> they are storing people's private data and selling primary communication devices.

To be clear, I think privacy laws like GDPR absolutely have a place for consumer protection.

I just don't think the DMA does. Watching how the DMA applies to Apple, it feels far less about consumer protection than it does about businesses, and that's what makes me uncomfortable. The EU is in this case listening to complaints from a bunch of other businesses who do not have consumer interests at heart and ignoring the very real damage that their actions could do to consumer protection.

The Apple App Store protects users from myriad abuses by myriad bad companies. The EU wants Apple to build a blessed, paved off-ramp that companies can strongly encourage prospective customers to use that brings them deeper into the manipulative control of those companies.

> complaints from a bunch of other businesses who do not have consumer interests at heart

Apple (and other big tech companies) locking the competition out of the market, or buying them, hurts consumers. It robs them of other innovative choices.

Having more choices and interoperability is generally good for consumers.

If you stick with the Apple defaults how does this hurt you?

To clarify: I don't use Apple. I chose their competitors instead because I like the features offered by the competition better.

> If you stick with the Apple defaults how does this hurt you?

Because people won't be able to stick with the defaults. One of the first dominoes to fall if the EU gets its wishlist will be Facebook, which will put a version of its app that wouldn't pass Apple's review out through unofficial channels and strongly encourage or force users to switch to it. Once Facebook has paved the way many other companies that are similarly inclined to abuse their users will follow.

A walled garden with a wide-open back door is no walled garden at all, and the many Apple users who liked the garden are going to be cranky when they realize what tech lobbyists have done in the EU.

Interesting. I had thought of the garden walls as being in the way of users, based on my personal experience, but you bring up the point that the walls can also be in the way of nefarious companies. I assume both can be true.

And perhaps the legal system sees some of these garden wall as protecting Apple, falling under anti-trust, like the 30% markups on all financial transactions?

You mentioned malicious versions of the Facebook app that do an end-run around Apple's review. Maybe the EU is trying to cover this with new laws like the GDPR and DMA, making malicious app behaviour illegal. Might that not be better, protecting all users regardless of platform?

> Maybe the EU is trying to cover this with new laws like the GDPR and DMA, making malicious app behaviour illegal. Might that not be better, protecting all users regardless of platform?

If I thought the EU could actually execute on that? Maybe. But I know that Apple executes on it, and the fallout from the gdpr doesn't give me a lot of confidence that the EU knows how to regulate tech in a way that achieves desired outcomes and doesn't just lead to the same behavior as before with malicious compliance stamped on top.

> The Apple App Store protects users from myriad abuses by myriad bad companies.

Does it? Are the $50/month subscription flashlight apps gone?

This is just a form of 'think of the children'. Think of all those evil hackers waiting around the corner for the poor unsuspecting iPhone users.

> Think of all those evil hackers waiting around the corner for the poor unsuspecting iPhone users.

I'm not talking "evil hackers". I'm talking about Facebook just for a start. Once they pave the way and teach users how to use the off-ramp (or else not be able to use Facebook!) they'll be followed by dozens of smaller abusive companies that are eager to pass by Apple's review requirements.

I'm far less concerned about software vulnerabilities than I am about the companies that Apple's business policies currently keep in check.

A friend recently lost his life savings though a hack of a crypto wallet on an Android phone. Phone security isn't trivial.

Crypto comments aside, that could have happened on a Windows desktop too. Yet when MS tried to go walled garden with their store everyone complained. I don't see why Apple should get a free pass.

I guess with the iPhone it was walled from the start so anyone buying one knew what they were getting. I'd be pissed off if they walled gardened my mac. I've got an iPhone and have mixed feelings about the restrictions on it. They can be annoying but on the other hand I have significant investments and more and more banks are insisting you access them via an app and for that I'd probably prioritize security.

On the other hand, an example i've posted before: i want DaisyDisk for my iPhone. It will never be available as long as Apple can censor what's released for their phones.

> consumer needs to have the final say, not Apple.

And consumers spoke, and now other consumers unhappy with those consumers choices, are demanding the deal be changed.

Democracy is the dictatorship of the majority.

But it doesn't have to be, you can simply NOT regulate every damn little thing, especially when there are no victims and you are forbidding a simple trade between two entities who are both willing to engage.

No, developers who want to make money on the Apple Store are not victims. They can develop for Linux and sell apps there if they don't want to pay what Apple wants.

I'm one of them, I'm not supporting Apple or Google and I build everything on the web paying nothing.

I agree, mostly. It is worth noting that until the forced opening of the market occurred, safari was conspicuously lacking in PWA support, especially wasm support. I am a recovering libertarian, and I now see the need for regulation in more places. Largely because of regulatory capture, true, but I don't think anarcho-capitalism works. It just makes lawyers top of the heap instead of warriors (in pure anarchy). Which, when the lawyers command the soldiers, isn't any better.

If PWA support is the great panacea that its advocates suggest, why are companies still making iOS apps, Android apps and web apps for computers instead of just making iOS apps and telling Android users to just use PWAs?

Because they can collect more data with a native app. A native app is far better from their perspective, but not from the user's, unless it is something computationally bound that can't handle overhead (mostly games?). The last exception is banking apps. They do a lot of weird stuff to fingerprint your phone too, but in this case the user definitely wants them to.

This is factually incorrect. A web app can do cross page tracking through cookies. An app is much more strictly sandboxed.

Maybe the simple answer is that PWAs and using web technology has never been good enough?

In the history of computing, cross platform GUI apps have always sucked compared to native apps.

I think flash and actionscript might be a counterexample? People have different standards too. In thebearly days of win3.1 I liked apps that had different widget sets, now anything that doesn't look native is considered garbage. And some people seem to consider rastered fonts equivalent to baby-eating in a professional context. I don't think I have any common axioms or value systems to carry on conversations with them, but I believe they do care, so it is probably just that PWAs are my preference, but no one elses. I prefer the web mattermost to the app for instance.

Flash is actually an example of how bad cross platform frameworks are compared to native.

Despite what Adobe said when the iPhone first came out, there was no way that Flash was ever going to run on the first generation iPhone. It had only 128MB RAM and 400 MHz processor. When Flash finally came to Mobile in late 2010 on Android, it required 1GB RAM and 1Ghz processor. An iPhone with those specs didn’t come out until 2011.

Heck Safari could barely run on the first iPhone, it would do checkerboards until rendering could catch up with the scrolling.

And if you remember Apple’s cross platform Windows apps - iTunes, QuickTime and the short lived Safari, they also looked very bad on Windows.

Both Google and Facebook at different times said they are moving away from cross platform frameworks and web based technologies for iOS to more native software. Google has all but abandoned their cross platform mobile framework.

Web apps have ways to track users, but users have ways to mitigate this via adblockers and privacy features in their browser. https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/ exists to help users check their own browser fingerprint.

Full apps on the other hand have many more ways to fingerprint users which aren’t as well known, such as “your free storage, your current volume level (to 3 decimal points) and even your battery level (to 15 decimal points)”. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/09/23/iphone-...)

Is one conclusively better than the other? I’m not sure, but web tracking and fingerprinting is still much more studied and users have more countermeasures, including using a different device where the user has more control.

There is also a battery status API for web apps

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Battery_Sta...

Web audio api

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Audio_A...