android and buy that, instead of exercising a choice that already exists. And that's why I say, Apple should threaten to pull out and let its users sort out the lawmakers spearheading this complete idiocy.