I love my iPhone and my Mac. They are great devices. I’ve been using Apple products happily despite having pretty few acquaintance with the Apple brand (which I feel incredibly arrogant).
All of those stories about the DMA and the total lack of good faith from Apple when it comes to respect the rules are making me strongly reconsider buying new Apple products in the future. In fact I’m starting to regret my investment in a Air M2 last year because while it’s not new that Apple consider my devices to be their own, they are not even trying to act like it’s not the case anymore. They are actively and publicly fighting against my (their customer) interests.
While I still use Apple devices, I wouldn't have thought of switching to another ecosystem, say, 8 years ago.
Now, if there was a good alternative, I'd seriously consider.
My friends' counterarguments were always that they did not currently exert that power to the detriment of users.
To which my reply was "Show me a few down quarters, missed growth targets, or a threat to one of their primary sources of revenue and see what they do."
Any company should always be expected to pathologically leverage all forms of control it can, if it needs to generate profit.
(In fact I’m really grateful that Linux is even existing because otherwise the situation would be catastrophic. But I digress)
The point is that now, Apple is exercising this control to (try to) actively defeat public regulators. I do believe It’s pretty serious when a company actively tries to circumvent the rules made by the public powers.
And I say that as someone who ideologically tolerates civil disobedience when needed. But corporations are not humans, they must respect the rules in all circumstances. Because respecting the stupid regulations and the stupid laws is the only thing that distinguishes them from mafioso systems.
And especially if it needs to retain control of its platform.
Just look at Microsoft’s dark patterns when it comes to browser control. And this is after the EU find them like a billion dollars on the exact same pattern 15-20 years ago with IE.
I had the S0, S3, S6 and never had any problems otherwise. In Ultra, their flagship and most durable watch, it's problematic as I can imagine: the original loop started to wear out in 6 months, the action button sometimes just does nothing, GPS (which should have been more accurate due to more band support etc) goes crazy while swimming (which never happened with S6) and records incorrect data (I see physically impossible "jumps" in recorded swim daya) and most importantly, the screen sometimes goes black (after months of debugging I've realized that it is wrist detection, but no solution other than turning off always on display which for some reason "solves" the problem but I can't have always-on display).
Despite all those problems on the most expensive and "durable" watch which I didn't have on any other watch before, Apple support did a diagnostic and told me there is absolutely nothing wrong with the device, and don't offer a replacement.
A friend had similar problems and they "found nothing wrong" with his AWU either and refused to replace it too (he then switched to Garmin).
As Apple is a company that blatantly refuses problems with their own devices I now hesitate to buy another Apple Watch, or the AVP for instance, simply because I can't trust them anymore.
If Apple allowed unrestricted sideloading or third-party app stores, then it loses its leverage to hold apps accountable to any guidelines.
A few major players would switch to using the alternative method (eg Amazon would want to sell digital items and use its own payment system), legitimizing it, and then everyone who wants to ignore the guidelines for less admirable reasons would follow suit.
Less technically savvy users would follow the prompts to install an app with extremely mixed results. And once there's no one way to install apps, it makes it that much harder for them to tell if an app is legitimate or not.
That's maybe fine for more technical users, but for people who just want to use their phone as an appliance rather than verify the chain of trust for an app, there's no discernible benefit. The time required to verify an app is non-negligible, and the risk is pretty much infinite with respect to what information they give it.
And sometimes you don't really have a choice whether to use an app or not. Your employer or locale may make or imply decisions on service providers for you, and the reason for choosing those service providers likely has nothing to do with how their app treats end users. They won't need to clear any quality bar to offer an app at all, and a locked-in customer has less negotiating power than Apple.
Apple has positioned itself as a premium product which is going to make things simpler (ie reducing executive overhead) by making decisions for you. Saying "no" to features to keep things focused for the largest group of users is hard, and those decisions are going to trend towards the largest demographic using the platform, which is probably less-technical users who don't hang out on HN. If you want to customize the platform, then that's Android's competitive edge.
You can even sideload apps with a developer license - that's essentially how UTM is installed: https://docs.getutm.app/installation/ios/
While that does mean you have to put down more $$, it also effectively narrows the people sideloading apps to people who "know what they're doing" (or at least have demonstrated a higher bar of tech-savviness and clicked through more legal waivers)
What do you want to do now that you can't do with the current state of affairs?
I want to own the object I paid hundreds to own.
You are serving me the « you can still use android » argument. But that’s a false choice : I know both platforms, I know their pro & cons (at least relatively to my opinion). I choose iOS because Android had other cons that I couldn’t tolerate. Making this choice doesn’t tie me to agree with every decision Apple make on my device.
The thing is that I’m stuck between two actors and I don’t like any of them for various reason. Because those two actors actively used their previously accumulated financial power to block new competitors on the market. Your argument of « you can go elsewhere if you are not happy », would be valid if we still had Windows Phone, Palm Pre, Symbian OS or if it was doable for new actors to emerge tomorrow, heck I would even accept it if you could install Linux on my phone (in fact I do believe that regulators should enforce the right to install another OS ok any phone). But we are not in this situation of choice and that’s precisely why those regulations are coming.
The EU law allows for consumers to sideload other app stores on hardware they control. It has no provision that compels Apple to continue doing business with a company in their own app store.
Yes, it is a business decision you need to make to offer a sideload app store and opt-out of the Apple app store. Does it suck for Epic? Yes. But this is the path they chose.
Edit: If you read the Apple letter Epic cites it refers to App Store Review Guidelines, clearly they are terminating an App Store developer account. Nothing stops Apple from minting a fresh Developer Account with only Marketplace capabilities if they apply for a Marketplace account.
The thing that gets most on my nerves is the ridiculous "protecting users security and privacy".
Because if I go along this line of thinking then the conclusion is that they don't give a damn about it on the Mac line because there I can install what I want.
It's not up to Apple to decide how I use their products and I will never ever buy their phones albeit I need to use one to test mobile websites and applications for work.
There's a distinction between "secure for users by default" and "secure from users"
Apple (and Apple fans) really like to muddy the two.
You can build a perfectly secure ecosystem by default... that still has an escape hatch (covered with warnings) that the user retains the right to use.
Apple chose in its mobile ecosystem, and continues to choose, not to do this.
Ergo, what they're really in favor of is "security from users"
PS: To head off the 'users are the most insecure part of a system' apologism, (a) we're talking about personal devices, not managed ones & (b) with great power comes great responsibility.
I.e. Google only implements Play Integrity (nee SafetyNet) attestation. Third parties decide what to use it for. Google has no control over those third parties.
That said, in practice it's 90% about controlling and limiting open source / third-party Android forks.
It's not convenient and you need to reboot your console to go back to running commercial apps, but it is present. At least it's a one-time payment to get the developer account.
I don't think I've ever looked at a video game console and thought, "I'm sure glad that I can't sideload games onto this." This is a slippery slope that I am happy to go down.
So first malicious compliance with all the inflated costs and then they don't even allow people to use it. I really hope the EU will crack down on this BS and force Apple to allow real sideloading.
But anyway I've written Apple out of my life a long time ago.