Apple's really been acting in bad faith with moves like this and the 27% fee on external payments. Regulators took these actions for a reason, and Apple's doing its best to just barely comply, at the cost of bringing even more attention to itself.
The Apple apologia anti regulation response to this comment is ironic because without anti monopoly protections Apple wouldn’t even exist right now.
Microsoft bailed out Apple with an investment entirely because of anti monopoly regulations.
More importantly, MS kept producing versions of Office and even Internet Explorer IIRC that allowed the Mac to remain an option because of their fear of being regulation.
Then after that it was EU anti monopolist regulations that struck down MS and prevented it from strangling the open web, which allowed the web to become an open platform which made it possible for both the Mac and iPhone (which didn’t even have an App Store on launch and relied entirely on web apps) to exist.
The only success Apple can claim credit that wasn’t directly the result of anti monopoly regulation was the iPod and even that wouldn’t have happened because Apple would have folded if Apple hadn’t been protected by anti monopolist regulations.
Imagine if MS had done the shit Apple is doing and blocked iTunes from Windows because it didn’t “add enough new functionality”.
And then when it eventually did allow a gimped version of iTunes charged Apple 30% of all the music and movies sold on it.
If they were being Apple like they would probably have even started charging 20% of the album price of every music CD users ripped to their iPods using iTunes.
And MS was a far more ruthless company. If it wasn’t afraid of anti monopolistic regulation it would have come up with other ideas I can’t imagine in a 1000 years to have absolutely destroyed Apple.
Global market share hardly matters though. UN isn’t regulated monopolies national agencies/EU are. Not that it should matter it’s still an oligopoly which is not that different
this is a super slippery slope. this would mean most manufacturers are actually monopolies because they have control over their own products. i don’t see how this makes any sense.
Not only that, many people that only know Apple after they managed to survive, seem completly unaware that old Apple was always siloed into their own stuff, A/UX and the timid attempt to having clones being officially supported, were the only exceptions to their vertical integration.
Even Atari and Commodore were somehow more open to third party vendors in that regard.
Not disputing anything you're saying, but in hindsight, the web as an open platform was only viable from ~2005-2010 in the window where most people had at-home broadband, but smart phones hadn't taken over.
I’m a U.S. resident who’s eyeballs deep in the ecosystem… (well, I will be, come Friday…) and I feel much more valued by Apple than cattle.
If there’s a future where there’s an app that requires me to install their store on my device to have the privilege of buying their app, I’m simply not buying that app.
And if that turns out to be the case, then it doesn't need to be enforced, as people will select accordingly. And then, the people who do want to run things that Apple won't permit in the app store (browsers/emulators/JITs/scripting/etc), or that aren't economically viable with a 30% cut, will have the option of doing so.
The existence of an option does not force you to choose that option.
until there's another pandemic, and your local government decides everyone has to install their tracking app. or any number of situations where users will be pressured by institutions they don’t have any control over.
You're not supposed to say the quiet part out loud. Suggesting that we should rely on a for-profit corporation to "save us" from democratically-elected officials is such an extreme idea I'm surprised it's being voiced so openly.
I say this as someone who strongly opposed any kind of mandatory apps.
Your local government is staffed by people accountable to you, and it is easy enough to call them, and to get everyone you know to call them, and tell them if they do this they will be out of a job next election.
Historically, Apple has demonstrated more trustworthiness and greater morality than the United States Government, when direct comparison has been available.
More generally, your argument doesn't really hold up. Apple's never owned slaves. Apple's never killed coal miners. Apple's never put humans into concentration camps. The United States Government has done all of these things. Why should anyone trust it?
> a future where there’s an app that requires me to install their store [...] I’m simply not buying that app.
Why is it so hard to understand that market pressure will affect you indirectly.
Monopolies are harmful to even those who will never step outside Apple's walled garden... The mere threat from the EU, and anti-trust hearings in the US has already benefitted you by reducing the commission from 30% to 17% for apps with revenue under $1M.
This applies in the other direction too: in this DMA world, at some point perhaps an app I will want will only be available in Meta’s Store and I’ll have to either accept their (maybe ickier) terms or forgo the app, whereas without the DMA I’d have the option to download from Apple’s Store.
You're assuming a developer would have bothered submitting such an app to Apple's store in the first place or hasn't tried to already. The reality right now is that many people just give up because of either Apple arbitrarily banning things for opaque reasons, Apple banning things because they compete with Apple, or because it's not economical enough to be worth the effort (the other effect of high commission rates, not only do users end up paying more for apps that are available, but it causes some apps to never exist).
This also assumes that Apple won't make their store more friendly to developers once they have competition... i.e that app that would have never existed could now exist in Apple's store because they are forced to actually compete. As I said - indirect benefits.
> The mere threat from the EU, and anti-trust hearings in the US has already benefitted you by reducing the commission from 30% to 17% for apps with revenue under $1M.
The old terms had it at 15% (small business program).
Choice is good, though I can't help but wonder what % of European customers will start getting their applications from third-parties. In 12 or so years of on-again, off-again usage of Android (usually as a secondary phone), I've sideloaded one app: a pre-release game that I happily pulled down from the official channel once it went "official"
This is the thing I see mentioned more than anything else, but wouldn't this require Firefox organizationally to completely rebuild the Quantum engine on native iOS code for you to actually see any benefit?
Side loading on android is laughably easy, probably easier than installing a program on a Windows device. If we can consider the installers that Windows users need to use to get something as simple as Chrome installed easy to use, downloading an .apk file and opening it and pressing install should seem trivial by comparison.
We all know that sideloading is a well-established method used by millions of people to gain access to software that is not available on the dominant stores.
I didn't think branding them as developers would change anything.
Do we? Which common app is exclusively distributed though a standalone install and used by millions? I can't think of a single example which would validate that.
You can't just open the apk directly, you have to enable installations for the browser and also go to deep in the settings and go past the scary warnings. That's not possible for the average user, not everybody is a developer.
That's not a viable distribution channel at scale and that's intended.
When I open an .apk file from a new application for the first time, I get a popup that asks me if I want to allow installations from unknown sources for this app, with a button that directly takes me to the setting to toggle this, and then immediately allows me to install the application.
Imagine if Apple tried to implement privacy labels in a multi app store world. Rather than complying with an action that benefits the consumer, Google and Facebook could work together to create an app store that doesn't require privacy labels and then only publish GMail and WhatsApp/FBMessenger to their app store, forcing me to download and use their app store or not use my e-mail or standard means of communicating with my friends.
It becomes a race to the bottom, where rather than the app stores competing for consumers by improving features, the app stores compete for companies with apps at the cost of the consumer.
You can see this pattern emerge across many marketplaces. Look at AirBNB, terrible customer experience because they are competing for hosts. Amazon turned one of the worlds largest stores into a co-mingled flea market. Because apple has a captive audience, apps have a choice to have access to apple customers or not. Apple does not have to have to make concessions to business interests they would if they had to compete with other app stores to attract apps.
I don’t see any restrictions on these app developers requiring them to publish to multiple stores or the App Store. In fact, only publishing an app to an alternative store seems to be the point of much of this.
The DMA (the legislation that Apple is being forced to comply with in the EU) is specifically intended to stop this kind of gatekeeping behavior by big tech companies. Apple is not the only company coming under fire: Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and others are also being targeted.
The idea is that, if for example some "evil company" you really depend on decides to do things that Apple is protecting you against they can be like "you have to install our app from outside the App Store".
That "evil company" can be Facebook, Epic Games, your bank, your government etc.
Well both Facebook and Google have already convinced consumers in the past to install certificates that were only meant for internally distributed iOS apps so they could spy on end users.
Good thing the greater good is more important than what you personally like or dislike. There are people who like to smoke indoors, but thankfully that's also not allowed (everywhere).
Also, nobody is forcing you out of Apple's ranch. You are free to stay locked in if that's what you like. It's the other people who now have an alternative.
To distract/exhaust people, pseudo-solutions analogous to cookie pop-ups (do not improve privacy), recommending shorter shower to battle a drought (malicious/idiotic), etc may be suggested.
People interests appear to be used as a rhetoric device, while the actual solutions are harmful to EU business (latest example: AI regulations).
Or a worse experience? I mean android phones and tablets are already something you can buy, people still buy Apple products despite that.
> It's not my intention to poison the well, but Apple feels like treating its customers like cattle
A lot of remember how the computing world was before, the Wild West that the EU is trying to make the only option. We aren’t eager to return to that, and would make different platform purchasing decisions if we did. The EU is simply taking away choice, not adding to it.
I get it, Apple has an unfair advantage because they lock down their platform, and the EU making it suck as much as the other platforms, Apple will compete with the other platforms more fairly.
The reason iPad is good is not because you're not allowed to choose what browser engine to use. It's, largely, because the hardware is simply better than anything else on the market.
I think it is amusing that there is a contingent of Apple fans that actually believe the platform will get significantly worse because people are allowed to sideload and install browsers that have their own browser engines. I think this is a truly ridiculous line of argument. I don't like the other line of argument, which goes somewhere along the lines of "We should tolerate Microsoft-esque anti-competitive behavior because otherwise Google Chrome's anti-competitive behavior might win", but that is literally a better argument, to be fair.
We know it will because we remember what life was like before. Sucky platforms that were never good enough, always some weird piece of software that you thought was benign gunking up your system. It really did suck. And then…most of the problems were gone and things just worked.
I’m ok if this is actually all optional, but I don’t think the anti-Apple crowd is going to be content until iOS is just another Windows. That somehow it won’t just be an unlock that we have buy into and know what we’re are getting into.
Why do people think that iOS will become like Windows when we all know that iOS (and Android) were designed with app sandboxing from start and not like Windows where a program can do anything it wants to.
EU could decide next that app sandboxing is anticompetitive restrictive gatekeeper behavior and force Apple to change that too. It too violates the ‘it is my hardware let me do what I want’ ethos expressed in this comment section.
Because what we really need are less choices to save us right? “Look at all those poor sheeple buying Apple rather than a more open platform, they shouldn’t be making that choice so let’s take it away from them.”
If their bad choices have negative effects on others, for example developers being exploited, then yes the choice should be made for them. It's the same as smoking or drinking. When you smoke, there are harmful effects to third parties so the government limits the use of those products. When millions of people make choices that lead to millions of other people being exploited, governments should get involved. That is the entire point of modern legal systems. Free markets until negative externalities become out of control and then the government steps in.
The idea that iOS has been a negative for developers is a hilarious one. Funny that all those poor developers choose to develop on iOS before android because that’s where the money is.
Is it though? Before the iphone desktops were king. On desktops
- developers could use any programming language and there was a standard language that was well supported on pretty much all systems (C), so no need to learn 4 different language ecosystems to target different platforms if you arent a language nerd.
- you could release your software to users under any licence you see fit.
- Software SDK's billed with flat fee's instead of revenue sharing.
- Developers could develop in any environment and didn't have to depend on heavy, buggy IDE's.
- Cross compilation for other systems was common. You didn't need a system from the target vendor to build and distribute software (although for testing purposes it was still common).
- There weren't arbitrary rules on how you are allowed to monetize your software.
The developer experience since the release of mobile systems has dramatically decreased. To say that is not true is just naive. These electronic markets will form no matter what. If apple and google was wiped of the face of the earth today, new markets will form within months. Apple and Google act like the markets are their God given property but in reality they are piggy backing off their first mover's advantage.
Honestly, i feel sad to see your type of attitude on HackerNews.
Maybe that which is best for a mobile computing platform is different than a desktop one. I like my iOS and macOS each in their respective place today.
> Sucky platforms that were never good enough, always some weird piece of software that you thought was benign gunking up your system.
This is a category error. Your iPhone isn't more stable because Apple charges a premium to developers so that they can invite you to use their apps, it's more stable because of all of the good decisions they make technically around the platform.
Your iPhone isn't more stable because Apple refuses to allow competition to their apps. Just like you mentioned elsewhere, if you don't want third party apps, do not install them. Please do not come for my freedom to run the apps I please. Don't piss on me and call it rain.
Your Mac is also a very nice experience, but Apple isn't gouging and restricting the developers of your favorite Mac apps (much), so no one is complaining about MacOS.
Welp, company did stupid thing, time to let the OS company have 100% control and profit over the entire computer.
A bit of an outsized response, no?
To be clear, I disagree with Zoom's rationale (avoiding a single confirmation click when the zoom website launches zoom), and I agree with Apple automatically disabling that server for it's customers. That doesn't mean I think we should throw the baby out with the bathwater.
No, it isn’t. It’s been proven over three decades of computing that companies - even reputable ones - will do all sorts of crap to your computer.
I’m very careful what I install on my computers. I will install any random crap on iOS devices that I would never install on my computer because they are sandboxed.
Not purposefully, but there was a version of Chrome where the installer would leave your Mac inoperable if you had System Integrity Protection turned off.
Yeah see, where I don't see eye-to-eye on here is the idea that Windows is bad because it lets you download and run whatever you want. I don't agree at all. I think Windows is just bad, and in fact, it gets worse as they try to push for an Apple-esque App Store model and slowly add roadblocks to """side-loading""" (or as we called it in my youth, "installing software".)
Likewise, I don't think that's what makes iOS good, either. I don't think it ever was. I think that it's understandable that Apple's approach to this would in fact be to make a "walled garden", especially given that it is wildly profitable, but Apple already had beloved computers long before they started doing stuff like this. Yes, to be sure, the Macintosh had and has plenty of flaws, but I do not think that anyone's goal is to turn iOS into Windows, and Apple would retain a visegrip on the iOS experience just due to how locked down modern operating systems are. Immutable image based operating systems with heavy restrictions on what usermode apps can do are going to be inherently much more stable, even when faced with untrusted usermode apps.
The thing is, while I get why I and others get categorized as part of the "anti-Apple" crowd, it's not because I simply hate Apple for no reason whatsoever. Like many others, I desperately wanted to like Apple, and then they just crapped all over what I consider to be my demographic of users. Please understand: to me, I am not THAT loyal to ANY vendor. I am a user of computers first and foremost.
But what's worse is, I have to deal with the knock-on effects of this. My biggest pet issue is absolutely their tirade against patent-unencumbered formats like Opus, which impacts people I know who prefer iPhone because it's all they've ever known. "How can I get WebMs to play in Discord/My web browser/etc?" You own a computer where the manufacturer decided that you're not allowed to install codecs or alternate browser engines, so you can basically go fuck yourself.
"Bicycles of the mind" my ass.
In any case, I think there is no slippery slope here. Apple is not going to volunteer control of their ecosystem away, so god knows they're going to do the minimum necessary to comply with any of this. So I think the impact on the overall iOS ecosystem will probably not be that substantial once all is said and done.
Even on Android, app stores outside of the Play Store are relatively rare, and attempts to circumvent the Play Store for the purposes of making more money haven't done very well. Even on Windows, it's hard to compete with or avoid selling on Steam, because it's got so much momentum and users generally like it as a platform for buying games on. Apple has more than a level playing field, they have a decade head start, total control over the platform, and so much more; They are far from at risk of control slipping.
If they're worried about anything, it is probably quarterly financial reports not being as good as they possibly could be.
I can go out and buy a windows machine if I want. Or a windows mobile phone back in the day, or an android phone today. There are so many alternatives to Apple products that if I wanted that kind of platform, it already exists and can be chosen! For Android…in China the play store basically doesn’t even exist, so phones with non-play stores aren’t rare at all.
So you basically want to force your preferences on me, and that really just annoys me. You don’t have to buy an iPhone or an iPad for yourself, you have other choices that better suit your needs, so leave my preferences alone please. I don’t like being told what I have to buy.
I mean, plenty has been written about the rationale behind the Digital Markets Act (DMA), but you could start with the EU’s own explanation:
> The Digital Markets Act is the EU’s law to make the markets in the digital sector fairer and more contestable. In order to do so, the Digital Markets Act (“DMA”) establishes a set of clearly defined objective criteria to identify “gatekeepers”.
> Gatekeepers are large digital platforms providing so called core platform services, such as online search engines, app stores, messenger services. Gatekeepers will have to comply with the do’s (i.e. obligations) and don’ts (i.e. prohibitions) listed in the DMA.
> The DMA is one of the first regulatory tools to comprehensively regulate the gatekeeper power of the largest digital companies. The DMA complements, but does not change EU competition rules, which continue to apply fully.
I'm missing the part where someone is forcing you to install non-sanctioned apps. If Apple is adding all the value you say they are, what do they (and you) have to lose?
> So you basically want to force your preferences on me
No one is forcing you to install third party apps. Are you really unable to control the impulse to install third party app stores on your device? You need Apple to stop you from doing something you don't want to do in the first place?
Just because you want to stick in the Apple approved apps doesn't mean that I should have to do the same on my own iPhone.
Why? Up until now I was entitled to choose a strong platform that forced the developers to play nicely. Now I lost that so indeed as you're saying, not using the app is my only choice.
But that's bad, I want the strong platform back. I left Android just few years ago precisely because I liked the guarantees of the iOS platform - now it's going to be just another shitty privacy nightmare like the hellscape of Android I left.
I don't understand why people can't just buy an Android if that's what they like.
> I don't understand why people can't just buy an Android if that's what they like.
I don't understand why you people can't just use the apps they trust and let me use the ones I trust.
I should not have to buy a different device to have the ability to put the software I want on it, and the hardware vendor shouldn't be able to get in my way.
Why did you buy the device in the first place if it doesn't do what you want? And why do you think you are entitled to force its satisfied users to your ways? Just sell it, make a different choice and let us be happy with what we got.
This assumes there is one and only one reason to buy an iOS device, and it's because the platform is locked down. But that's not true is it? Is that the one and only reason you like iOS?
No, but it's one of them, and imho a very important one. You recommended I don't use the apps - I recommend you don't use the device. It's not like it's not possible to live without iPhone in Europe.
The magnitude of our recommendations differ quite a lot. The phone is the most important thing in your life. Changing it is very expensive, both in money and in your own time.
Changing which app you use is, in most cases, a far less costly endeavor.
If you were upset that an injustice was occuring where you lived, would you want people to tell you to move to another country?
So why did these people buy the device in the first place? They knew what they were getting into. Why do they have to break it for the ones who actually wanted it?
I just want to know: What choice do you think I'm trying to force on you? This argument only works if you force this into an us-vs-them dichotomy, but I'm an Apple customer that owns multiple Apple products, so this thing where some outgroup is trying to piss on Apple's parade is a delusion. But even ignoring that, do you think I'm trying to force Apple to force you to install Firefox? Because I'm not, and I'd love to hear what it is you think anyone wants to force you personally to install.
How long until ‘this app only works on browser X’ on mobile that is only available via a third party store? Not impossible. We’ve been spared that so far but happens frequently on desktop Safari even today.
I have an iPad and there's plenty of stuff I literally can't do with Safari on it right now. However, it's not everyone else's fault. Yes, some websites are stupid and do UA checking and intentionally block people on some browsers, but none of those websites are the problem, as all of those sites are not going to give up a vast quantity of iPad users even after Chrome and Firefox become available. It's not like macOS because iOS is not a minority in the world of smartphones, and iPadOS is definitely not a minority in the world of tablets. It's not like Internet Explorer or Edge because it doesn't suck shit through a straw.
The websites that are actually a problem? The ones that don't care. The ones that really could not give a shit less if it runs on your stupid iPad or not. Those are the websites that you can't use on iPadOS. And while the top 500 most popular websites are never going to act this way, this mentality is more widespread than you think. They do not care, and will not care, that Apple doesn't let you run an alternative browser on your tablet. Therefore, you simply miss out.
In addition, some web apps will just not be able to have good support on Safari because Safari just generally takes longer on standards. So instead, you will just not see support for Apple mobile browsers at all. Again, you come upon it a lot. It's not out of malice for iOS users, its that Safari just isn't as good at keeping up with web standards as Firefox and Chrome are. And yes, a lot of web standards suck, but a lot of them also don't and are made to resolve real problems with the web app platform, and look, if Apple's argument that you don't need sideloading is "just make webapps", then I think it's only fair to say that it's not a very good option when they have such inferior support for the standards that people are making to make better and faster webapps.
Apple's influence on web standards has always felt petty. They're the only company that has the specific kind of influence that they do because users can't simply opt to use an alternate browser; they compete in a totally different way than almost every other browser. They should have to compete on a level playing field. I reckon that suddenly, WebMs will start playing on iOS and iPadOS.
Nobody "struggles" to see something that you literally made up. The original iPhone and iPad were literally global news and that happened before they ever did anything like this.
I am sure it made them a rich company, but they were going to be rich anyways. They also hoard money like fucking crazy, so it's not like it's all getting spent on R&D.
MacOS works exactly like what you are purporting to be undesirable, but I bet you have a Mac, and I bet your experience is none the worse for Apple's wild west policies on it.
If I could have bought the same hardware with the same functionality, but not Apple, I absolutely would have. It's not because I hate Apple products (I happily use Macintoshes), but because the system is too closed.
I overwhelmingly prefer Android, Microsoft, and macOS to iPadOS -- primarily because I can get a browser I like on them, but not on my iPad. If I didn't use it for drawing, I would sell it.
I don't live in the EU or have any connection to the EU, and I am not positioned to have any strong opinion of the laws or court cases there.
My argument was against the person above claiming that an open platform makes for a worse product, and that European iPad users would get an inferior experience. I disagree.
Let's not forget that Apple invented the smart phone, but then they lost their dominance over the smart phone market. It seems to me that consumers like open platforms.
I don't think there should be laws forcing closed platforms to be open, given a competitive marketplace where people have a choice. I think most people will choose open platforms in a free market, but it is good that closed platforms exist for people who prefer them. That is one of the benefits of competition.
I do think anti-monopoly laws are necessary for maintaining this competition. However, I don't know enough details of this case to know whether I agree with this specific ruling. I do think the EU can be very heavy handed without sufficiently considering the implications. But that's their business, I guess.
I hope you bought a generic "pencil" at least. There's knockoffs to be had for <$10 on aliexpress, I bought two.
I or someone needs to get around to reverse engineering the digitizer's stylus support, since ipad6 digitizer glass can be bought for ~$11 last I checked, and all-in that's pretty competitive with regular drawing tablets even if you include the rpi nano used to drive the thing.
> Or a worse experience? I mean android phones and tablets are already something you can buy, people still buy Apple products despite that
It’s a good natural experiment. In the states, it feels like a good issue to drop for a couple of years from a lawmaking perspective. (Investigation and enforcement should continue.)
Note that if you opt for the EU compliant new business terms for iPhone, you will still be obligated to pay Core Technology Fees on all Apple platforms, even if those platforms do not allow sideloading. So your iPad apps now have install fees and you still have to pass app review.
Yeah but your App Store commission is significantly lower as a percentage. So you're still going to wind up paying less money if you're collecting amounts like €5 or €10 or more from customers.
In the cases where you'd come out worse, because your app is free or extremely low-cost like €1, then you shouldn't opt for the new business terms. You should use the current ones -- which show no indication of going away since they're what the rest of the world uses.
Supposing I want to release a free, personal hobby project, app that uses some private APIs in iOS, to solve some long-standing usability or feature-gap within iOS, then no, I don't have a choice: I don't have an option at all: I can't release it in the Apple-run iOS App Store becuase it uses Private APIs, and I can't release it in a third-party App Store as a free app because I can't afford the "Core Technology" fee (despite paying my $99 annual fee to Apple, which they said (back in 2008) pays for the platform, SDK+DX) - that leaves me only with Cydia as my only option and a significantly reduced audience.
-----
Actually, this whole debacle has me wondering - does this mean that Apple thinks they have the right to shakedown developers in the Cydia ecosystem for their "Core Technology" fees too? If so, it's going to be hilarious to watch them try to actually do that; and because they'll be unsuccessful, does that mean that other developers (using something-other-than-Cydia) can tell Apple to pound-sand as they have no moral-right to the rent they're seeking?
What makes you think it'll be easier to get away with using private APIs by selling through a different storefront? Isn't Apple is still requiring all apps to be submitted for notarization?
My understanding is Apple’s notarization is about accountability than policy/approval: I’m okay with having my apps stamped with my legal identity - that’s no different to Microsoft AuthentiCode going right-back to the late-1990s.
Regardless of how much review is used, Apple will still be gating what entitlements can be used by third-party apps. They already do this for dev-signed apps - i.e. you can't provision apps that ask for things like, say, task_for_pid-allow[0]. There's actually a whole host of entitlements that you either can't get as a third-party developer, or have to ask for special permission[1] for, or are only available to paid Apple Developer Program members.
Whether or not this hampers your use of private APIs depends on whether or not the API requires a private entitlement in order to work. There's a lot of stuff that doesn't - notably, all of IOKit is there just sitting in the public Frameworks directory, but you won't pass App Review if you touch any of it, because that's still considered private API surface. If you want to touch private APIs that are gated behind a private entitlement, you're not getting them. Remember: most of iOS's security comes from sandboxing, not human review. In fact, there's been a lot of scams on iOS that App Review has failed to catch. So Apple is never, not in a million years, going to give an official way to break out of the sandbox.
[0] In XNU, processes are part of a Mach task. The task_for_pid syscall obtains a Mach port for a given process's Mach task. If you have this port, you have full control over the process.
As you can imagine, this syscall normally only works for development processes that have opted-in to debugging with the get-task-allow entitlement. task_for_pid-allow bypasses this, allowing you to debug everything on the system. Some jailbreaks will even patch this syscall to allow retrieving a task for PID 0 - i.e. the kernel.
[1] Notably, there is an entitlement for using the VP9 decoder, which only Google gets to use.
Just because you don't like your choices doesn't mean you don't have one.
Before, you only had one set of terms. Now you have two, which may be an improvement for a lot of people.
It goes without saying that neither may be your ideal choice. Heck, in an ideal world, my choice would be for Apple to pay me rather than vice-versa! You know, as a little thank-you for making an app for their phone. It's not gonna happen, though.
> Just because you don't like your choices doesn't mean you don't have one
But I don't have a choice - how am I supposed to make my JIT-based/IOKit-using/Kernel-mode/Launchpad-extending app available to (informed) potential users?
Is what correct? Is iPadOS a different platform than iOS?
That's not an easy question to answer. It's a different OS, it has a different name, it runs on different devices, it has different features, it runs different apps.
But iPads ran "iOS" for many years, and iPadOS was clearly just a rebranding of the iOS that ran on iPads. On the other hand, iOS (then iPhoneOS) was announced as a "compressed and streamlined" version of OSX.
I don't think it's unreasonable to say that iPadOS is a different platform than iOS, but I do think that Apple is being very self serving by saying so in this context.
As sibling points out, it's about what the EU thinks.
"iPadOS" runs iOS apps, and iOS apps can be full fledged "iPadOS" apps with a single binary. The distinction is a business distinction, not a technical one.
There are strange tiny differences in what APIs are offered, but the same is true of two Windows computers, for example, for one that has a DirectX capable graphics card and one that does not.
I had the same reaction at first. It looks like and probably is an obvious tactic to evade the DMA.
But then, if we look at Debian and Ubuntu for instance, we'd agree they're different even if there will be compatibility.
I think Apple should be allowed to set each of their stores and OSes as separate but compatible entities. And I also think scrutiny should be applied not on an OS base but on a more generic "platform" or "ecosystem" base. I suppose that's where the EU regulators are ropping in iPadOS even if it doesn't fit the bill strictly speaking.
> But then, if we look at Debian and Ubuntu for instance, we'd agree they're different even if there will be compatibility.
They're separate organizations, which largely precludes it being an effort to avoid the DMA barring some cartel-like behavior.
I think it's going to hinge heavily on their usage of the term "platform". Debian and Ubuntu are both undeniably the same operating system under a technical definition of OS. They both run Linux, which is the OS. They differentiate themselves in userspace, which is not part of the OS.
I don't care for the usage of the term "platform" because it's unclear what makes a "platform". It feels like something that will be arbitrarily applied when convenient.
Regardless of whether iOS and iPadOS are the same OS, I think it is substantially the case that they operate in different markets (smartphone market vs. tablet market).
I think looking at the competition is a good indicator.
On one side we have the hybrid computer market -> computer market, like Chromebooks and chromeOS devices, and Windows 11 in the same space.
On the other side android spans what we'd call phones up to 14" tablets, foldables brindging both ends.
iOS is clearly competing with android, and the iPad is way closer to android than Windows or even ChromeOS. The iOS/iPad split would relate to Apple's internal divisions more than a existing split of the market itself IMHO.
> iOS is clearly competing with android, and the iPad is way closer to android than Windows or even ChromeOS.
Yes, I definitely agree with that. However, you could contrive an argument that ‘since the tablet market is way smaller, it’s less important to regulate it.’
Personally I’m in agreement that the regulation should apply to both markets, though.
> "iPadOS" runs iOS apps, and iOS apps can be full fledged "iPadOS" apps with a single binary. The distinction is a business distinction, not a technical one.
That’s a rather weak argument, because the exact same thing can be said about running iOS/iPadOS apps on macs with ARM chips (aka any macs made since 2020).
Yes, you can literally go to the iOS/iPadOS section of the App Store on macOS, and for devs that enabled that checkbox during the build of their app, you can install those apps on your mac and run with a single click.
I think the question was framed around verifying the part where it claims the European Commission is said to agree with Apple that the 2 operating systems are separate.
now that iPadOS has features that frequently trail a year behind iOS — lock screen widgets, off the top of my head — as well as features like Stage Manager and whatever it is I'm using right now to make my iPad an external Mac display, I think it's safe to say we're at least four years into a now non-trivial hard fork.
“Operating system” is one of the categories of things the DMA applies to. The commission so far has only designated iOS (among Apple OSs), not iPadOS. The commission could arguably have viewed them as being variations of the same single OS, but it didn’t.
App stores and operating systems are different things under the DMA to which different rules apply. The commission view Apple’s App Store as a single app store, but iOS and iPadOS as different operating systems. The rules apply accordingly.
No. EU doesn't pre-approve any of these plans. They'll only be assessed after the compliance deadline (in early March) and will take into account public feedback on the proposals.
The interesting question will be how plans that are deemed to be insufficient are dealt with. If the companies can just change their plans after getting the EU's feedback, it becomes a rational choice to submit illegal plans and then "fix" it. That way there's no risk of accidentally giving too many concessions. To avoid that, attempts as blatant as Apple's shouldn't be just negotiated down to a compromise but result in immediate fines.
If you presume that the EU has actually signed off on this and all the other DMA changes Apple announced, then the DMA at least as it affects Apple is useless.
If iPadOS was deemed separate by the EU prior to the DMA rulings, that's interesting, and am wondering if anyone can cite a source.
I really think this is insanely poor strategy on Apple's part. They know damn well that they're simply delaying the inevitable, and probably in deluded hopes that this can get watered down significantly with enough effort, but I don't think the public or the government regulators are going to be amused by these stunts in the slightest.
They manage to get away with a lot by virtue of having probably the best PR in the entire computer industry as a whole, I don't think that's an exaggeration; but if they keep pulling moves like this, I feel they risk losing a lot of their public support. For me, it's quite unusual seeing even the most popular comments on sites like MacRumors absolutely trashing and condemning Apple--there is usually at least one highly sympathetic perspective that has a significant amount of mindshare, but in this case, it's hard to not see how egregious and petty this really is.
And to be fair, I doubt their famously positive reputation is going anywhere overnight, but there are definitely cracks forming, especially between this and the near-miss with the CSAM scanning debacle.
Well, the ball is in regulator's courts. I have mixed feelings about some of the EU tech regulation, but that doesn't justify malicious compliance like this, and I hope that regulators do their jobs and send a message that Apple (and Google) are not above the law.
I really hope the EU doesn't take this lightly and modify the laws accordingly. And if not, I hope Apple ends up split like Standard Oil. - Sent from my iPhone
The iPhone is their baby, and the iPad is decidedly not. It’s a good business, it’s a big business, and they sell a lot of them, but in terms of revenue it has never really exceeded the Mac and doing QA for both iPhones and iPads running the same operating system at feature parity year after year was holding their baby back. That’s why when they do new releases, things like widgets on the Home Screen appear on iOS a year ahead of when it does on iPadOS. By renaming it iPadOS, they’ve given themselves cover to hold stuff back a year and roll features out on a tick-tock schedule cuz now the iPad is running a totally different operating system.
That it may benefit them here dealing with the EU’s shenanigans is probably just a nice incidental bonus, but that’s just my own cynical take. Honestly though, gun to my head, I think prioritizing iPhone features and QA probably is the right thing to do. I like my iPad, but it couldn’t replace either my iPhone or my Mac, and it’s a supplement to both at its best.
I have worked with Apple and know a couple people that work there. They would not be able to operate with the level of precision and scale to pull of a single OS across mobile and ipad. But it wouldn't be a totally different OS, it would be a branch.
I say this as a huge Apple fan: the iPad strategy is ridiculously frustrating (for my purposes).
The crux of the issue is that the latest Pros have one of the most awesome and powerful processors on the market for traditional computing purposes, but all that power is locked behind a toy OS that you can’t do much with.
There are few meaningful differences in the underlying hardware between this and a MacBook Air, but I can take my MBA anywhere to code, work offline, easily multitask by switching between numerous project windows, install all sorts of open source software as needed, etc.
With the iPad, I can watch some videos, and download some popular games with gacha mechanics. Cool?
I picked up a cheap refurbed Surface Pro X. While no means perfect, having an actual usable OS that I can do whatever I want with is so nice. Come on, Apple. Just let us run MacOS on these things.
> but all that power is locked behind a toy OS that you can’t do much with.
You and I may not be able to do our jobs on it, but I know people using it as their primary machine, including people running their entire business off it. (Such as my sister who runs a very successful photography/design Business with only an iPad Pro.)
It’s not for me, but I can accept not everybody requires the same of their machine and software as I do.
That must be it. It always felt super peculiar that they did this, and I really didn’t see the value in it for Apple, even from a marketing perspective. I 100% buy that we’ve just gotten to peak behind the curtain.
I'm as cynical as anyone, but iPadOS was introduced at WWDC 2019 and thus was in the works for some time before then. This conspiracy theory doesn't stand up to the historical timeline.
The more plausible and less conspiratorial theory is that iPadOS was made separate to help market more expensive iPad Pro devices.
Government bodies also move slowly, and they usually telegraph their moves years in advance. When corporations act like they're caught off guard by a new regulation it's usually (though not always) just a PR move.
It's not improbable that Apple could have predicted that separating the ecosystems would be legally beneficial, even if they didn't know about this specific regulation back then.
> Government bodies also move slowly, and they usually telegraph their moves years in advance.
There's no evidence of that in the pre-2019 period. See https://fasos-research.nl/vista-jmn/files/2022/10/VISTA-Poli... "For much of the 2014-2019 period, European Commission leaders, most notably those linked to DG Competition, articulated a commitment to the use of traditional competition instruments to meet the needs of the new digital economy."
> It's not improbable that Apple could have predicted that separating the ecosystems would be legally beneficial
I disagree. It's improbable. Show me any evidence that anyone in the world was talking about splitting out iPadOS for legal reasons.
In any case, it's really more of a minor annoyance than anything, relatively speaking, because iPhone has a vastly larger user base than iPad. iPhone is Apple's bread and butter, and iPhone is what the DMA is regulating. Apple wasn't able to spare the iPhone by separating iPadOS.
> There's no evidence of that in the pre-2019 period.
GDPR was proposed in 2012 and implemented in 2016. Any reasonably intelligent observer would look at the contents of the GDPR and predict that the EU was interested in sweeping regulation of large American tech companies, and it would have been foolish to think they'd stop at data use. Apple's legal experts and lobbyists are more than just reasonably intelligent observers, they were interacting regularly with EU regulators and knew that change was on the wind, even if they didn't know the details before 2019.
> they were interacting regularly with EU regulators and knew that change was on the wind, even if they didn't know the details before 2019.
One wonders, then, why Apple didn't do more to open up the iPhone and protect it from regulation before the EU had to force something worse down Apple's throat. (The tone of Apple's PR yesterday was startlingly bitter and combative.) Moreover, it's not clear that the iPadOS ploy is even going to work in the end: "the Commission has opened a market investigation to further assess whether Apple's iPadOS should be designated as gatekeeper, despite not meeting the thresholds." https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_23_...
In fact, Apple has made a series of anticompetitive moves with the App Store in recent years, enraging third-party developers and practically daring regulators to bring down the hammer.
Besides, iPad is already kind of a neglected software platform. Some developers still don't bother to specifically support it with their apps. Lack of iPad support isn't going to stop anyone from going outside the App Store if they can; indeed, this move may backfire on Apple by causing even fewer apps to support iPad.
iPadOS does not exist outside of branding. Apple never actually forked the OS - there's jailbreak tweaks that will enable Stage Manager on iPhones, for example. iOS and iPadOS also share the same SDK - which incidentally, is still called iPhoneOS.sdk, not even iOS.sdk. iOS has always had the ability to gate features behind iPads vs. iPhones ever since the iPad first launched.
That being said, I still don't think Apple rebranded iOS for iPads to evade an EU regulation. The EU wasn't even aware of Apple's monopoly until the Epic lawsuit a year and change later.
That was March 13. WWDC 2019 was June 3. Do you seriously think that Apple magically switched everything to iPadOS in 2 months? And why? How exactly did iPadOS even help with the Spotify complaint?
Sure, why not? How hard is it to change "iOS" to "iPadOS"? And to hedge their bets. It's a mostly meaningless change that has let them claim it's distinct from iOS. They could tell where the winds were blowing.
Monopolies are lazy. They grow fat on free cash flow they don't have to earn anymore.
Apple needs razor-sharp competition. That won't happen without regulation.
Remember when it took Google buying the Motorola patents in a MAD scenario to keep Apple from nuking even Android itself? They almost owned 100% of mobile computing forever.
Now both companies are content with policing what gets put on mobile and taxing it when it tries to process dollars. And now mobile is the most used form of internet.
Apple did lot of efforts building the ecosystem. No government system helped them in it. Now fruits have come up & they want to tweak it to their own taste.
If monopoly is causing trouble to small businesses & you’re able to prove it then impose fines & whatever is under the law. But just being jealous & imposition of laws just to target businesses(here almost Apple is being singled out).
But this is unpopular opinion.
With 30% fees you get access to big ecosystem of Apple imo is cheap. They’ve put lot of efforts in building it. If don’t want to participate, then don’t. Use android it has what you all what EU wants.
You may not be an Apple shareholder and I’m not sure how being a US Citizen has any potential to be a conflict of interest in this case but you still sound like you “drank the cool aid”… the question I have for you is where (if anywhere at all) do you draw the line between what Apple should be allowed to do and and what it should do voluntarily … and what rights you think individual nations have to regulate their internal commerce including regulations on what manufacturers and sellers of devices must make it possible for the purchasing public to do…
while this regulation is targeting Apple’s software control the same principles are underlying the regulations that allow bilingual countries to require products be labeled in both languages, allow countries to mandate hygiene in health care facilities, higher food safety or ingredient quality control to minimise food contamination risks…
Does Unilever have the right to decide what’s good enough for consumers in a country? Or does the country and its citizens have the right to demand Unilever products meet their standards if Unilever wants to sell in that country?
> what rights you think individual nations have to regulate their internal commerce including regulations on what manufacturers and sellers of devices must make it possible for the purchasing public to do
> while this regulation is targeting Apple’s software control the same principles are underlying the regulations that allow bilingual countries to require products be labeled in both languages, allow countries to mandate hygiene in health care facilities, higher food safety or ingredient quality control to minimise food contamination risks
I mean, while this regulation is targeting Apple’s software control, the same principles are underlying the regulations that allow countries like PRC to demand Apple to host data of their users in China in datacenters that are run by, essentially, the PRC government, as well as give them the keys to decrypt data of those users.
I don’t see how that’s a point in favor of anything at all here. Just because the countries have the right to do those things and sometimes utilize those rights for things like food safety management or bilingual product labeling enforcement, it doesn’t automatically make their usage of those same rights for other things (like compromising user data and, with full legal support, spying on political dissidents) any more justified.
No one is arguing that the EU doesn’t have the right to do what they are doing (the EU, indeed, has the right to do it). People are arguing whether it is a smart and beneficial thing to do.
Apple did not build the ecosystem alone. The ecosystem is made up of the platform, the developers and the users. Lose one of these and you don't have an ecosystem. If all the developers leave, users will leave. If all users leave, developers will leave.
I would argue developers put in just as much, if not more effort.
Apple did not build the ecosystem alone, nor does it own the ecosystem. It is merely acting as a uncool gatekeeper.
