This however isn't a reason for the rest of the world to accept this. And since the power in the market is highly concentrated and all of it is moving more and more in this direction, regulation enforces these alternative options now.

All this does is regulate the power the provider of a product has over their customer. This does not ruin the walled garden for the people who prefer to stay in it for peace of mind, but it adds a door for the people who want to leave. There is no negative side-effects for the people staying, only the platform providers will have to spend some money and lose some revenue.

I agree in principle, but I worry that we end up in the situation where if you need to use a particular app, you can only get it from a third-party store that you don't trust. (Something gross like Facebook starting an app store.)

Or course, this is mostly a result of Apple being greedy. If they had acted like a good steward of the platform rather than trying to extract a lot of money from developers, we probably wouldn't be here.

In practice I doubt many apps will use a third-party appstore. Apple has a lot of leeway in how they will implement the regulation - they can make it painful enough to use a third-party store that most popular apps will want to keep using the primary app store to get maximum reach. Just like how almost every android app is on the google play store - despite sideloading being a thing since forever.

As soon as those devs can avoid Apple's restrictions and deliver their apps directly to users with the "intended" experience, they will.

Personally, I like neutered-evil-genie apps, and will be sad to lose them (i.e. have them turn into unfettered-evil-genie apps, which I won't use.)

Or does the EU law prevent them from having private APIs/system components period? It seems like many people are making the assumption that this means that every single sideloaded app will be able to bypass all of the privacy/security features on the device, and I don't see why that would be. My understanding is that this is for "fairness", which would mean that apps that are sideloaded would have the same level of access as those on the App Store, meaning they use the same APIs that trigger the same prompts.

These are the sorts of prohibited behaviors that can be heuristically recognized by technical means (e.g. static analysis), but where any such recognition would necessarily result result in tons of false positives; and so those issues, when raised, must be passed to a team of human auditors for determination.

This is, by-and-large, why App Store submissions — even for updates — still require that human-auditor step. They're always watching for those seemingly-minor "this app got sold to someone evil" updates that slip in spyware — the kind you see often with Chrome Extensions.

The second example has already been fixed with the microphone indicator from 1-2 versions back, where a light shows up in the corner whenever the microphone has been activated (and swiping down tells you what app activated it). A notification could be added if an app tried to activate the microphone when it wasn't in the foreground (but I don't think the OS lets you do that anyway?)

You'd think that maybe restricting connections to e.g. domains that are rooted in a zone the developer has proven ownership of, would be fine... but there are third-party advertising, analytics, and fingerprinting services that allow you to CNAME them as subdomains of your domain to evade ad-blocker signature recognition.

And, of course, no user could ever be expected to figure any of this out if asked in a prompt. "Example App is asking me to allow it to connect to abcdefg.example.com? Well, they own that, don't they? Why wouldn't I allow that?"

ANY "solution" that puts more burden on the user isn't.

The problem with consent prompts on websites is that they are rarely in compliance with the GDPR.

Take, for example, this: https://www.reddit.com/r/ios/comments/w27x6j/uber_does_not_r...

This also ignores that it's conceivable that Apple can harden iOS's existing permissions system.

Not at all. App Store review is not perfect and no one expects it to be. That doesn't mean it has no value or that we should get rid of it entirely. Otherwise you could make the same argument about any system involving unscrupulous actors: "people still kill despite there being laws against murder, doesn't that mean the law is pointless?"

> This also ignores that it's conceivable that Apple can harden iOS's existing permissions system.

Curious how you think this would actually solve the issue I linked above.

But Apple is clearly presenting it as such.

> That doesn't mean it has no value or that we should get rid of it entirely.

That is correct, but right now it is the only game in town. There's no secondary stores that present it with competition. Already we read about top-10 grossing apps that are actually scammy. Perhaps Apple will strengthen its App Store when presented with alternatives.

> Curious how you think this would actually solve the issue I linked above.

It really depends on what mechanism that Uber is using to bypass the notifications systems. But off the bat, iOS could force even more granular alerts to the user when sensitive permissions are required.

Curious too, how you think that App Store review currently solves this issue. Uber is already too significant to the platform for Apple to do much more than give them a slap on the wrist, as seen historically.

https://www.cnet.com/news/privacy/apple-tim-cook-threatened-...

How does having more granular alerts actually solve this issue?

> Curious too, how you think that App Store review currently solves this issue.

Well, obviously it doesn't, currently. App Store review needs to update their rules to address this type of abuse. Uber is big but they've taken hard line stances against bigger apps before (e.g. Facebook).

> https://www.cnet.com/news/privacy/apple-tim-cook-threatened-...

Sounds like a success story, imagine the alternative scenario where there was no review process and Uber could get away with this unimpeded.

> Sounds like a success story, imagine the alternative scenario where there was no review process and Uber could get away with this entirely.

It'd say 60-40. The 40% downside is that Apple deigned to go through with actually pulling Uber from the store, even just for a few days. Do you think they'd do anything even remotely similar over the notifications permission leak you cited?

> How does having more granular alerts actually solve this issue?

More restrictive and more transparent handling of permissions. Maybe this mechanism was caused by Uber bundling some sort of library that led to permissions leak. Perhaps the OS could expose that permission being triggered.

I don't think you've thought this all the way through. Once a user grants me permission to send them push notifications because they want to know when their ride shows up, you can't really stop me from pushing them ads through the same channel.

> Once a user grants me permission to send them push notifications because they want to know when their ride shows up, you can't really stop me from pushing them ads through the same channel.

Wait, can't an improvement upon the OS be to make it more granular so that Uber is forced to establish separate permissions channels for rides (vital) vs. ads (not-so-vital), and that every time a notification of a certain type appears, the user is given the option to mute that channel entirely?

My underlying point, of course, is just because the operating system provides certain APIs, does not mean they are going to be used in good faith.

Perhaps they could team up with Facebook and create a rival app store of those who don’t want to pay the 30% tax. Of which they can all hemorrhage users together- it should be noted that FB is also having issues maintaining and growing DAU.

Permissions represent one of two pillars of their strategy against legal malware developers. The second one is the rulebook associated with the AppStore, preventing publishing non-compliant apps and banning developers for breaking said rules. A classic example is Facebook misusing enterprise certificates to install "Facebook research" which allowed them almost unrestricted access to the data of the users. Apple revoked their enterprise certificate, which also affected internal applications that Facebook employees were using. Facebook relented.

If Facebook launches their own app store, the second pillar is completely circumvented. Additionally they will find ways around the technical limitations, be it through use of private APIs, tricking users into clicking confirmations or bribing them. Technical limitations are not enough when dealing with malicious actors.

Meta be forced to offer their adware/spyware Facebook app through the Apple app store as well, as many people will not agree or won't have the technical knowledge to install more than one alternative app store. Apple will probably be forced to provide a list of alphabetically ordered app stores to choose from in the initial iPhone setup. It's quite convenient that their own app store starts with an A.

And let's say the user says No. Today the app will be forced to work without it. By Apple Store rules. Tomorrow the app will say "this permission is required for app to work".

The government offers a democratic way to determine these requirements

Some apps are unavoidable for most people, like whatsapp or facebook.

Future is Matrix.

Are you aware of man in the middle attacks? Do you think encrypted channels are safe from state actors?

Also most phones don’t even use SMS anymore, and instead go through an encrypted server to make it so you can hide your traffic from your neighbors.

Get with reality, not everybody wants or needs what your selling here.

Of course I am aware of this.

Spend $16 and sit in a coffee shop for an hour, guarantee you'll intercept plenty of SMS: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/03/16-at...

Not selling anything here considering every reasonable solution to this problem is something offered for free, or can be mitigated by a user with FOSS.

Furthermore, the lawyer isn't just de-risking one evil genie wish, they're de-risking millions of them. Apple does not just have Facebook on the App Store. They have millions of apps. And as you can imagine, many of them are barely reviewed garbage or outright scams. If these apps tried to get distributed outside of the App Store, nobody would trust them. But them being on the App Store gives users a false sense of security. Apple switched from being highly selective in the early days of iOS to doing bare-minimum checks because the latter made them more money.

"just don't install the app" won't work in many, many cases.

Yeah, but I can't I can use only Safari engine, and I would like to use Firefox one.

Such compulsions are the real problem. In a free society, nobody should be compelled to have a phone at all, let alone install software on one. Government services in particular should never be gated in this way. If no compulsion exists, then there is no problem with people having the choice to use any appstore they wish.

If by 'have to' you mean something along the lines of "My brother keeps badgering me to install WhatsApp" then the answer is to simply say "No." Real example. He texts me instead.

I believe a rooted Android used to allow something like that, not sure if that still works nowadays.

This can lead to an arms race where the OS creates increasingly advanced/realistic fake data, and apps get increasingly sophisticated logic.

So I'm not a fan of solving this the technical way. A policy is way better, but you need to be able to enforce it.

Sure, it'll lead to arms race like you describe on one side, but let's say 99% of the apps won't even engage in that arms race if the fake data is generic enough to cause a high number of false positives (blocking someone who's not actually faking the data).

Then, we can focus on the remaining 1% of worst offenders to actually enforce the policy.

Realistically this just drives people into a different walled garden. One that is device-vendor agnostic, but a walled garden nonetheless - in that your purchases are tied to Epic. This law could have been so much better, but now it just trades one problem for a bunch of new ones (some even worse than what it's trying to solve).

One thing that might have been nice - making allowances in the law for centralised certification authorities with fixed tariffs, so that Apple still checks the builds as it does now for the App Store, but then the builds can be released elsewhere (as the signatures will match). For this they could charge a fee, which could be capped in the law at a percentage of the sale price (and obviously much lower than 30%). This way iOS/Android could still have guaranteed protection, for which Apple/Google's costs are covered, but the user would have freedom to get their software from wherever.

The problem is that hardline free software advocates would still complain about this, insisting that the certification authority be scrapped. iOS and Android are now Windows, and it's going to be a mess.

Now that I have an iPhone, I miss NewPipe greatly. But with this law, I might be able to get something like it in a few months without jailbreaking.

And when your employer / school / insurance provider / other requires it, what then?

Other wise you can end up like the streaming situation where people are just giving up with all the subscriptions and just pirating everything.

This will be a problem but the solution is not to transfer your freedom to choose to Apple and just let them decide which third party apps you are allowed to use.

In some cases that will mean making a hard choice between accepting the risk of using the third party app store, or accepting that you won't be able to use certain apps. The benefits are significant though - your device will actually be under your control. You will be able to do all the things Apple prevent now.

Very good point. It's almost like people believing it to be better for a "benevolent" dictator to make all decisions, so that they won't be bothered with having to make choices.

Not every user wants to give over their freedom of choice to Apple (or any seemingly "kind" dictator), and many would prefer they can make decisions about what is best for their particular situation and based on their own preferences.

Will the solution involve a method to negotiate degrees-of-freedom? Or perhaps a freedom grant method with revocation protocol? Do I get a little widget to see how free I am at the moment?

I'd love to see a laundry list of changes to industry practice, too. But the language employed for these compatibility fights is just getting goofy.

The F150 cup holder is enslaving me, somebody pass a law quick!

You already have that choice today: I can buy into the walled-garden, or go to Android and side-load to my heart's content.

Clearly the market has chosen the preferred route. (I personally am also in the camp of preferring the simple, locked-down approach for my family that Apple has created.)

So if Google decided to force this policy onto Android phones, you would support the EU introducing this legislation to bring back the option of side-loading?

Or would you want the legislation to only apply to Android phones, and not Apple devices?

Indeed - iOS trails Android in Europe. With this law in effect, perhaps more Europeans will choose to buy iPhones

As apposed to today where you can’t get it at all if apple and the app disagree about anything?

I know you are thinking of another large enough player you don’t trust as much forcing their store as the only avenue for an app, but it’s hard to imagine how that wouldn’t provide large incentives for a smaller party to make a competitor on the official store.

Since there is only one app store for iPhones, almost every app vendor is willing to conform to Apple's guidelines (which are often pro-privacy and protect the user). Otherwise they lose out on a significant market share with a lot of spending power.

smaller party to make a competitor on the official store

Sure, they will pop up. But Facebook, Microsoft, and Google will start iOS app stores and app developers will go to their app stores because of network effects.

You've just described why these changes are good. I feel like the word "willing" in your statement is carrying a lot of weight.

Apple forces developers to publish from Apple devices, spend $100 a year for a developer account, give up 15-30% of any revenue generated from that app, use WebKit, etc.

That is not at all what I describe as restrictions that lead to "willing" app vendors.

They might try, but it would be a lot harder than you imagine.

You have Android as a real world experiment, go ask an Android users to search the Facebook Messenger app on Google Play store and you will see it is there, FB did not forced Android users to install the app by side loading it and FB did not created their own app store for their apps.

What could happen though is you would get fair prices, say an app/Game would be 30% cheaper if you buy it directly from the developer and not from an intermediary, though I did not see this happening on PC (getting a better deal if I buy directly, I am wondering what causes this)

I often hear this argument but Android has had third-party app-stores and 'side-loadable apps' since day one and I can't think of a single major app that needs its own app-store.

There are also app stores on Android that basically push lots of scamware targeted at kids.

We aren't the target audience so we aren't going to see much of these going ons.

My bet is on Microsoft Solitaire. :-)

Though Minecraft is supposedly still at 170 million monthly active players vs. 80M or less for Fortnite.

Not necessarily up to date but interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-played_video_game...

This works both ways. Some people want to use iOS exclusive apps but can't justify buying an iPhone because of how restrictive it is. This act alleviates that.

- The app in question does not exist because the only existing app store run by Apple rejects it. Tough luck, no choice, but you still can stay safe.

Don't you agree that the latter situation is a strict subset of the former?

Also, if I were Apple, I would implement a one-click return to "safe defaults", and a prominent badge to tell Apple's software and setting from third-party.

I use MacBooks and iPhone, and I love their current form, but they are victim of their own success at one point, like how Intel just dragged its feet to just keep the performance gap enough to keep the lead. Maybe this can help us to see a better, more exciting Apple and tech ecosystem, no?

The last battery lawsuit brought us "Battery health" menu, and this is immensely useful, even if it only reads a couple flags and shows us what the iOS is doing.

This sounds like iPhone user argument. In Android world you can have multiple app stores, but if you want your app to be used you must be on Google one, because it has the most eyes. Facebook didn't create their own app store.

Custom App stores are fringe apps, with exceptions of f-droid which is source of open source apps and many prefer it to google play (and apps are frequently on both stores) and maybe samsung/amazon ones because they are preinstalled on some devices.

I don't think so. Another comment was mentioning how some desktop apps are built to install ONLY from a certain marketplace (eg Steam) so you can't install them from anywhere else. It could easily happen on iOS.

Competition

Direct downloads from websites isn't far off - I wouldn't be surprised if we very rapidly get to a place of each-app-is-it's-own-store for the purposes of complying with the law so you can freely download apps from websites.

It'll be Windows all over again, with all that implies.

That’s actually not possible though. For instance, Microsoft is likely to create its own app store, as is Adobe, Google, and obviously Epic, among the many others. So now I will have to install a bunch of app stores just to install different softwares.

I already have this problem on my gaming PC where I not only have a bunch of different app stores, but a bunch of different update tools, payment providers, logins (not just for the games, but for the app stores). It’s a freaking pain in the butt. I just want to play a game on my PC and I have to deal with crap like that. I don’t want it on my phone!

I guess most of "the rest of the world" will still be hindered by the price tag.

This isn't going to end well.

I’m sure apple will fight this tooth and nail, but it’s my phone. I paid for it. I want to be able to do what I want with my device.

However, the Apple Pay & NFC stuff just rubs me the wrong way. The only reason they have been begging for this is the ability to collect more data about riders, which isn't necessary and probably would get sold to third parties for the purpose of serving ads and other services.

I want none of this and those firms can kindly fuck off right into the Sun.

Existing API's do the basics just fine.

Thank $deity the MTA didn't entertain any of this bullshit when they rolled out OMNY. Now if we could get NJTransit on board, we'd be all set.

^ Offset of course by the fact that most customers have pretty good credit to begin with and probably spend more than your average Visa or Mastercard.

In addition, I would also expect them to be paying for integration into someone's payment infrastructure to provide other services - PayPal, Stripe, Square, and the like.

See also, Aussie banks who wanted the same thing.

How anyone would ever think this is a good idea, with third parties having unmediated access to hardware has not thought this through.

I’m not opposed to regulations, but the EU should be careful not to be too permissive or specific, keeping in mind the limitations of doing either one.

See also: the EU directive about mandating USB-C ports. They claim the standard will be revised in response to market conditions on the ground, which is nice to hear, but governments are slow - often by design - and they will need to prove it before they can be trusted not to screw up.

It’s not like apple subsidises the devices with income from the App Store fees. They’re just double dipping, and I’m glad the EU is slapping that down.

Using the official API prevents most of this misbehavior, which is why it doesn't bother me if Apple are jerks about enforcing compliance.

If you, or an app you use, feel like access is necessary, make your case to them. Repeatedly if neccessary. Software is nothing if not malleable and most of these areas are slowly opening up, as the company seems to have read the room on a few things and would like to get ahead before the law requires they do so.

On the other hand, especially with hardware that could conceivably track your location, I'm surprised that users - the knowledgable ones anyway at least - aren't up in arms about what access to raw data (e.g, not mediated by an API) by someone other than the platform vendor might mean for them.

I don't think it's necessary to pull an EFF move and demand everything be private, but this is one area that I suspect would meet the standard where people want the bar to be much higher about who gets access to data and what they are allowed to use it for.

Particularly after reading the memos which came out in the Epic lawsuit, I can’t tell how much all of this really is about privacy. Or how much privacy is just cover to take a cut of the profits of Netflix, Amazon and visa by controlling access to our phones.

The privacy argument probably has some truth, but it seems suspiciously self serving for Apple.

I think there’s plenty of ways apple could preserve my privacy without taking such extreme control of my device. A simple answer would be to give banks direct access to the NFC chips on the condition of user privacy. And cut them off if they violate that policy rule.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that apple’s chosen solution just happens to be the one which maximises their profit.

After all, Google can't really do the differential privacy stuff to the extent Apple does due to their reliance on ad revenue - which is only so targeted because they collect it in the first place, giving their Ads customers (businesses) more opportunities to sell to.

Netflix wants to build viewer profiles of its users, so gathering that data in a way that they can ID helps; Amazon will do similar things to suggest purchases based on your history.

As a card provider for the general public, Visa kind of has to play ball and even then, their customers are merchants and financial institutions that issue cards.

Given enough size - think FAANG, or really any financial institution - Apple probably can't reject them for shady behavior, but can always work to build guardrails to prevent the worst offenders from going off.

So you would also approve government entity to control what you do in your house, just to make sure you don't do something gross? If not, why you want some private company to control a phone you bought and own?

How about the fact that you knew about the restrictions before you bought the product?

I feel you are in the wrong here. You knew the contract conditions and still signed it but because you don’t like it you want to change it. Well I like it so why is your view stronger than mine? Keep in mind you do have the option of Android and with this law you are taking away my right to choose a completely closed garden. Something I actually enjoy - I’m not just playing devil’s advocate here

> You knew the contract conditions and still signed it

I didn’t sign a contract. I bought something with my money. I don’t have an ongoing business relationship with apple. But apple still thinks they’re in the right to control what I do on my own hardware.

And wow do they make a lot of money inserting themselves into my financial transactions. All in the name of privacy I hear. Suuuureee.

Apple is cleverly using the iPhone as a moat to stop banks and other companies from competing with them on software for their devices. They know nobody else has the expertise and deep enough pockets to compete on hardware - and they’re using that to milk as much money through software as they can get away with. It’s just the same as what Microsoft did bundling IE with windows - except way worse because apple doesn’t even let you install anything else.

It’s a terrible deal for consumers and the EU is right to slap them down for it.

It's my phone, I should be able to do everything with it, if they don't like it they don't need to sell it in EU.

Oh no, one of the richest companies on the planet might have to spend a tiny bit more on making things better for everyone.

The absolute horror!

Seems to me that opening this stuff up would make our phones better, not worse.

It wouldn't necessarily make things worse for you though.

> Apple is the world's largest technology company by revenue, the world's largest technology company by total assets,[454] and the world's second-largest mobile phone manufacturer after Samsung.[455][456]

> In its fiscal year ending in September 2011, Apple Inc. reported a total of $108 billion in annual revenues—a significant increase from its 2010 revenues of $65 billion—and nearly $82 billion in cash reserves.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc.#Finance

And then...

> In re: High-Tech Employee Antitrust Litigation (U.S. District Court, Northern District of California 11-cv-2509 [10]) is a class-action lawsuit on behalf of over 64,000 employees of Adobe, Apple Inc., Google, Intel, Intuit, Pixar and Lucasfilm (the last two are subsidiaries of Disney) against their employer alleging that their wages were repressed due to alleged agreements between their employers not to hire employees from their competitors.[11][12] The case was filed on May 4, 2011 by a former software engineer at Lucasfilm and alleges violations of California's antitrust statute, Business and Professions Code sections 16720 et seq. (the "Cartwright Act"); Business and Professions Code section 16600; and California's unfair competition law, Business and Professions Code sections 17200, et seq. Focusing on the network of connections around former Apple CEO Steve Jobs, the Complaint alleges "an interconnected web of express agreements, each with the active involvement and participation of a company under the control of Steve Jobs...and/or a company that shared at least one member of Apple's board of directors." The alleged intent of this conspiracy was "to reduce employee compensation and mobility through eliminating competition for skilled labor."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

And do you really think they've "seen the light" since then?

> the entire tech industry was colluding on salary and comp?

And BTW it pretty much was the entire tech industry, it came out in the court proceedings: "Dozens" of other major tech companies were involved. Pando Daily had good reporting but they closed but you can still read up on it through the Archive.

- - - -

The OP said:

> Because it requires the devotion of Apple's resources to supporting non-Apple things. It will necessarily degrade certain experiences away from those that Apple would provide without the regulation.

The first point (about Apple's war chest) is that they have plenty of resources.

The second point (about how they conspired to cheat their own engineers despite having more money than Scrooge McDuck) is just to remind everyone that these are amoral money-grubbing bastards who will do pretty much anything they think they can get away with to make a buck.

The idea that opening up their walled garden to competition will "degrade certain experiences" is laughable.

Many things will need to be rewritten; this legislation will result in significant delays in shipping new end-user features, if Apple doesn’t simply pull out of the EU, since the EU is demonstrating with this legislation that they don’t care about end-user privacy/security.

Come on, do you really expect us to be sympathetic to a trillion dollar company if its profit margin reduces? (Which any way may not happen - realistically, they'll just pass on the cost to us consumers).

Keyboard crashing, UI glitching and having wrong dimensions/inoperable sections, occasionally deciding that minimum brightness is the only allowed value and being entirely unresponsive to the brightness slider, some days using waaaay more battery with no battery accounting, sometimes requiring a reboot to use a Qi charger, occasionally freezing and dropping me back to the home screen after what I assume is a crash, sometimes requiring hard reboots as the UI is entirely locked up and doesn't even want to soft crash, ...

I can keep going. And yes, it's a new model that no it's not full of crap and apps. It sees light usage outside reading news sites.

The "apple is more reliable" thing is a myth. I feel that it used to be the case, but I haven't felt like that for a decade.

And no, having anecdotal good experiences is not very useful. I also have those, and so do users of every other platform. Reliability is about the bad experiences, and just works" implies none or at least very few bad experiences.

This isn't a hardware defect or a broken install. It's just mediocre software, nothing more. This isn't even that glitchy. All those things don't usually happen at once, although they are recurring - including for friends on different device generations, ruling out unlucky hardware and moon rays.

As mentioned, they are reproduced on devices of friends of different generations, and my earlier devices were no saints either.

Plus, remember the debugging manual: When software bugs out, it's safe to assume it's always the software that's broken. Suspicion of kernel, compiler or hardware faults come after the software has been proven free of fault (which you can't reasonably do without source access).

That eliminates...nearly all software ever created. Good luck out there

HN should know that "works for me" is not a good answer to an issue report...

As for service, this is not unique to a single device. Many if the issues are seen on a newer model from a friend within a few weeks of purchase. For that to still be hardware or related to my iOS install, shipped product quality would have to be quite a lottery...

None of what you mentioned I even heard of, let alone experienced. Yet you come here and seem to be claiming that your anecdotal evidence weighs heavier than the anecdotal evidence of others. Weird.

It's a shame that you drew the short straw but maybe it's something in your setup, home network, mobile coverage or whatnot.

If we're going to exchange anecdotes, I can write at least 20 short horror stories of all 13 Android devices I owned over the course of 6 years, belonging to 5 different brands. They had systemic and repeatable / reproducible issues which I eventually concluded their custodians weren't interested in fixing.

I can keep going as well. None of what you said is actual evidence.

(Macs may not be as "just works" as iPhones, sure. I've personally seen that too many times. But computers are also intended to be more flexible and complicated in operation than smartphones, and regardless of personal anecdotes Apple is still widely regarded as building the most "just works" general purpose computers. And whatever faults Macs have, you'd be hard pressed to argue that if only the Mac was more of a walled garden that things would be better.)

Yeah, but now you can choose which walled garden you lock yourself up in, so it's even better.

I am a tech person but when it comes to phones I want the damn thing just to work and simple to use.

I think the form factor is very relevant. A MacBook is treated like a computer. A phone is treated like an appliance.

Most phone/tablet users want the convenience of modular functionality without vetting the source. Said functionality should also be easy to discover and add/remove, hence app stores.

Whereas on a computer, app stores are ignored if they even exist. Most people install after doing their own Googling or seeing it run on another MacBook.

In my opinion phones intended for general purpose computing should have distinct marketing and different software-related features.

I feel a lot of ppl in tech actually don’t care about the end user and care only about the profit they can make while completely disrespecting my privacy. How about that being the phenomenon?

Most people use Google Pay there, bank apps with payments is something that is used rarely, but there is such possibility.

Though you and various others might prefer the "walled garden", that is not to say that all Apple users prefer it that way. Clearly, as jailbreaking demonstrates, there are significant numbers of iPhone users that didn't and don't want to stay behind Apple's jail or wall.

You have a choice when you buy things.

I want the walled garden for my parents so that I can tell them - anything you install is safe so don’t stress.

I think most engineers are so narrow minded and don’t understand a vast majority of the user base that it’s insane.

Ppl made the decision to buy a specific device. Respect their choice. You don’t like it? Don’t develop for that OS…

For example, I might want to use iMessage without any of the restrictions that you get on other non apple devices. This is huge, my friends all have iPhones and use iMessage. I don't want a neutered experience. What happens to family that rely on these tools, mom's that are looking into buying their child's first phone? This is how people become trapped in these ecosystems.

The camera on iPhones is really good, apps like Snapchat or Instagram have always functioned way better on iPhone than on android.

There are many reasons why someone would want to use a lot of apps developed for the iPhone. But they might also have extra needs. Personally, I do have an android phone, and besides the apps that I've installed through the playstore I have lots of alternative apps from the f droid. They're great. I have wanted to try the iPhone because I know my mainstream apps would work better in the iPhone. But alas, there are too many restrictions.

Why would having more choice be a bad thing?

If you want to follow Apple's future suggested practices, then you will still be able to, it just won't be forcibly imposed on all users.

That way when the inevitable "Apple has been hacked and is no better than Android" media driven hit pieces come out - Apple can highlight that this is happening on the open developer phone meant for the fringe consumers, not the safe walled garden that most of us normal, non bleeding edge consumers have in our pocket.

And us folks who just want a phone that works can sigh in relief versus having to read a 1000 word article only to find its because some guy went through several hoops to install some obvious malware.

They would have then controlled this debate, and there would have been less room for the Epics of the world to complain about the platform being locked down. Not to mention users would benefit from greater choice. Imagine boutique third party app stores springing up devoted to specific interests and niches such as F-Droid, or promising better curation or quality.

Companies who refuse to use the AppStoreKit that Apple so beneficently provided would then be seen as malefactors seeking to subject their users to lack of privacy and security, rather than Apple trying to uphold their 30% cut and restrictive behavior.

Instead, Apple tried to control everything and not only did they expose themselves to regulation like this, they deal with customers annoyed at scammy apps on their own App Store, and third party devs crying foul at inconsistent policing.

Also, I use a few mobile apps with web push notifications, so there is that too! Webkit still doesn’t support neither.

Im hyped.

Not saying that the trade isn't worth it, just that, well, now that Pandora's box is open, it's coming to get you, even if you don't want it to.

1. Apple won't stay competitive for its major partners in the app store.

2. The app will be really important for you with no alternatives.

3. It will be both important and won't be up to your standards established by Apple.

My suspicion is that if it provides really interesting functionality, it will have enough competition that you will be able to choose from.

The major danger comes from scams targeting uneducated users, however, if Apple really wants to protect them, it will make everything possible to maintain their app store as a viable distribution channel.

I'm thinking of scenarios where you don't specifically want the app, nor does it offer any particularly interesting functionality - it's just a platform lock-in effect.

As a trivial instance, you can't install Fortnite on Windows machines without going through the Epic Store. Yet, the value of Fortnite isn't how the game plays, but the skins & community - things that cannot be replicated by another app.

This is something iPhone uses use all the time and this did not happen on Android.

Some people just like golden handcufs.

I think being able to side-load stuff, while keeping the sandboxing (and requiring user permission for access to data) in place would be ideal for me. This makes it a bit easier to write stuff for the device and distribute ad-hoc to friends and family stuff that is of no interest to the general public.

I don't have a strong interest in alternative browsers, because I don't believe any of the developers of alternative browsers will prioritize battery life. But I know others have strong feelings about that.

The idea of this is great in theory. But since when have third party companies ever acted for the benefit of the user. This is one of those cases where I felt like Apple benefiting also benefited me as a user.

Epic is a fantastic example that went to great lengths to not use the App Store for Fortnite.

I worry that allowing this will make it so more developers use third party billing (and dark patterns for canceling), third party app stores that may do shady things, or just distributing packages directly.

Sure you can make the argument that I can just not download those apps, but once a company realizes they can abuse their customers by not needing to conform to the rules that Apple sets. Why would continue to be on the App Store?

I am watching this very carefully, but I worry that as a consumer I will loose one of the key reasons I use an iPhone.

It’ll turn the iPhone into an android. Which sucks as I left android because I enjoyed the walled garden.

No one is forcing you to play Epic games.

But Apple will probably cut down their rates significantly so most companies stick with the app store.

Especially if the US follows suit.

what is in the walled garden is decided by apple, and they do not have your best interests in mind.

For example - any app you install has unfettered network access.

what/who the app is connecting to, and what is being sent back and forth is opaque to you.

deep linking allows apps to intercept url references external to the app.

privacy policies are documents that live on a web server and can change at any time. And app updates can silently change the behavior of the apps as well.

It's all a mess, but because there are nice fonts and the icons have rounded corners people are subtly influenced to think it is well organized, maintained and modern.

Then the solution will be to use anti viruses and other software, which will make the ecosystem even more exploitative (imagine the likes of Norton and Avast on your phone).

I believe the best solution is giving the user a choice of the OS. Like go to a store, select phone hardware, select OS and pay. Once you're on an OS you play by the OS' rules. Like for android you could choose vanilla, Samsung distro, Mi distro, etc. Similarly iOS could be available on Pixel hardware, etc.

The new iPads have an M1 chip with virtualization capabilities, but you wouldn't know it with the stuff Apple allows on it. Imagine how much better iPads would be if Apple couldn't block Linux VMs just because it doesn't suit them.

It is a surprise so, that the EU is actually moving, at scale, in that direction. Maybe privacy, processed food and some other things next!

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/06/developers-get-linux...

The EU has enacted GDPR, 178/2002/EC (food safety), 44/1999/EC (consumer protection), any number of consumer protection Regulations and Directives.

I looked at the rules and it seemed like a really good idea.

I even got the impression, products got changed for the better in the last year to get a higher nutri-score.

Inefficient to produce, sure. Destroying the environment, yeah. Cruel to animals, definitely. Unnecessary, yes. These should be reflected in the price, not nutritional labels.

Thanks!

It's the only drink that got A. Which seems reasonable to me.

Sideloading apps as an advanced user concept sounds great. But if users who switch on their iPhone for the first time had to @choose a store”, that would be an absolutely terrible UX.

That until you find out some of the best web technologies are not working on safari(i.e indexeddb has been left unfixed for years on purpose by apple). I don't think people would like a safari only on desktop. Why would they want that on mobile?

Then don't use web apps. You can still use only native apps and safari just like people could (until recently) use win32 apps and internet explorer.

Then you shouldn't have an opinion on modern web tech. Stick to what you care of.

>> I don’t do web dev so I don’t need to professionally worry about the IE6

Mobile safari is the IE6 of the modern web but as you don't do web dev you don't need to worry about it. Let the people who build for the web worry about the web.

>> I’m happy so long as web pages I visit work and lay out properly.

Simple text Webpages were workig on IE6 too so I can only assume that the transition from IE6 to Safari mobile was a smooth for you.

It's not a free-for-all or a virus-laden hellscape. It's just freedom.

This just bludgeons so much of the security model of the iPhone. I get that this is by Apple's design, in that conflating the security model of the iPhone with App Store lock-in has been a gold mine, but I just don't see how you provide the same malware guarantees without that enforcement.

EDIT: Not sure why the downvotes, I guess it's from people that are big free-software-at-any-cost advocates. The cost of doing this is going to be too high for most iPhone users - I very much doubt this is in their best interests overall.

In the future, this might be the same on the other platform, — or it might be different. I don't trust any of Google/Microsoft/Facebook to not try to shove their app store (user account, personal information collection) down our throats in perpetuity.

You can build most of an iOS app today on Linux (eg. some game frameworks, qt)

Eg: https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/development/compiling...

You're not going to do it on a Linux box for sure as the tools aren't there but you certainly can run your own stuff on iOS. You don't have to sign up for anything either - just install XCode from the app store and build stuff.

> I can start writing software on Linux for iPhone, without requiring me to have a Mac

> we'll be able to develop iPhone applications from any operating system, but first Linux

> how to develop iPhone applications on Linux

^ is what I wrote, and you suggest "just install XCode from the app store"? Not sure how that's compatible.

Regardless, I hope we end with a phone that people can actually install their own software on, regardless of what laptops/desktop computer they own.

The issue is you don't have a Mac and that's really your problem, not theirs.

1. What devices have to comply? 2. Who decides what device has to comply? Should playstation open their system too. What about a niche bank transaction signing device that internally uses an android capable hardware. Is this illegal now? 3. What about a car infotainment system that can theoretically run linux. 4. What if a European startup wants to compete with the iphone? Now they have so many regulations instead of focusing on a great device for their niche.

This looks like it will kill competition and harm European innovation, while major players will find their ways around it.

So no, this will not affect startups and harm innovation, it will just force the monopolistic behemoths to play nice and cease actively harming innovation.

Further it seems more like a moat to keep anyone else from getting as big as these "digital gatekeepers" are as suddenly when you get to a certain size you have an enormous expense.

If these companies really are that large that they have to get special laws for them isnt the solution to dissolve their monopoly and split the company up instead of starting to create separate classes of laws.

Like tax brackets? Treating big things exactly the same as small things seems ideological, not rational.

Behavior that applies marginally avoids most "discontinuity" and distortions in incentives that come along with them. For example, people whose income increases from $99,999 to $100,001 are only incentivized by a 100,000 bracket to hide the marginal $2, rather than suddenly needing to hide all of their income.

EU regulations that apply to companies above a certain size are not like this. Once you pass a certain level, it applies to all the business below the level. That already has a distorting incentive on growth and incentivizes companies to stay small. Maybe that's something you want in this case, but it's almost always an unintended consequence.

Perhaps if we formalized legal code as code, we could apply automatic differentiation (just kidding... I think)

Continuous laws do seem more fair in general. But it seems more important (to me, at least) that this sort of fairness is applied to individuals. For companies... they aren't people, we don't need to worry about making their lives confusing or miserable. They have legal departments to sort this sort of stuff out, they'll respond rationally to incentives, it is just a business decision.

So, if there were any medium companies just below the regulation threshold, the discontinuity argument would make sense. But there isn't, and there won't be, precisely because of anti-competitive behavior of the giants, they can sustain walled gardens precisely because they are giants.

And short term cap gains are just regular income.

I can’t speak for all member states but I do know some have a threshold and from that point you have to pay a percentage of the total amount. So some investment firms will game your portfolio to bring you in just enough to fly under that threshold.

The U.K., while not technically an EU member any more (and I’m still bitter about that), also operates this way.

Stamp duty is a U.K. tax placed on purchases of property. It’s free for properties under a threshold but the moment you go over it you have to pay a percentage of the total price of your house. Stamp duty does have incremental percentages but it isn’t calculated like income tax. Thus you’ll often see a lot of properties for slightly under each increment and then a jump in prices after. Some sellers even go as far as to put the house on for £x (under that threshold) but charge extra for additional purchases outside of the property (like a gazebo, hot tub, etc). I’ve even seen some buyers/sellers ask for private bank transfers for the additional extra. Which is outright fraud. But it does still happen.

So, exactly the same thing with a bottom bracket marginal rate of 0%?

Whereas the capital gains and stamp duty go from (again made up numbers) 0% on 15k to 15% on anything above 15k. So if you had 15k you get taxed nothing. But if you get 15,001 then you pay 15% on ~15k (just by gaining an extra £1) rather than 15% on £1 (like how income tax works). Thus that extra £1 actually ends up costing you _a lot_ more in tax than it’s face value. And thus why people game such taxes to slide under the threshold in ways that doesn’t make sense with income tax.

I think it is.

I have no recourse against Big Tech scamming me. They are an oligopoly sharing the same anti-consumer practices.

But if I regularly buy something from a friend, maybe I'm a 10th of their customer base.

Giants can afford to skimp on any single customer relationship. Go read Amazon reviews, etc...

The one-person show with only continental shipping taking PayPal payments for their hobby business absolutely cannot afford to screw over 10% of their customer base. PayPal (or any other provider) has no patience, and anecdotally will always side with the customer.

And sure, citation needed, I know :)

Amazon has completely refunded every defective or damaged products I have ever received. I've done two returns of $100+ items in the past month, in one case the seller disagreed with me and Amazon took my side. In total I've probably had 30 refunds over the past 10 years of which at least 5 were Amazon intervening to prevent the seller from screwing me.

I cannot remember the last time I had to return something. I rarely buy from Amazon though, and choose quality products from reputable sources, not the cheapest offer.

Or maybe I'm just lucky.

Amazon is full of minor counts of fraud like this and at their scale I bet it adds up to real money.

YES, like tax brackets. Everyone should pay 30k$ per year to the government, no matter how rich or poor, for the services they get, and it would be the literal individual fair share.

The percentage-based taxes are already an unfair distribution of cost for the rich, and the progressive taxes amplify it even more. After all, who costs more at school, a Jeff Bezos, or an unruly one?

This is completely normal for laws.

Your kitchen at home doesn't have to follow the same rules as restaurant kitchen, for example. You as a driver of your personal car don't have to go through the same process and registration as truck drivers do. Small stalls selling things have different rules than big stores. And so on.

This is a very perceptive extension of the famous Steinbeck quote. The sentiment is certainly not limited to the blue-collar labor class of which the original referred.

Sure, and it's possible to heavily discount your opinion when compared to the hundreds of opinions of experts in antitrust law that helped shaping this legislation. This would be less the case, maybe, if this legislation actually targeted you, so your insight would be relevant; but the fact is that it doesn't.

And it makes sense. Let the small business experiment a bit, give them a bit leeway and once they grew to a certain size, expect that they think about the bigger picture. Which our dear monopolists only do in their favor.

A person, even if very rich, has a limited lifetime and a limited amount of hours in a day to spend. A corporation is immortal and can have 100,000 people simultaneously working on something. It’s bizarre if the law pretends that such an entity is just another human.

If you start a grease fire, you burn down your house.

If you serve meat that's been stored at room temperature, you make your family and some friends sick.

But a commercial kitchen's potential for harm is much higher in many ways.

They are literally the internet. That’s not about some companies to get some of there dollars. They literally gatekeeping. Amazon just shut down a whole social media platform. You can’t sell apps to iOS without paying Apple a big part of it (15 % - 30 %). Yeah you could say just create your own phone that would be fine right? How realistic is this. You can’t even build a good one because the bigger companies have so many patents you can’t go out. Then you write your own OS because you don’t want to pay and global company for using there OS. So give me my 200billion $ to get in the market. You can’t even advertise your product because they wouldn’t show your ad at all. That’s equal?

Also the EU can’t just split up companies. It’s a step to get some freedom back.

I mean, after the facebook-whatsapp merge (and the whole aftermath) we mostly lost all hopes.

we are not treated the same, If I killed 300 people the way boeing did with its Max debacle, I would be serving 15 consecutive life sentences.

for all the times a corporation kills people, almost never does anyone go to jail

> isnt the solution to dissolve their monopoly

Why is that the preffered solution? If you are arguing for that, you need to provide some reasoning or benefits.

I am sure they would prefer not to be split up.

We already do that. We always did that. We regard things that are used larger than a certain scale as infrastructure. Roads. Justice system. Military. Power network.

We always heavily regulated these. Entire world except the US also regulated the Internet backbone as a utility. So nowhere in the world do people and companies have to still pay mid-2000s prices for bandwidth like they have to in the US after 1990s regulations expired and major ISPs started to consolidate entire backbone. They even tried to declare the Internet backbone, therefore the Internet, their 'private property' to be able to do whatever they wanted.

When tech monopolies go over a certain size and become literal infrastructures that everyone HAS to use one way or the other, they should get the same treatment.

Anti-American company sentiments are high across Europe, especially when it comes to big tech companies. Our people are sick of US companies playing wild west and stomping all over regulations - AirBnB and Uber caused the most public backlash here (AirBnB because of people complaining that they were priced out of their homes and illegal hotel-style operations disrupting their lives, Uber because taxi drivers have pretty good lobby connections), followed by Facebook (which was mostly a topic for privacy nerds). Also, we have not forgotten who caused the 2008 financial crisis and who keeps dodging tax and labor laws while the taxpayers are left to deal with the followup costs.

Pay up and behave or get kicked out, GDPR was just the beginning (and once we get the Irish authorities to behave, your companies are done). The EU bureaucracy is like a big tanker ship, slow as molasses, but once it is moving it is not stoppable other than by going out of its way.

I went for 2 weeks abroad with a week vacation and other week working remotely. There was no hotel in the area to provide me with the proper accommodation. But Airbnb did that just fine.

So I don’t necessarily see those services and companies behind as pure evil. I would say the government running behind and reactively setting limitations rather than proactively thinking about the way to move forward is an issue here.

A taxi may be more expensive at "idle" times - but ever tried to grab an Uber at a big event like a concert, a soccer game or Saturday night out drinking? You'll pay triple or more. Regulated taxis are more expensive, but always consistent which is a value on its own. Also, you can be sure that the driver doesn't live in poverty [1] or works ridiculous hours.

> and if I imagine a foreigner catching one on the street without the meter - that could get even worse.

I can't speak for countries other than Germany, but at least here this is simply not a thing.

What is a pain point with German cabs (and other German services) is that the acceptance of credit and especially debit cards is still a bit lackluster, but the situation has massively improved during covid.

> There was no hotel in the area to provide me with the proper accommodation. But Airbnb did that just fine.

Yeah, because wherever you were is most likely zoned residential, meaning no hotels and the associated noise from partygoers, vehicles and the likes. Are the neighbors of your AirBnB fine with someone renting out a room to randoms? Most likely not.

[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/He-drives-60-ho...

You absolutely can't. Taxi drivers are independent contractors in most european countries too, with no minimum wage protections or enforcement of hours worked.

The prior here is simply not having enough taxis available. Fixed cost and capacity versus incentives that increase capacity when needed.

Even Linux is more an American product at this point than a European one with Intel being iirc the biggest contributor. I just think it's a bit of a joke that the EU strategy is to regulate American companies to this extent without having any coherent vision on developing genuinely viable alternatives and providing incentives to stay in the EU.

But we have apparently forgotten about this [0], nearly a decade later and it still remains a completely ignored issue that pretty much nobody was held accountable for except the people who drew attention to it.

[0] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/document/activities/cont/2014...

Not "especially" but exactly those. Almost no other american companies are known here. Of course there are McDonalds and Coca-Cola, but their bad reputation is for their unhealthy products, not the companies themselves.

The 2008 financial crisis might have started in the US, but outcomes in European countries varied greatly depending on local policies and debt levels. It's hardly Americas fault that some European countries had taken on very high levels of government debt.

AirBnB and Uber seems pretty easy to regulate on a local level and in many places in Europe they are.

The cold war has already gone hot thanks to "Fuck the EU" US interference in Ukraine [0] by now having escalated into a full blown open war, just like there is no "LNG pipeline from the US" to Europe.

> not sure they’re even able to without mass protests

Do you mean mass protests like they we had over the invasion of Iraq? That didn't lead to anything and thus has crippled the global peace movement to this day.

That's why the idea that European people will "take to the streets" to protest for "American gas", is pretty out there and quite fantastical.

Before that happens you will see people take to the streets to protest the sanctions that are mainly responsible for this economic hardship, sanctions pushed for by Washington.

[0] https://youtu.be/WV9J6sxCs5k

The Cold War got hot cause of Russia, no one else. Russia is the one who decided to invade Ukraine, Russia is the one who decides to bomb children, Russia is the one who decides to commit genocide against the Ukrainians, Russia is solely responsible for this war.

No amount of “Ukrainian bio weapons” or “Ukrainian witch battalions” or “Ukrainian inhuman super soldiers” stories pushed by the kremlin will change this fact.

To hear Russia tell it, Ukraine has bombed a lot of children in the last 8 years and was committing genocide in East Ukraine. Ukraine also got couped.

Note: I personally have no ability to determine the truth of the Russian side beyond reading the wikipedia page and noting it plausible. I wonder if you have some extra information on things like how many civilian causalties occurred in the Donbas before 2022 or what the real support for Crimea joining Russia was?

Except that's not how Russia tells it, that's what actually happened.

On February 21 then acting Ukrainian president Yanukovych signed a transition deal with the Ukrainian opposition, brokered by the EU and Russia [0].

That should have been the end of most of it, but it wasn't, later that day Yatsenyuk, aka "Yats our guy" from the Nuland tape, and Tyahnybok, who both agreed and signed to the deal, went on stage on Euromaidan and then declared how "That's not enough" riling up the protesters to demand more.

Klitschko, who was constantly trying to keep the peace [1], and was Merkel's aka the EU's choice [2] was completely left out of that. More context on that in the leaked Nuland call, where she rates Klitschko's governmental experience not high enough for such a position, thus their go ahead with "Yats is our guy" and "Fuck the EU".

That situation escalated then so much, that by the early morning of February 22 the leader of Right Sector announced how they had taken over, and secured, the parliament and several other local government buildings [3].

It's exactly that part the current "Russia lies" narrative always leaves out, by claiming Yanukovych just randomly fled from a completely peaceful protest.

After Yanukovych fled, Yatsenyuk announced their new post-coup government to rather frosty reception on Euromaidan [4].

As a German I was actively following the situation back then, that's why I still have most of these sources. But since then so much information was straight up "deleted" from the web. It used to be extremely easy to find violent footage from Euromaidan on Twitter and YouTube, not anymore, all deleted as "Russian propaganda" so the "peaceful revolution, there was never a civil war" narrative can keep getting pushed without too much of an factual opposition.

Another, rather concrete, example is Yatsenyuk's "Open Ukraine Foundation", that went online shortly after the coup, it's partners page had all the usual US regime change actors bluntly spelled out [5]. First the foundation changed from his name, to his wives, and ultimately that partners page vanished completely, too blatantly incriminating.

[0] https://www.politico.eu/article/yanukovych-signs-transition-...

[1] https://youtu.be/5bPKFto1AFY

[2] https://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/ukraine-merkel-will-k...

[3] https://www.unian.net/politics/888104-verhovnaya-rada-admini...

[4] https://youtu.be/wegtWNIFX1Y

[5] https://web.archive.org/web/20140302111543/http://openukrain...

Alleged Nuland tape, it hasn't been in anyway shape or form authenticated and we know from this war that Russia is more then happy to use deep fakes to control the narrative.

> It's exactly that part the current "Russia lies" narrative always leaves out, by claiming Yanukovych just randomly fled from a completely peaceful protest.

It's not a narrative, unless you seriously believe in Ukrainian weaponised witches/black magic and Ukrainian bio engineered super soldiers.

Its funny you paint a very different picture to the wikipedia article.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution_of_Dignity

> The following day, police withdrew from central Kyiv, which came under effective control of the protesters. Yanukovych fled the city.[33] That day, the Ukrainian parliament voted to remove Yanukovych from office by 328 to 0 (72.8% of the parliament's 450 members).

Looks like Yanukovych ran away after he got ousted by the parliament themselves.

Except the USG officially apologized for the "undiplomatic language" on the tape [0]

Do you think the USG is in the habit of apologizing for Russian fakes or what happened there?

> It's not a narrative

Yes, the "peaceful revolution" is very much a manufactured narrative, you should check out your own link [1]

> unless you seriously believe in Ukrainian weaponised witches/black magic and Ukrainian bio engineered super soldiers.

Can you please stop the bad faith arguing and strawmanning? I didn't write a single thing about anything like that.

> Its funny you paint a very different picture to the wikipedia article

Lets take a look at the actual TIMES article that's the citation for that [2];

"Ukraine’s beleaguered President Viktor Yanukovych fled Kiev Saturday as protestors took full control of Ukraine’s capital"

Beleaguered president fled after protesters took control of the capital, which also involved taking control of the parliament and the local security authorities, Right Sector announced it very much themselves in the very early morning of 22 February [3];

"“The Seventh Hundred is located inside the Verkhovna Rada. Also there is a division of the "Right Sector". Protected by the Cabinet. The nineteenth and third hundreds are guarding the Presidential Administration. The Fifteenth Hundred guards the Ministry of Internal Affairs,” Parubiy said."

Right Sector had control over who they let enter the parliament and who not. Want to guess who they let in, and who don't? That's also why the Wikipedia article has several different numbers for that how many actually participated in those parliamental votes. Sometimes it talks about 328 attending, then it's 386 and then it's suddenly "450 members voted 332-0", the Wikipedia article is all over the place on that.

Additionally; Did Russia also fake McCain shaking all the right hands [4]? Was it Russia who then made an American investment banker the new minister of finance for Ukraine, complete with fast-tracked citizenship? [5]

The evidence is overwhelming and blatant, that's also why all you can do is deny, even trying to strawman the discussion by talking about "weaponized witches".

Very much the same as back in the early 2000s when everybody knew the USG was lying about Saddam being responsible for 9/11 and the WMD, yet everybody played along for appearances and not wanting to get called a "terrorist supporter". But unlike back then, this time the stakes actually involve nuclear weapons.

This might or might not be the reason US authorities have lately been very active in educating their population about the proper response to a "radiation event" [6] [7] [8].

Mostly unnoticed in the US, yet to those who was alive during the cold war, particularly in central Europe, that's just quite scary, particularly in combination with the even worse than war on terror levels of information distortion.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/06/us-ukraine-rus...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution_of_Dignity#/media/F...

[3] https://www.unian.net/politics/888104-verhovnaya-rada-admini...

[4] https://www.businessinsider.com/john-mccain-meets-oleh-tyahn...

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natalie_Jaresko#Citizenship

[6] https://youtu.be/N-5d7V4Sbqk

[7] https://www.cdc.gov/nceh/radiation/emergencies/index.htm

[8] https://www.reddit.com/r/oddlyterrifying/comments/ufbx40/the...

> Except the USG officially apologized for the "undiplomatic language" on the tape [0]

>> Victoria Nuland reportedly said ‘Fuck the EU’ speaking of Ukraine crisis, though department didn’t confirm it was her voice on tape

There’s no confirmation whos voice is on that tape although the tape itself is reportedly said to be authentic

> Yes, the "peaceful revolution" is very much a manufactured narrative, you should check out your own link [1]

The Russians often lie _is not a narrative_ the Russian government nearly never tells the truth. All you need to look at is there state media during this war to see many examples of it, from downing civilian aircraft to weaponised witches, the firehose of falsehood is well and alive.

> Yes, the "peaceful revolution" is very much a manufactured narrative, you should check out your own link [1]

The only person on that page that suggests this is a coup is the former president who got deposed and ran away back to his masters in Russia. No amount of images will change the fact it wasn’t a coupe, no amount of walls of text from you will either.

> The evidence is overwhelming and blatant, that's also why all you can do is deny, even trying to strawman the discussion by talking about "weaponized witches"

Do you think the Russians lie?.

What has lately been up with the voting system on HN? Apparently people I reply to, with much newer accounts, can just instantly downvote my comments.

Yet most of the time I don't even get a downvote option, and pretty much never to any of the replies to my comments.

Feels like the system is being gamed by people with alt accounts.

Russia likes to tell a lot of lies and half truths to muddy the waters of everything I wouldn't trust what they they also generally don't provide any solid evidence of any of there claims either, just take these examples.

"Russian State Media Claims to Discover Militarized Ukrainian Witches".

https://www.vice.com/en/article/dypmpk/russian-state-media-c...

"Russian lawmakers baselessly claim their army is up against biologically modified Ukrainian super soldiers"

https://www.businessinsider.com/russian-lawmakers-tout-basel...

"U.S. Ramps Up Ukraine Warnings as Russia Denies Invasion Plans"

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-02-17/russia-te...

Russian state media just cannot be trusted to tell the truth, I wouldn't believe a single word they say.

> Note: I personally have no ability to determine the truth of the Russian side beyond reading the wikipedia page and noting it plausible.

This would be a mistake, the "firehose of falsehood" is a well known Russian tactic, they lie constantly just to muddy the water. All you need to do is look at MH70 (the civilian airliner that Russian troops pretending to be separatists shot down) to see it in action, before it was publicly revealed to be a airliner they where posing with pictures of the wreckage and bragging about downing a Ukrainian military plane then when it was revealed what happened a whole bunch of Russian pushed conspiracy theories started popping up regarding it.

> I wonder if you have some extra information on things like how many civilian causalties occurred in the Donbas before 2022.

Because of the way that Russia lies and muddies the water, the real numbers will never be known just look at how little casualties they are claiming on their side for the current war.

> or what the real support for Crimea joining Russia was?

Again because of the tactics the Russians use this will never be actually known. But maybe once Ukraine retakes Crimea we may know more.

Because decades of NATO expansion have nothing to do with this [0], having literal NATO exercises at the border of Russia [1], just completely normal and not at all an escalation. Nobody ever warned about any of this, it just came completely out of nowhere [2].

While the US would have no issue with Russia holding military exercises in Mexico, and couping the Mexican government. It wouldn't react in any way, most certainly not with the military, it's not like we have a precedent like the Cuban missile crisis, and the US military illegally occupying parts of Cuba to this day, in a very similar way to what Russia has done to Crimea.

> Russia is solely responsible for this war.

Sure, as long as you just wholesale ignore and deny what actually led to the war and how it was an active choice by US officials to undermine a diplomatic and peaceful solution, brokered by the EU, because "Fuck the EU".

In that context most online debates about this topic are similarly dishonest and toxic as war on terror debates in the early 2000s were; Anybody who doesn't join in with the blatant jingoism shall be declared an "enemy supporter", back then it was "terrorist supporter" nowadays it's "Putin supporter" and allegedly the only way out of this is more conflict, more weapons, any diplomatic solution shall be considered "pro Russia propaganda" because the forever war can't stop.

In that context you might as well tell me about WMD in Iraq, that's the level of argument you can bring that solely rests on ignoring a coup and insisting how a civil war, resulting from that coup, is totally not a civil war.

[0] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1997-jul-07-me-10464...

[1] https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/natosource/us-army-to-...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/13/international/bush-pulls-...

Ukraine is free to lick whatever alliances it wishes to join.

> Because decades of NATO expansion have nothing to do with this [0], having literal NATO exercises at the border of Russia [1], just completely normal and not at all an escalation. Nobody ever warned about any of this, it just came completely out of nowhere [2].

Decades of NATO are literally driven by the current actions of Russia and the past actions of the USSR. To view this in a vacuum is disingenuous at best, and malicious at worst.

Those NATO exercises where in Ukraine in 2014. In what world is that on the border with Russia?. In it’s a _country_ that borders Russia far far away from the actual border, in Lviv on the border with _Poland_.

> While the US would have no issue with Russia holding military exercises in Mexico, and couping the Mexican government. It wouldn't react in any way, most certainly not with the military, it's not like we have a precedent like the Cuban missile crisis, and the US military illegally occupying parts of Cuba to this day, in a very similar way to what Russia has done to Crimea.

The worlds changed (at least outside of Russia). Since Cuba, if this is your best comparison maybe it’s a bet of a stretch. This comparison would also require Ukraine to plan to host US nukes to be comparable.

> Sure, as long as you just wholesale ignore and deny what actually led to the war and how it was an active choice by US officials to undermine a diplomatic and peaceful solution, brokered by the EU, because "Fuck the EU".

Sounds like your suggesting that Russia was forced to invade Ukraine and murder there citizens.

You need to remember that Russia has the ability to not invade and subjugate countries, although given their history this may be hard to believe.

Russia is solely responsible, no one else. Ukraines also had 3 elections since the revolution and different people got elected each time, amazing isn’t it.

Your source for [0] is from the 50s the world was a very different place back then.

Putin has told the world many times that the Ukrainians (and other former Warsaw Pact countries) aren't real countries and destined to be colonies at best. All his actions align with these sentiments. For example, Belarus never threatened to join NATO, but they were invaded and subjugated all the same. This is 100% on Putin and Russia.

The ones really affected by the sanctions are us Europeans.

[1] https://ustr.gov/countries-regions/europe-middle-east/russia...

oh no anything but that

Speak for yourself. Most users don't hate the GDPR, they hate the way companies tried to game it (very incompetently, I might add) by adding obtuse banners and modal dialogs.

As for companies: mostly US companies hated it because they previously got away with extremely abusive business models whereas EU companies were already facing similar regulations in individual EU member states.

Uh, are you secretly longing for filing the paperwork required to obtain Title V Operating Permit for a major air emission source, or is there some other reason you oppose the idea that different things will have to follow different laws?

Personally I think most people will agree that a company with 150000 employees (Google) is not the same thing as one with 750 (tinder).

Yes, and that's a good thing. It suppresses monopolistic tendencies before they can take hold, rather than trying to prove they are a monopoly and trying to figure out after the fact how to break them in a sensible way.

> If these companies really are that large that they have to get special laws for them isnt the solution to dissolve their monopoly and split the company up instead of starting to create separate classes of laws.

Why? All you're doing is letting that monopoly create the great device/service/whatever that lots of people seem to be enjoying, but levelling the playing field so they are still forced to compete for users instead of exploiting their monopoly power to kill any competition.

Encouraging competition is the ultimate goal because that's where the progress from capitalism comes from. If we can continue to encourage competition without going about the messy business of directly interfering with how a company is structured or how it operates, that seems like a win.

I can't understand why would anyone apply narrative of systemic opression and social issues to corporations.

I understand that awareness of the importance of treating individuals equitably rather than equally has been increased in light of the increasingly public discourse on civil inequity, but these words have always existed outside that context to mean what they do.

The meaning of "equity" in a legal context according to the american heritage dictionary [0]: Justice achieved not simply according to the strict letter of the law but in accordance with principles of substantial justice and the unique facts of the case.

Not seeing how that requires me to anthropomorphise corporations.

Also, I kindly ask you to extend a bit of respect my way and not imply that I suffer from a mental illness because you disagree with me. It's not very civil.

[0] https://www.thefreedictionary.com/equity

I may have missed the definition in the article, but my cynical take is that it seems geared towards getting companies that enjoyed dominance in the 90s back into the game now.

• with over 45 mil active users • more than €7.5 billion turnover for the past 3 years

[1] https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/infographics/digital-mark...

I'm getting more optimistic as I look into the details. Open messaging could be interesting, for instance.

Valuation will limit startups chance to raise investment.

Less investment in general will limit startups runway.

How would you approach this otherwise? The EU probably can't break up Google or Apple (how would this even look like?) and the walled gardens are clearly a market failure, including apples fat margins. You mention details, but regulation can be well made and just continuing the status quo is also bad. All regulations open up questions but it's not the wild west here, we have rules and they regulate the economy, even for big multinational giants like apple. Sometimes companies even get nationalised (or nationalised companies get sold)!

This type of comment is everywhere on the Internet and completely predictable.

As an American I think regulation should only be enacted when absolutely necessary, and these laws seem anything but necessary. I’ve rarely seen convincing cases of innovation being stifled or people being harmed by Apple’s walled garden approach. It’s clearly not a market failure because (1) it is extremely profitable and (2) it is not a monopoly. As you can see in this thread, tons of people prefer differently, and those people can buy Androids. I also don’t like how this EU legislation mainly targets American companies.

Forcing Apple to allow other voice assistants will only strengthen Google and Amazons dominance in the voice assistant ecosystem.

Forcing messaging apps to allow cross compatibility only will give them more of my unencrypted messages.

I could go on, but I’m very curious what all of these “massive goods” that I’m not seeing are.

You don’t personally have to benefit from this legislation, you can stay in an “official” configuration until the day you die. For some of us, this opens the door to have a FOSS App Store, or custom apps without having to rebuild them once a week.

If Microsoft continued its monopolistic practices, it's very likely that the iPhone that you like so much now won't be existing today.

I don't even know what to say to this. Backwards thinking? Apple employee speaking? I seriously wonder why you would use this argument.

The default remedy isn't break up, it's 10% of the total worldwide turnover (20% for repeat offenders). The EU can very much fine Google or Apple (and already did so).

If break-up is not possible, retricting or prohibiting access to the EU market is quite possible.

Edit: also, on my dealings with Google, I am contracting with Google Ireland Limited, a company that the EU can break up.

I wouldn't call it a market failure, there's plenty of benefits with wall gardens and it's not done solely for profit. BUT there's also drawbacks and places where walls don't make sense.

Not being able to install arbitrary apps from various app stores provides security, UX consistency, and stability of the software. But there's also drawbacks for things like privacy or abusive censorship or copyright policies.

Given the benefits/drawbacks, the best solution is to have options in the marketplace. If you prefer having more control, don't mind sacrificing deep horizontal product integration, or doing the leg work to make it ideal (doesn't need to always 'just work' predictably), etc, then you should have the option to use an OS/device that offers that.

Personally I'd rather see Google make Android more flexible (for ex: making Google Play Services less restrictive) rather than forcing every OS to be like Android.

But I'm not sure how that could be done via restrictive policy without throwing the baby out with the bath water (other than targeting monopolistic behavior like preventing choice in browsers). Otherwise taking a more-freedom approach would be best, maybe by investing in open platforms, investing in public relations campaigns to make people understand why lack of choice is bad or a consumer-friendly 'open platform' label to guide shoppers, incentives like small tax breaks for offering more open platforms, etc.

For Apple, they could offer a stripped down iOS (like a server edition of a desktop) without all of the services and side-loading restrictions, without having to ditch the current approach that people like.

Do you realise the irony of arguing for free market and a walled garden (not a free market)- simultaneously?

You can't have it both ways, pick your poison

Do you think free-markets means corporations also need to run their business operations and products/platforms like a market? Because that's not what that means. (Even if it did ideological purity is dumb)

Inversely governments forcing companies to all operate with the same business model is not on a free market.

The only thing that would prevent a walled garden from operating in a free market is if Apple et al was a monopoly/oligopoly and you had no other choices. I've already said antitrust laws for things like browser choice is one of the better solutions than the one proposed.

If you want to sell an app, you have to deal with rules of App Store or Play Store, or Windows Store. You can't even sell pornographic apps - this is the definition of an unfree market.

Android has those options. Please point me to this great privacy and security conscious competitor to Google Play Store.

- smartphones

- desktop/laptops

- music and video streaming

- App Store and payments with Apple Pay

- chip design

- physical stores

All of those could stand on their own.

Edit: I'm not saying that the EU can break them up but Apple is not a company with a single field where breaking it up is impossible. I misread the parent a bit.

Perhaps they might pull a China and require them to open a 51% EU-owned subsidiary to do business here, which would then be subject to all sort of restrictions including company size.

As a EU citizen, I would absolutely love it. But I suspect that the EU is bound by many more and much more comprehensive free-trade treaties than China is, and such a draconian approach would require many of them to be renegotiated or exited outright.

1. Making unsubscribing is as easy as subscribing, and 2. Guaranteed interoperability between instant messaging services, and 3. Sharing marketing and/or advertisement performance with business users

will "kill competition"?

What? They have a choice in whom they vote for.

Or you mean that all legislation is "monopolistic"?

Again I am curious how you believe this will "kill competition" by regulating for points 1-3 in my previous post.

For example imagine a new company trying to build an iPhone with minimal app store, well guess what, now they have to also build support for third party store, developer tools, etc… which increases their cost to launch. Apple on the other hand will have all this taken care of. It will have multiple people making sure regulators are happy (or rich).

While I later found that this will not target small companies, so in this aspect this regulation will likely have minimal impact.

That new company won't have neither 45 million users nor over 7.5 Billion EUR turnover in the last 3 consecutive-years.

You are making a false and bad-faith argument against the regulation in question just to promote your laissez-faire ideology.

Sometimes I really do wonder whether some commenters, given their counter arguments, work at a facebook/amazong/netflix/google, or that they hope/dream to work for one of those or all one after the othe, or if they naively believe like gospel what these companies tell them as consumers of their products filled with privacy concerns and dark marketing patterns. Or a combination of the 2 out of the 3. The other possibilities are of course sarcasm or generalised brainwashed syndrome.

I'm against all form of regulations. Life is wild and I would rather advocate education. But hey, since we heavily regulated the 99%, let's at least regulate the 1%. They alone have far more damage power than everyone else combined.

This regulation increases freedom for everyone (users and businesses), except for large platform operators.

You as a user are free to continue exactly as you were, and if you are a business that is not Apple or Google you have more flexibility and freedom to choose.

If anything, this is anti-monopolistic.

With sideloading, unlocked nfc and alternative stores and payment providers this will likely kickstart whole new markets (eg: a better app store for the iphone).

This is just great.

Let's see what we get when we google this? Here's one: https://www.akingump.com/en/news-insights/digital-markets-ac...

Core platform services include:

    online intermediation services.
    online search engines.
    online social networking services.
    video-sharing platform services.
    number-independent interpersonal communications services.
    operating systems.
    web browsers.
    virtual assistants.
    cloud computing services.
    online advertising services, including advertising intermediation services.

> “Gatekeeper”, in turn, refers to an undertaking providing core platform services that meets the following qualitative and quantitative criteria, set out in Article 3:

> First, it must have a significant impact on the EU internal market. An undertaking is presumed to satisfy this requirement where (a) it either has achieved an annual EU turnover equal to or above EUR 7.5 billion in each of the last three financial years, or where its average market capitalization or its equivalent fair market value amounted to at least EUR 75 billion in the last financial year, and (b) it provides the same core platform service in at least three Member States.

> Second, it must provide a core platform service which is an important gateway for business users to reach end users. This requirement is presumed to be met where the undertaking provides a core platform service that had on average at least 45 million monthly active end users established or located in the EU and at least 10,000 yearly active business users established in the EU in the last financial year.2 Users are to be identified and calculated in accordance with a methodology set out in an Annex to the DMA.

> Third, it must enjoy an entrenched and durable position in its operations. This requirement is presumed to be met where the threshold points in the paragraph above were met in each of the previous three financial years.

Well that would depend, are you a "gatekeeper", as defined in the Regulation?

That is, do you have a significant impact on the EU's internal market (a turnover of €7.5bn or a €75bn market cap), provide a core platform service which is important for business users to reach end users (have have 45m monthly active end-users in the EU or 10k monthly active business users), enjoy an entrenched and durable position in your operations or foresee that you will enjoy such a position in the near future (i.e. you meet the above for three consecutive years)?

If you answered "no" to any part of that then you are not a gatekeeper, and these regulations do not apply to you.

I don’t know how useful this particular hypothetical is, but it’s definitely a “code smell” that the proposed company’s seemingly only options would be to limit sales to retain the “not a gatekeeper” status or stop doing business in the EU.

I would love to read some surveys on this matter, because I highly doubt that security/privacy is a significant factor for more than a few percent points of iPhone buyers.

(I base this hypothesis on the fact that, in virtually every field of technology, end users have shown that they will overwhelmingly sacrifice privacy and security in exchange for convenience and cost savings.)

I expect that the main motivations for iPhone purchases are aesthetics, performance, ease of use, integration with the Apple ecosystem, and especially fashion/status symbol factor.

As for the rest of the comment, as other people have already pointed out, you can prevent evil maid attacks by putting the legally-required "open" mode behind a factory reset. Which is roughly what Android phones do with their unlockable bootloaders.

That's a false assumption.

At the end of the day, consumers aren't children. If they so choose to destroy what the manufacturer gives them, that is their choice.

I did some cool things with early Android that made the phone tailored to me. If I wanted stock, it was just a reflash away. This is the way.

This is how Xbox currently works in that you can’t play any regular games if you enable developer mode to run unsigned code. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that, if Apple complied by disabling apps downloaded via their own store when a user is using a 3p store, then the EU would laugh and fine then $x millions of dollars per week.

To avoid this it seems you’d either be forced to sell it at an insane markup (to avoid having too many users) or means test people to make sure they don’t purchase it if they’re not super vulnerable to attacks that matter.

The obvious solution, for your hypothetical, would be to give a setting to the user, that turns on "safe mode" and make this setting only changeable on factory reset.

So any user could choose, at startup, to have safe mode on or off, on their own device.

Problem solved.

The restrictions inherent in the device (including only having a few apps that have been thoroughly reviewed by security researchers) would keep most people away.

The players this regulation target are pretty obvious. It's those that have gained such market dominance along the years that it has become unfair competition for newer players. It is the outcome of years of consumer pressures and entrepreneurs who are calling out for some government actions because markets are regulated anyway everywhere in the world, and these US based companies (for the most part for now) have lobbied along the years to get away with their practice but the EU has decided their lobbying won't do with them. At least not anymore.

> This looks like it will kill competition and harm European innovation

I don't really understand how you got from "you are not allowed to stifle competition" to having less of it?

Well rent control is also supposed to lower rents but usually what it does is make them more expensive and lower the quality on the long term.

Otherwise any regulation could be skirted by having a constantly revolving roster of fronts that import your product.

Otherwise they'd be in trouble.

And I first want to approach it from the "good faith" point of view. The past 20 years have seen a sea change in what surveillance and devices can do. And as such we (society at large) needs to adjust our understanding and approach to this new technology.

Firstly the opportunities are immense. With almost (*) every person having some kind of heart, lifestyle, monitoring and measurement we could see transformational medical and epidemiology breakthroughs. On top of which access to (free, correct!) information, hell GPS is amazing. We know

Secondly there are opportunities for abuse, and there is justifiable concern about privacy, about affect on democracy, truth etc. I personally think these are..the wrong terms to use, but never mind.

I think we have to assume Good Faith from the EU here. They don't know the answers any more than the rest of us do. But they have been upfront abut tackling obvious big problems - the GDPR, for all its many faults was first, and a again big Good Faith step in right direction (pace all the stupid cookie warnings)

As for answers

Which devices apply - which ever ones are "owned" by a Gatekeeper (45 Million users / 7Bn turnover). Should Sony open up Playstation. Yeah basically. Xbox too. Will that cause problems - I expect so. In 99% of cases a big warning saying "you are side-loading this is dangerous" will prevent most horrors.

I expect this will not lead to an Open source free for all. I expect there will be develop licensing programs and approvals - because I certainly see the walled garden of iOS as a real benefit.

The bank transaction signing thing is interesting. The definition of a gatekeeper (Article 2 in the Act) is fairly specific to things like online search engines, intermediation services, OSes etc. I think its unlikely 45 million users is a big floor for such a thing.

(#) 4.5 Bn smartphones are in use globally, that's almost every adult. In "western" countries there are 10s of millions of people with daily heart rate monitoring.

It's entirely possible that to enable compliance with this will require explicit compromises to the security of iMessage, for example by requiring key exchange with startup messaging providers. The other rules seem to prohibit Apple from describing the risks involved in such a compromise.

> * Use existing hardware and software features without competitive prejudice. E.g. NFC

This appears to say that a malicious app can present UX elements that were previously limited to the OS. Read liberally, that would mean that e.g. any app could now get biometric data by presenting a fake privilege escalation screen (e.g. FaceID/TouchID) and then capturing the results from the Secure Enclave. Is this something people really want?

> * Not preference their services. This includes CTAs in settings to encourage users to subscribe to Gatekeeper services, and ranking their own services above others in selection and advertising portals

This will likely make it harder for users to find safe/private services to use. If every offering can find its way into the default browser/App Store/etc. settings page in the OS, scam services will appear to be endorsed and therefore legitimate.

Edit: Limitation of interop is still possible, the EU is just deciding to move decision making from California engineers to Brussels attorneys. From the Act:

> The gatekeeper shall not be prevented from taking strictly necessary and proportionate measures to ensure that interoperability does not compromise the integrity of the operating system, virtual assistant, hardware or software features provided by the gatekeeper, provided that such measures are duly justified by the gatekeeper.

So Apple just needs to explain security & encryption to Brussels attorneys to keep iMessage in a silo, for example. (Obviously making iMessage interoperable with e.g. Discord or ICQ will compromise the integrity of the software features of iMessage.) I don't think this is going to increase the pace of product improvements.

Is that really much worse than the status quo, where all iMessage plaintexts are shared with Apple by default, unless every participant in the thread has disabled iCloud Backup?

> So Apple just needs to explain security & encryption to Brussels attorneys to keep iMessage in a silo, for example. (Obviously making iMessage interoperable with e.g. Discord or ICQ will compromise the integrity of the software features of iMessage.)

Are you arguing that it's impossible for Discord or ICQ to implement the same feature set as the native iMessage client?

The wording in the Act appears to not place constraints on exactly what services must be able to interop with iMessage, and it says Apple can't preference iMessage. So presumably the blue bubbles have to go. This means that when chatting in Messages now, one will not be able to know whether it's Apple alone protecting the privacy of the conversation, or whether the weakest link is a company of a single person that started this week using an OSS package to spin up a new messaging app on a Linode VM and was able to achieve parity in iOS messaging simply by virtue of this Act.

That's a very different situation than the status quo.

Similar logic applies to the App Store and payment details, but messaging is egregious because other participants in the chat can make (and potentially change) the security posture of the chat without your knowledge.

(Edit, adding reply to this part.)

> Are you arguing that it's impossible for Discord or ICQ to implement the same feature set as the native iMessage client?

No, I am saying that it's going to be trivial to implement the feature set. I fully expect there to be OSS libraries to implement the iMessage client.

The issue is that when people use iMessage and see a blue bubble, they also know something about how the encryption keys are handled & who does the handling, etc. This Act as written appears to allow any person to install an OSS iMessage server on a VM and achieve OS parity with iMessage, and Apple is prevented from indicating that others in the chat may be compromising the security of the chat. I used ICQ and Discord as examples because Apple exchanging my encryption keys with ICQ is definitely compromising a core feature of iMessage.

Realistically, the average person doesn't even know what an encryption key is and the average tech enthusiast doesn't know anything beyond "Apple handles everything".

> So presumably the blue bubbles have to go. This means that when chatting in Messages now, one will not be able to know whether it's Apple alone protecting the privacy of the conversation

Why can't iMessage to iMessage be blue bubbles with iMessage to anything else being green bubbles? Do you think the average iPhone user understands that green bubbles mean insecure rather than thinking they're "Android bubbles"?

Why are so many people convinced that consumer choice and security are mutually exclusive?

The new law removes that person's ability to even discern this much.

> Why can't iMessage to iMessage be blue bubbles with iMessage to anything else being green bubbles?

This would pretty clearly be Apple preferring its own service over other services, and is prohibited under the new law.

I should be clear here: I think this law is clumsy and will have to be fixed or loosely enforced. But even if one is in favor of these changes, it's fair to acknowledge the reality that the law basically mandates a major change in the security posture of a billion deployed devices. One may still be in favor, but it's important not to lose sight of the fact that there are in fact compromises being made.

> Why are so many people convinced that consumer choice and security are mutually exclusive?

I am 100% not convinced this is true; security and choice can coexist. But this EU law does not aim at the goal of preserving security while increasing consumer choice. Which is strange, given how a consequence of a prior EU Act was the pollution of the Web with cookie banners. (I am aware these banners are not specifically required for many use cases, which is why I said this is a consequence of their Act and not something ordered by their Act.)

I don't agree. Green bubbles indicate that messages travelled 100% within Apple's ecosystem. Indicating interoperability with a 3rd party by using blue bubbles doesn't do anything to prevent those 3rd parties from having their own green bubbles within their own ecosystem.

The entire point of the law is Apple/Google don't get to manage their own ecosystems anymore; EU regulators do that. One read of the intent of the Act is that platforms should not be able to preference their own services over those of third parties. My skim of the Act indicates that it would be in bounds for a regulator to decide that this means no blue/green message distinction, and a direct consequence of that is that anyone in a group chat could be using Facebook Messenger as a client and allowing Facebook to log all the messages.

Engineering decisions henceforth need to weigh what a specific regulator believes the law says, since the law is not very specific about many details. This is not good, especially coming from the people who caused the global cookie disclaimer deluge.

Does it really, though? Is it something that that was explicitly brought up in the drafting of this law? Or is this a doomsday scenario that chooses to interpret the law in its most extreme form?

The legislation has been approved. Let us see how regulators actually enforce it. Until the EU bans green vs. blue bubbles, this is nothing more than FUD.

We're on the same page here: lawyers are now deciding matters of technical import, and that is not a good thing.

I agree with you in general, but it is possible for this evaluation to be done by a simple read of e.g. the iOS marketing page. The Act proposes a regime where it is not possible for a chat participant to determine who holds the encryption keys for the chat. You may consider that better or worse or neither, but it is a significant change in the security posture for billions of deployed devices.

Regulator: what are the others using?

Apple: something very similar but slightly different

Regulator: and it's impossible to develop an open standard thet allows p2p encryption to be maintained?

Apple: Yes obviously in this specific field of technology that's not possible at all.

(Not the) Regulator: Sounds legit

What this Act says is that Apple Messages must interop with any other messaging system. If you spin up a VM running an iMessage-compatible server on Hetzner, Apple Messages must interop with you and cannot privilege Messages (e.g. by continuing to use blue bubbles as a differentiator). That VM may be malicious (for ex: it may log who communicated with whom when), but the Act still requires that it be placed on an even footing with Messages.

Similarly, the Act essentially says that once implemented, anyone using a phone can unintentionally be sending all of their messages to Facebook Messenger, which by law must have seamless interop with Messages. Any group chat could be logged by Facebook by virtue of one person in the chat choosing Facebook Messenger as their default messaging app.

This requirement materially changes the security posture of a billion devices currently in use. You may believe the tradeoff is worthwhile, but it's still not a free tradeoff.

If Apple prefers lock-in over innovation, it's their problem, not the users'.

That's what tech companies like to say. But from experiences with less tech-savy friends, the current way always leads people to share as much as possible. Opt-out is always harder than opt-in.

Hello, Alphabet world domination. They finally get the chance to get rid of that pesky Safari. Next stop: obligatory sign-in for using a service.

Apple is no underdog anymore, if their browser couldn‘t compete on its own merit I won’t be crying a river over it.

Firefox, while mired with its own problems, is another story; but I don’t see Mozilla losing from this decision.

Why ? Seriously - this competition argument gets brought up and I see 0 benefit. There is almost no innovation in the low level aspects and the foundations are opensource with several tech giants contributing.

The only thing "competition" adds at this point is fragmentation, compatibility issues and slower feature adoption.

This idea that competition beats cooperation is silly - innovation in browser rendering and JS engines is mostly done - the only real innovative effort was Servo and that died - modern variants are there just for political/commercial reasons.

If every browser out there converted to Blink/V8 and development resources were focused the web would be better.

In the current situation a ton of websites are already bailing out and shoving mobile apps to their users instead of actually addressing Safari.

For instance parking payment apps, mobile ticket apps etc. that you download when in vacation and could 100% be web only, or a PWA if Apple was onboard with it, instead of their “light app” thing.

Or I had some of the government services apps not exposing text labels as selectable, which is a pain if you need to search for it. Same thing when you want to print/save the screen, you end up with a single screen png instead of potentially a fully scrolled and text including pdf. All these features could be coded in the app, but realistically devs don’t give a damn as it doesn’t bring much praise or money.

Should just be a payment terminal instead of an app. Beyond that, there's App Clips for one time use, and accessibility is worse on the web than on the iPhone (can't speak for Android). For printing and sharing, might be right, but it's broken on websites often enough, too. There are lots of developers (or their management) not caring about UX at all on both sides..

You need an interface on your phone for remote payment. Most of them have a workable mobile web site, but notifications for instance aren’t available in that case. Yes App Clips cover that case, but it doesn’t look to me that it got much traction.

> accessibility is worse on the web than on the iPhone (can't speak for Android). For printing and sharing, might be right, but it's broken on websites often enough, too.

I see this as the main point for having other browser engines. Mobile Safari is horrible to select text and on many basic features. I took these limitations for granted until I moved to android and the browsers work so much better (not flawless, but pretty close). Basically in this day and age, there’s no reason why a mobile browser should be weaker than its desktop counterpart.

In a nutshell, I’m not sure Mozilla can still bring relevant change to the landscape, even if its handicap goes away.

As a firefox user, I feel it truely suffered from both Safari locking it out the the emerging mobile web where it had the biggest chance to shine (I actually like firefox mobile even with its current pretty severe limitations), and from Chrome pushing it down from the heavy desktop applications for reasons that aren’t only performance.

So it sits in a tough position, but Mozilla also appears to be shooting itself in the foot time after time, and I wonder if the people that made the magic happen haven’t abandoned the ship long ago.

I'm genuinely not sure if this is satire or not.

I do not understand what you are saying.

- - - -

Ah, I think I get it. You're saying that Chrome would beat Safari if they were both available?

You’re capable of more, we’re capable of more, this entire thread of yours is beneath us all.

This is obviously a complex topic with a lot of strongly held views. For me personally it's a rare case where I haven't yet developed firm views of my own.

FWIW, I'm not particularly happy with the way this sub-thread has gone, but I found it stimulating at least. YMMV.

Okay. Granted. So what? IE died.

> Safari is the only viable competition.

Is it? It seems to me that it's not competing with Chrome if you can't run Chrome on your iPhone.

I bet that Chrome adoption on iOS remains under 25% forever. People just don't care which browser they use so long as the default one works. Safari isn't so bad that people are desperate to replace it.

>[won't be able to]

>pre-install certain apps or software, or prevent users from easily un-installing these apps or software

>require the most important software (e.g. web browsers) to be installed by default when installing an operating system

For the average user Safari behaves identically or slightly better (battery life, privacy defaults, integration with the OS for login and payments) then chrome and Firefox.

NB: This is just the desktop version. The mobile version has been more or less fine for me.

If an extension is garbage, blame the developer. The API is more or less the same.

The users have already chosen Chrome (and its derivatives). Mozilla has done absolutely nothing to stop it as Firefox has become totally irrelevant today. The EU is about to allow the world domination of Chrome and its derivatives to takeover entirely.

Just like the many choices of a Linux distro, you will have the many choices of Chromium based browsers! All thanks to 'oPEn SoUrcE'.

I think Google prefers the status quo to either of those scenarios. They prefer it to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars a year, for that is how much they pay to perpetuate it.

These are all the highest risk API and integration surfaces on mobile devices.

Also I hope Microsoft get pulled into this as well because they're slowly turning Windows into a marketing device.

Edit: as an iOS user I'm optimistic that this will lead to complete device network whitelist capabilities though so you can neuter any apps which circumvent the current browser restrictions. That would destroy a lot of tracking capability instantly and completely stop embedded browser side channel attacks.

Negligible; most large-format computing devices already allow you to do all of these things.

Also "large format computing devices" are moving more to the lockdown model, at least partially due to the security problems inherent in allowing end users to install/run whatever they want :)

Obviously, those plans were shelved when they changed strategy for iOS to walled-garden, but it's surprising how in the course of fourteen years the issue went from product roadmap to cultural anathema at Apple.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/c/22611236/epic-v-apple-emails-proj...

https://techcrunch.com/2022/03/15/facebook-2018-breaches-dpc...

but here you are anyway: https://noyb.eu/en/noyb-aims-end-cookie-banner-terror-and-is... https://noyb.eu/sites/default/files/2022-07/ANNUAL%20REPORT%...

if you still don't believe me, try and use google maps, or youtube in incognito mode

> Make core messaging functionality interoperable. They lay out concrete examples like file transfer

Google, Apple, and Amazon are supposed to design, ratify, implement and ship a universal messaging standard in 6 months? This won't happen even if they skip the first two steps and use an existing standard.

Apple ships a new iOS version in September, when this timer is supposed to start. Are they supposed to upend their entire release cycle and ship these major changes to their OS by March?

I've used iPhones for years, and I'm totally down with these bullet points. But I think we can all chuckle at the timeline, given the scope of this.

If they all agree that email or sms is the common messaging standard, is that problem solved?

When Eu put out the 'browser ballot box' requirement for OSes, Microsoft said that it was technically very complicated, near impossible to implement it.

Then the Eu started fining Microsoft ~700,000 Euros a week or something.

Microsoft magically made the ballot box happen within a week.

Amazing things are possible when the incentive is right. Given their VAST resources, it's only a matter of focus.

That was the unbundling of Internet Explorer from PCs.

Which in hindsight looks like small beers compared to Chrome on-every-device usage, and probably why MS are getting away with it, again, bundling Edge and crippling Firefox workarounds.

For Alphabet (Google) the revenue distribution from 2015 to 2021 was approximately 33% for all of Europe, Middle-east, and Africa. It's unclear to me the actual European numbers since they are combined EMEA.

For Apple in 2021 the revenue was approximately 23% for Europe (no middle-east or Africa).

For Facebook in 2021 the revenue was also approximately 23% for Europe (no middle-east or Africa).

So it's safe to say that a first offense would potential halve the revenue for the region, and a second offense would remove the financial rationale of doing business in the region.

Do not forget here: These are countries which existed hundred of years before FAANG and will exist hundreds of years after FAANG. They have to protect themselves as a society but also as a constitutional body. If you let the monopolies go their way, their own constitutional existence is in doubt (example: these companies have already gigantic control on aspects which are governed by law hate speech, nudity, etc or are normative in the society). Long rambling, short reply: Other countries will quickly adopt these laws to keep long-term relevant.

Yep. Its amazing how the rest of the world tolerated being moderated on the Internet per - mainly American - foreign laws and even cultural norms up until this point.

Also, it has to be global revenue, because otherwise they would just use funny accounting tricks to hide their revenue (they already do that).

I’d be fine if we take the money and burn it but it’s not gonna be that is it it’s gonna be we take the money and funnel it into organizations that politicians children happen to be on the boards of.

Cookie notices was the industry response, ignoring the spirit of the law and complying at a minimal rate

And you know who does the actual implementation, right?

This is mostly a case of malicious (arguably non-) compliance.

This is like blaming the dentist for your tooth pain.

[citation needed]

The reason this regulations went through easily is that they mostly target foreign operators.

It's not the same with all regulations, the EU is a lobbying battleground as much as everywhere else, you can see that in most things, big corps just go through governments when not going through MEPs.

Because 1) foreign operators do the fuck they want in unregulated markets such as the US and 2) there are no such operators in the EU because they have already been regulated

EU institutions tend to want to do the right thing but will easily cave to "lobbying" when it comes to regulation that hits too close to home. They will not hesitate to regulate to the benefit of the people when the regulation hits far from home, lobbying be damned.

In fewer words, they will accept to be corrupted by interests close to home and still put the well being of citizens at any other time.

The law doesn't even cover devices. It only covers online marketplaces and gatekeepers who control everything.

the tradeoff is now there's only one entity to bribe instead of 27

there's almost 50,000 registered EU lobbyists

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/headlines/eu-affairs/...

The high number of institutions taking part in governance is in part responsive for the reputation of EU to be "slow" to act but it also means that it's incredibly hard to bribe because you have to bribe different institutions that don't even share the same mindsets.

Not arguing there that EU is perfect (it's far from it), but it's really better that what most people think about it, which is because local governments always use the "it's the EU rules, we can't do anything". The thing is, they also omit to remind that ministers and head of states are part of two institutions and that they choose the council of the European Commission. So they are the ones making the rules and those rules have to be accepted by the democratically elected European Parliament.

So when a politician in europe blame the EU for anything, they blame rules that they wrote themselves and that have been approved by a democratically elected parliament.

the "7 institutions" is also not relevant: Putin wouldn't bother bribing Germany's federal constitutional court or government auditors to push his fossil fuels

he'd go after the executive and legislature: exactly the same as if he wanted to influence EU policy

What happens is you are promoted out of the corporate world and into EU council advisory positions (special advisors). So you end up a fill time EU advisory position with part time and contract work for your parent company. Or there's the full time corporate advisors (institutional special advisors)!

Some are academically sourced and the universities are usually bankrolled by corporations who are just buying advisory positions.

And initiatives like this, same with the Microsoft ballot box initiative, are generally brought to Euparl and led by left-wing MPs, especially communists. There is considerable awareness and following of Open Source in Eu political circles, including Euparl.

Incidentally, a Green-Left coalition dominates Euparl right at this moment as far as I know.

For how long, I wonder, given the megacorps have financial resources on par with entire nations, and the EU has been taking some pretty strong stances on topics of interest to them? Or will the megacorps at some point just decide Europe's no longer worth the trouble to operate in (probably not the worst outcome)?

Companies will put up with almost anything if there’s money to be made there.

The GDPR wasn’t watered down but in the end it just wasn’t enforced (at least not enough) against the biggest offenders it was meant to regulate.

And its way more than enough for large foreign tech companies like FAANG to have obliged with it waaaaay earlier.

Enforcement generally happens upon reporting. So your garden-variety startup or corp somewhere in the US or another corner of the world is unlikely to get reported unless they start to get sufficient userbase in the Eu.

I didn't take it to court because I didn't want my dating history to be dragged out in court.

TLDR: the enforcement is nowhere near enough.

They’ve basically been allowed to willingly and maliciously breach the regulation for 4 years.

Facebook appears to still be getting away with breaching the regulation on so many levels.

If this law only reaches 20% of what it envisions, it'll do more for consumers than other laws before.

And I don't think any of the big companies is afraid of yet another fine.

Which is why after being found noncompliant a third time, the new law gives the power to the EU Commission to impose structural changes to the company. Or they can stop operating in the EU.

Is it possible to sneakily get around the law? Maybe.

But it isn't possible to do that, with thousands of people working on it? No, one of them will talk.

What this will mean for me as an iPhone user: instead of using Apple Pay which is seamlessly integrated in my phone, watch and desktop OS, I will instead have to use my bank's terrible HTML-based 'app' to perform contactless payments, making it 100 times less convenient. This probably will make me switch back to using my bank card.

But hey, my bank makes a little more profit at the expense of UX.

Thanks EU!

Apple Pay will not just die, Android has no restrictions on NFC and Google Pay is still supported by banks.

What you do is fear mongering that's not based on reality. Android shows that it works and Apple just wants their cut, as always.

I've bought mostly Apple products because I prefer their system to Androids. People who disagree can buy something else.

Competition is better than these father knows best overarching regulations.

Legally requiring companies to degrade customer experiences is frustrating.

Man, you Americans are SO taken in by your corporate landscape that you seem to have literally forgot what it is making your own choices.

Frustrations everywhere, I guess we should just not do anything about it and go back to the stone age? Someone else in this thread was suggesting that.

“You can opt out” doesn’t help, because I want Apple to leverage its market power to force other companies to act in my interest, such as by banning unnecessary location harvesting from the App Store. Today, if someone wants access to the iPhone market, they have to comply with a pile of requirements that benefit me. If Apple loses the power to force policies on developers, for example by being required to allow sideloading, developers won’t have any incentive to offer non-user-hostile apps, and the the product “a smartphone where apps are available that are not user-hostile” will be gone from the market. The only options will be “a smartphone where user-hostile apps are available” (if you succumb to sideloading), and “a smartphone where apps aren’t available” (if you refuse to sideload), because given the opportunity app developers will only make user-hostile apps.

The EU is making my life worse and I’m annoyed about it. People who want an Android can already buy an Android, why is the EU banning the product I want to buy?

Otherwise if you're saying that users WILL move off the App Store, then that's how Apple's monopoly is anti-consumer and anti-competitive.

If users choose to continue to use Apple App Store only, then Apple can continue to enforce policies while also not being (as) anti-competitive since they wouldn't be actively stifling competition.

Users unambiguously benefit from most of Apple’s App Store policies (the payment rules less so, but even then there are benefits such as mandatory subscription cancellation support), but often in ways they can’t or don’t see. Apple’s policies are obviously negative for app developers, but I don’t care and nobody should care that Apple chooses to benefit its consumers at the expense of its third-party corporate partners. That’s just normal business behavior.

Look at Fortnite's removal, all because they added an additional payment method that bypassed Apple's. You could still use Apple's method if you wanted to for all those benefits, but Apple want their cut. Apps like YouTube increase prices to make up for Apple's cut. Others like Netflix and Spotify not only do not allow you to pay for it via the app, but also aren't allowed to tell you how to pay for it, making a worse user experience.

Or how about the blocking of streaming gaming apps like Stadia and Xbox Cloud Gaming? Who benefits from that? Only Apple.

This doesn't happen with any kind of frequency on Android so I'm curious as to why it would happen on iOS. Do you have ideas on what it would be like? Why would it be so different than android or windows?

https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/30/18203551/apple-facebook-b...

As for Android, many Android app stores (especially ones in China) impose no restrictions or barely any at all. The only one that imposes meaningful restrictions is Google’s Play Store, and the restrictions are much less than in Apple’s App Store, so the incentive to bother circumventing them is much lower. For example, unnecessarily harvesting user location is not a blocker for access to the Play Store.

Can you give examples of this? Android has plenty of non-user-hostile apps...

EDIT: to be clear, currently on Android any app can handle NFC payments, not just Google Pay. Banks could easily force people to user their apps, but that's not happening.

Then Apple Pay launched here, contactless adoption on iOS became triple of Android's (despite Android having more than double the phones), and a few months later Google Pay launched in response with their better implementation. I'm guessing it was a combined "in response to Apple" from Google and "maybe this will increase adoption" from banks.

NFC payments were possible through the banking apps on Android for years before Apple Pay launched in my country. Note that contactless payment had also been around here for years and pretty much all payment terminals supported it. Technically, everything was in place for it to be adopted, yet no one used it. Only after introduction of Apple Pay did it take off. Google Pay support followed the success of Apple Pay.

Maybe the ui app will stop being shitty as the usage goes up? That is the point

The bank will by discontinuing Apple Pay support. They have every incentive to do so.

PS: It's 0.10-0.15%, don't know where your 1/2 come from

They will or there will be a repetition of Microsoft Corp. v. Commission, but with much higher fines.

Of course they will try not to. They will do everything to prolong the appeal process and so on - it's unthinkable they would allow any other app store on their devices, that's the very core of their identity - to be as closed and unified as possible. I don't believe the EU has enough power to fight Apple. I'll believe it when I see the first iPhone with an USB-C charger.

Of course they do. EU Commission, with parlament and member state approval (which they have), has supreme sovereign power over these matters. Market regulation is basically the main point of EU. Because it's a new targeted law, Apple has zero chance of appealing this to a higher court.

Thank god that companies don't have "power" over countries and sovereign bodies. I don't want to live in a cyberpunk world.

Snow Crash was like that, companies > countries.

Kind of hard to claim you're all unicorns and rainbows, when you're actively involved in a court case to defend anti-user practices...

1. EU bureaucrats are threatening one of the most successful business models ever.

2. Jealous EU tries to punish successful American tech companies as they can't compete with them in the market.

3. The EU attempts to lower the value of tech stock, threatening pensions of millions of Americans.

4. Apple will need to fire thousands if the malicious plan of EU bureaucrats succeeds.

Etc. etc.

2. see point 1

3. see point 1

4. see point 1

Yeah. That has been going on since 2005, and the US started it. It even adopted the whitepapers of think-thanks that advocated that exact trade war, elaborating how to sink the Eu's economy. This has been escalating since then.

This law basically says that the Eu is going full-out.

2. If true that is an argument in favor of the EU. That means no member countries will undermine the act.

3. The EU buteacrats do not care.

4. The EU buteacrats do not care.

When Chelsea Manning released her cables, there were too many of them for any journalist to read or even glance not to mention understanding what is going on. But I spent several weeks grepping and reading many fragments. My conclusion is that the US government cares a lot about their business in other countries, especially in Europe. Ambassadors reported a great deal about how things are going for American companies, what threats are (like European citizens realizing what's better for them), how to neutralize them and so on.

Which should never have happened and those companies should have never been let to dominate the Internet and everyone's lives to this extent. Especially considering how they are private tyrannies that decide whatever is the best for them, not their users.

Actually they do - thats the reason why that law was passed. That kind of thing may fly in the US, but not elsewhere.

1) Appeal to infinity, using all resources they can.

2) Comply but make things so difficult for the user that they effectively retain the control over the device as before. (Anybody remembers browserchoice.eu?)

3) Convince the US government the law goes too far and they should intervene. Given the war in Ukraine, it would be extremely easy to convince the countries bordering with Russia, Belarus and Ukraine they should support the USA in this case.

By forcing message passing platforms to submit to sharing private encryption keys? And that interoperability entailing the possibility of passing messages to government eavesdropping schemes? Sounds like a utopian paradise!

Why assume that requirement? For E2E encrypted messaging services all that needs to be shared are public keys for interoperability to work.

In the case of middleman encrypted messaging you already trust the provider not to sell you out. If they interoperate then you trust N providers, where N is the number of providers engaged in a particular chat thread.

I wonder if, just like in Android, this will open the doors for a lot of malware targeting iOS users.

For example: https://www.kaspersky.com/blog/camscanner-malicious-android-...

Very recent example: https://www.techradar.com/in/news/more-brutal-malware-laden-...

That would be sweet. Currently none of call recording apps work on my phone and this is a must have feature for me. When I take a call with my doctor I have to use my separate memo recorder, so that I can refer to the call in the future if I forget something.

Let's not mention usefulness of this feature when you are placing orders over the phone and then the other party claims this is what I wanted once they deliver something not as agreed. If I could record a call I had evidence in case of dispute.

It might not be legal to do that, in all cases, and the evidence might not be valid.

Similar to how we treat knives and similar things.

That being said, call recording is legal in my country.

Nonetheless, I anticipate teething problems, including some form of malicious compliance. The latter of which the EU tends to take a dim view.

One could also argue that if it takes longer than 6 months to add something dictated by law, you simply have to implement it faster or accept the consequences.

I don't think companies this big has a lot of excuses for taking so long to implement things. They have thousands of employees they can shift from other projects (projects that doesn't decide if the phone is illegal or not) to implement urgent things like this.

Then that will increase the implementation cost by at least (edit: up to) 10% of their global revenue.

Assuming they won't go with the maximum amount early on.

The US military having bases in Europe is a mutually beneficial arrangement, not some sort of charity America is giving Europe. The US threatening to withdraw from those bases for the sake of Apple would be supreme stupidity. Not impossible, but supremely stupid. There are much bigger fish in this sea than a handful of tech companies, large as they are. Apple is a small drop in the bucket compared to the vast commercial and industrial scope of America's global priorities.

Scams proliferate, praying on elderly and young. Widespread tracking of your location, browsing history. Same with other points, narrow, selfish thinking.

It certainly puts a huge incentive on Apple to figure out technical solutions to problems like "How do we get other browser engines on this thing without compromising a hundred OS assumptions, battery performance, or user security," but it's also possible Apple decides that's a no-go and it'll cost more than 25% of annual revenue to comply, at which point the winning market strategy is opt-out. That's fine; win-win for the EU market because it clears the playing field for a European-originated competitor to the iPhone.

ETA I forgot the third possibility: Apple decides it will cost more than 10% (and later 20%) of revenue to comply, but the 5% bump in value is still worth it and they write off non-compliance as a tax to do business in Europe. Then if the EU tries to impose structural or behavioral changes, we're back to square one on the question of whether those changes cost more than (now) 5% of Apple's revenue.

But I would agree, they're not likely to just give up on the market. Even ignoring the likelihood of similar laws everywhere else, it's too big and too tempting.

I doubt Apple will be willing to forego sales in the world's third largest economy, tbh.