It's a crying shame that it's the EU that upholds a remnant of competition and consumer rights while the “free market” in the US gets more corrupt by the day and the power of the big monopolies gets ever more cemented.
The free market will always tend towards monopolies/duopolies/oligopolies - it's the most efficient way to make money, which is exactly what capitalism incentivises.
If you want to push for openness and transparency, you need strong government intervention and without a culture that pushes for it, it'll only get worse (see also right-to-repair).
Short/medium term maybe, long term monopolies are definitely producing less revenue, I can't find a good study about this but I read this multiple times.
> “free market” in the US gets more corrupt by the day
The US has a strong history of antitrust laws and splitting up companys for free markets sake. The globalization as well the digital markets change this, and its perfectly rational for the US to do nothing. Breaking up big tech would be in the interest of the consumer due to increased competition, but its not in the interest of US citizens. In the digital world we live in, competition could come from within the EU or China and that's worse, also due to geopolitical interest of the US. It is just smarter to live with the few oligopolists, as long as all of them are American.
I think AT&T in 1982 was the last company actually broken up. It seems like the DOJ tries to keep companies from getting too big in the first place now, with mixed results. In recent times Penguin/Random House/Simon & Schuster was blocked, AT&T/T-Mobile was blocked, but Microsoft/Activision succeeded
With China coming up decimating many USA companies in eastern side, all these doesnt matter much. Do you matter what happen to Japanese or German companies? Bankrupted and outcompete by Chinese companies in the last 5 years? Well same thing now happening to many American companies on that side and European too. So having American companies splitting up at this point would give the Chinese side even more advantage to outcompete with way stronger resources in Brics.
Well my point was, globalization and digital markets lead to US companies making revenue (and abusing their market powers) worldwide. This has been going on for longer than 10 years - so doesn't make much sense to ask for a timeframe of the last ten years. If you go back 20 years, what Megacorp existed back then that needed to be broken apart?
Imagine those US law makers still interested in organizing the country, they probably tried, or didn't even bother to. All the cosy deals made back stage rendered null and void();
Also funny is the much hated EU still having to prove it's usefulness. I'm sure 100 years from now they will be selling out with the best of them but today it ain't in the cards.
Even more hilarious was that the current phone was suppose to be my last iphone. I might even make some apps. Under the current TOS that's just never going to happen.
Can I take my purchased iphone apps to Android? I can take my purchased Windows games to Mac/Linux, as well as many applications. If they run there, my license works.
Until this problem is solved with iOS and Android, this isn't a valid argument.
You understand this is a limitation going in. No one forced you to buy the iPhone. You seem to like to unnecessarily use force. You can buy multiple phones that support fdroid and get what you want.
I’m saying no one is forcing you to do anything, you make informed choices going in. If you want to be able to switch phones, only buy ones that support fdroid and the like. Apple doesn’t do that, so don’t get one of those. Maybe you think they should, but you’re a minority on HN and most people are thrilled with their wonder pocket computers.
haaha ... because both of these OSes were created at the exact same time? Sure, if I were 18-19 now and making my own choices, maybe that'd be different.
Most of these decisions these days are made by parents buying their kids their first phone. They aren't made by adults for themselves. By the time they become an adult, they've probably heavily invested in whatever ecosystem they grew up in.
FWIW, I'm not an Apple Fan. I'm just stuck with it.
There are some limitations that companies should not be allowed to place on their products or services, either because they harm the competitiveness of the market or because they violate the customer's rights. There are some rights that you simply are not allowed to sign away.
Obviously the companies should act in a moral fashion, and not violate your right to life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness. But buying an Android phone isn’t breaking any of the 10 commandments, or these companies aren’t causing you to do that, so all good there.
I'm not paying anything extra to use Mac vs. Windows on my office license... or Visual Studio either.
In regards to games on Steam, you don't pay anything extra to play on Windows/Linux/Mac if the game has support for that platform -- haven't since it became a thing almost a decade ago.
That’s a grave misunderstanding of capitalism going back all the way to even Adam Smith.
You can’t have fair competition without rules, without sane rules you could win the Marathon with an AK47 and a Jeep every time, without any innovation.
Also come on, this “vote with your wallet” is just dumb — what are you voting for between literally the two candidates? What if I want a privacy-respecting, but open to customization phone with great hardware - do I buy like 87% iphone and 13% android, or how does that work? Will it somehow magically register my “vote” at Google, and not make them introduce an ever worse privacy feature?
The phone OS market has such a hard entry for others that even goddamn Microsoft failed at it, and they did throw a litany of money there. This is as much choice as the US two-party system: you get go vote at the least bad, good for you..
They have broken no rules, and have provided great products that customers love to buy.
You’re bitching that you want more privacy, when GrapheneOS, Fdroid, Librem, Pinephone, and other alternatives exist.
They’re not that well developed because most people just don’t care like you do. “The man” isn’t keeping you down, there’s just not that big of a market for it.
And who knows, maybe the Solana phone will take off and be what you’re looking for.
> You’re bitching that you want more privacy, when GrapheneOS, Fdroid, Librem, Pinephone, and other alternatives exist.
All of these "options" come with huge compromises. I'd love to use GrapheneOS, but I also want to continue to be able to pay for things with my phone. That's just one example among many.
The point is that I shouldn't have to choose between these options. I should be able to get all of these things, but the market leaders have destroyed the ability of anyone else to be competitive.
That is a hugely disingenuous mischaracterization of what Android is. AOSP is nowhere near enough to put together modern phone platform that anyone actually wants. And every year it becomes less and less useful due to Google's actions.
It was enough for Amazon to slap a store on it and launch a competitor. Yawn. No one cared. If people were really that dissatisfied with Google, they’d move. People don’t dare, Google makes a damn good product.
You and I both wish for more privacy features, so we can run one of the forks, or the Solana phone. Or maybe we don’t care enough to do that.
Isn't that the point of this regulation though? The market failed to deliver, so we regulate the desired option into existence. Government functioning as intended.
Civil government’s (as opposed to self, family, church) function is to secure your God-given rights. Those are negative rights, not positive ones. You have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Not a right to anyone’s labor. If you want this done in the market, do it yourself.
Anything less than 1% marketshare isn't really a "competitor" though for the purpose of antitrust regulations since it doesn't affect the market.
And Android isn't really an open platform but a semi-open platform. There's not a single phone on earth running AOSP (not even their own Android emulator) and the Play Store contracts where Google dictates their terms are pretty much mandatory to ship a phone.
Then again, there's network effects in play as well.
We’re talking about whether or not you can go out and get a phone using one of these alternative stores, and it turns out you can. Android is free enough to allow librem, fdroid, others. Many users. You want the like to be mandatory, using the long arm of the law. I think that’s an obvious overreach.
> bout whether or not you can go out and get a phone using one of these alternative stores, and it turns out you can.
Well no, turns out you can't. Any app you might need for basic usage (communication, banking, taxes) isn't on it.
Competition in economic terms means actual substitutes and this just ain't it. This is also reflected by their negligible marketshare close to 0%, because well, they just aren't competitors.
> You want the like to be mandatory, using the long arm of the law. I think that’s an obvious overreach.
I'm not even talking about the political solutions to this duopoly yet, just stating the facts that the competition is dead on the area, then the conclusion on how to solve this are up to debate.
I wonder how this will affect apps like Apollo, which can still run fine if you use your own API key, but wouldn't be able to publish compliantly on the App Store while giving users the capability to use their own key (since it violates Reddit TOS).
More generally, will this lead to a resurgence of "unofficial" third-party apps for popular platforms like Instagram and Snapchat? These companies rely on the App Store to be the gatekeeper that stops such apps from proliferating. But if Apple can no longer control that, then I expect we'll see more usage of them. Perhaps Meta already understands this and sees it on the horizon, which is why Threads is built for the Fediverse, where third-party clients are the expected and default mode of operation.
> More generally, will [sideloading] lead to a resurgence of "unofficial" third-party apps for popular platforms like Instagram and Snapchat?
It will lead to piracy in general. But whom will it affect?
Big companies like Meta won’t be worried about unofficial clients much, since the core is at the server anyway. There are many means of ensuring client authenticity, including by constantly changing the APIs, rotating secrets and updating the client.
Even social media aside, almost no big company today releases “buy and own forever” apps that don’t tie to servers or use some sort of subscription model. (Affinity is the one exception that comes to mind.)
So what sucks is that sideloading is going to eliminate the small indie dev who could make an honest living through the simple model of 1) make software, 2) let the user buy it once and own. Note who lobbied for sideloading (spoiler alert: very big companies).
I think so. The AppStore has a policy against developers using private third party APIs and Apple would remove the app if the company complained. Now the company can’t easily have the apps taken down.
I'd love to sideload on my iPad, but let's be realistic, Apple will do everything in their power to sidestep the spirit of the law. Here are some guesses:
- Sideloading only works with an EU Apple Account, on a device purchased in the EU, while you are physically in the EU
- Enabling "sideloading mode" will disable a bunch of other features for [IMPORTANT_SOUNDING_REASON]
While I agree with you that shenanigans are virtually guaranteed, I don't think your two methods will work. They certainly could try to limit it to Europe, but they won't be able to limit it only to European soil. Travelers who find their sideloaded apps disabled or deleted will complain, and they'll be subject to fines again. The other one would be problematic too... sabotaging the phone when it's legally compliant will see an even swifter crackdown.
Yeah, I look forward to getting sideloading and at the end of last year it seemed like apple was preparing to play nice, and there was rumours they would announce info at WWDC2023 and that it would be included in iOS17 (which would mean ahead of the required deadline).
But then the rumours stopped. Which made me come to the same conclusion as you.
And looking at previous examples of BigTech defying the spirit of directives, like how Google blatantly ignored the consent rules for GDPR for 3 years[1], I guess we will get proper working sideloading around 2027.
The only hope is that even if it’s hard and complicated, it will make things like AltStore work well enough that I can sideload a few things to fix the biggest annoyances in iOS.
Unlike GDPR, the DMA has specific provisions to prevent shenanigans:
> 3. The gatekeeper shall ensure that the obligations of Articles 5, 6 and 7 are fully and effectively complied with.
> 4. The gatekeeper shall not engage in any behaviour that undermines effective compliance with the obligations of Articles 5, 6 and 7 regardless of whether that behaviour is of a contractual, commercial or technical nature, or of any other nature, or consists in the use of behavioural techniques or interface design.
> 6. The gatekeeper shall not degrade the conditions or quality of any of the core platform services provided to business users or end users who avail themselves of the rights or choices laid down in Articles 5, 6 and 7, or make the exercise of those rights or choices unduly difficult, including by offering choices to the end-user in a non-neutral manner, or by subverting end users’ or business users' autonomy, decision-making, or free choice via the structure, design, function or manner of operation of a user interface or a part thereof.
> 7. Where the gatekeeper circumvents or attempts to circumvent any of the obligations in Article 5, 6, or 7 in a manner described in paragraphs 4, 5 and 6 of this Article, the Commission may open proceedings pursuant to Article 20 and adopt an implementing act referred to in Article 8(2) in order to specify the measures that the gatekeeper is to implement.
I don't believe that the DMA has (or even could have, given ratified international treaties) anything that nullifies intellectual property rights.
The gatekeepers are required to provide "fair" access, but that doesn't mean everything has to be free of charge.
As an example, I would fully expect that iOS devices will continue to require digital signatures to execute, regardless of installation method. And those digital signatures will only be available to those who pay for the $99/yr developer program and comply with those regulations.
Feel free to bookmark my post and come back to make fun of me if I’m wrong.
I don’t think that there is any “merely” anything. I think it’s a complicated process with tons of patents that you get a license to use when you pay for a developer membership.
Do you believe homebrew software for game consoles is illegal? Do you hold that same opinion for apps offered for jailbroken iDevices?
Patents cover specific implementations. A lightbulb is patented. A specific machine that is connected to one cannot infringe on the patent for the lughtbulb itself, since it doesn't implement its inner mechanisms.
If anyone from Apple marketing/leadership is out there... as a tech savvy but plain jane iPhone user - I really do just want a bubble wrapped, walled garden iPhone experience where everything just works and I don't have to read every scary sounding "iPhone has been hacked" click bait article in breathless suspense only to read the fine print to find the end user in question was dabbling in some sketchy third party app.
(As an example - the top HN article at this moment is about iPhone being hacked).
I really think that Apple could have/could still head this off by introducing a separately branded edgier "dev" phone for people who want to live on the cutting edge. Give it a different persona (gamer hardware form factor and use distinctive UX elements) to ensure that when the journalist tries to create masthead graphics for their clickbait article, its obvious it only applies to non-walled garden phones.
Then let the market decide - maybe in fact the majority of Apple smartphone users do in fact want live life on the edge.
Tbh I feel like the market already has, otherwise the people who buy iPhones would have bought Androids instead. Only here in HN and other Apple enthusiast comments sections will you see ideas suggesting otherwise, but I’m convinced that they are a very small and inconsequential minority of hobbyists.
Anyway, I still think that Apple can benefit from this. An alternate app store paves the way for app developers to build and enforce their own walled gardens which would result in poor user experiences, so if Apple made more of the apps that third-party developers would otherwise do and such apps work seamlessly with each other and the OS, then people will have an incentive to buy into Apple’s own services ecosystem instead of that of some other third-party developer that does not have total control of the OS.
> otherwise the people who buy iPhones would have bought Androids instead
The problem with this sort of reasoning is that the ability to sideload is only one dimension that someone might use to decide which phone to buy.
Maybe someone values something else the iPhone offers slightly higher. But they're still not happy they have to make that trade off. And there's no technical reason why this trade off needs to be made, and no reason we (as a society) need to allow a company (a construct that we as a society allow to exist) to restrict our choices.
On the other side of the argument, I use Android specifically because I have more control over what I run on the device. But I am constantly uncomfortable that my choice reduces my privacy and security. Why should I have to choose between these two things? Again, there's no reason beyond a company's profit motive. And I don't think we (as a society) should put company profit motives above our own needs.
Frankly it does not matter if you are correct that no one cares about this stuff outside of hobbyists.
If you’re voting with your money to make the trade offs that come with an iPhone, then what you traded off wasn’t something that you badly wanted anyway and it was an opportunity cost that you were willing to incur. Literally free market economics already at work there, so frankly I don’t see why your point matters either.
Agree - the time to have launched a "dev/gamer" phone (maybe call it the xPhone with xOs) was probably 2 years ago when they first got a whiff of these regulations.
They could then have done a more controlled experiment on a subset of willing participants and had a much smaller blast radius if things got really hacked.
If anyone from Apple marketing/leadership is out there... as a tech savvy but plain jane iPhone user - I really do just want a bubble wrapped, walled garden iPhone experience where everything just works and I don't have to read every scary sounding "iPhone has been hacked" click bait article in breathless suspense only to read the fine print to find the end user in question was dabbling in some sketchy third party app.
I feel the same. However, Apple has been playing with fire with their 30% cut and people have been warning for years that this would be a likely outcome in non-US regions. Now the outcome is worse for both Apple and users who prefer the security of the iOS ecosystem.
I really think that Apple could have/could still head this off by introducing a separately branded edgier "dev" phone for people who want to live on the cutting edge.
That ship has sailed. The new EU regulations require that both phones have side loading.
You're not paying the 30%; the vendor is paying 15-30%. Prices wouldn't drop by 30% if Apple removed the requirement, and I'd suggest that it's extremely naive to argue otherwise.
I think it's more complicated than that. Yes, sellers price at whatever they believe the market can bear. But certainly some do push (past?) that envelope because of that 30%. Without as much pressure on their final take, at least some sellers wouldn't feel pressured to price quite so high. Some may have to pad their pricing (and accept the fact of fewer buyers) simply because they can't make their business work otherwise.
Also consider, though, that we have nothing to compare to. Since app developers can't sell outside the App Store, we have no way of knowing what they'd do if they weren't subject to that 30% cut.
But for that comparison: consider food delivery apps. Restaurants have to pay similar portions of their take to the food delivery services. And many restaurants do inflate their menu prices on the food delivery apps. So clearly there's some elasticity in "what the market will bear", since they charge different prices for in-person or to-go dining vs. food bought through a third-party delivery service. There's no reason why this should be any different for apps sold on the App Store.
But... I just want a "plain jane" iPhone that won't stand out, but does what I want it to do.
Apple could just introduce an extra setting to unlock the phone for developer mode, the same way Sailfish does. Then there's an option to install a terminal with easy SSH access, and away we go!
No need to spend time on new non-Appley designs. This fits right into their existing environment, and probably already exists in some form.
I think the primary difference between why a dev mode switch would work for Sailfish but less so for Apple iOS is the size of the install base.
It's so large that any tech article with "iPhone"+"hack"+images of "this iPhone is the ver same iPhone as the one in your pocket" is going straight to the top in terms of tech news click cycle.
The fact that the "iPhone hack" only applies to users who have enabled "dev mode" will be buried at the bottom in the fine print.
Presenting different graphics/hardware form factor and branding would ideally prevent the majority of honest tech sites from using the images of the standard iPhone and they would have to use headlines like "xPhone has been hacked" or leave it at "An Apple smartphone has been hacked" which would cue me that I could safely ignore it.
I think that's a fair reason for why Apple doesn't want to do this.
But I don't particularly care. If there are negative consequences to actually allowing people to own the things they buy, then that should just be the price of doing business.
Part of the reason I am still on Android is because I can install and uninstall whatever I want, including stuff like Revanced.
I still love to have the battery and the "it just work" reliability from Apple though. Let see how this play out in the US. If Apple doesn't hobble it too much I might get an iPhone for my next phone.
Guaranteed it will have some catches though. I also wonder how much it would affect the security side since Apple devices have been pretty secure so far with its walled garden approach.
I'd love to read a study if the walled garden actually produces more secure software. I've heard this claim a lot but I also see lots of 0-day vulnerabilities for iPhones. There's a patch for an in-the-wild 0-day literally today.
Modded clients are notorious for stealing people's accounts. While Revanced is safe if you patch the official apk yourself, normal people will fall for trojans that inject malware into it.
You have been able to sideload apps if you really want to for several years on a non jailbroken iphone with something like sideloadly. You need to connect it to a computer once a week to refresh and it's limited to 3 apps for a non dev account.
Will this have any effect on the App Store's ban on apps that have their own built-in app stores? I'm thinking of browsers that are compatible with the Chrome webstore, for example, which exist on Android but not on iOS.
That's a different problem. Apple forbids developers from shipping their own browser engine. Since devs can only use the Safari engine, they are limited to what Safari can do, and Safari doesn't support web extensions.
But, since App Store can't stop new browsers with their own engines, also yes.
It's more likely that the authority will establish their own App Store, and everyone will be required to install national security-related apps from it.
That might take a little longer, it seems. From the linked source on europa.eu;
> Second, the Commission opened a qualitative market investigation pursuant to article 3(8) DMA into iPadOS to determine whether iPadOS, despite not meeting the quantitative thresholds, constitutes a gateway for business users to reach end users.
It seems like their rebranding a few years ago might really pay off.
All I see about the DMA is how it will require Apple to allow sideloading apps on iOS. But the language of the act seemed to suggest to me that it would require Apple to allow users to install other operating systems on their hardware as well. Has there been any analysis of this, did I just totally misunderstand?
Why would/does this only apply to iOS 17? I thought earlier versions of iOS like 15 are still supported, getting security updates, and have access to the apple app store.
> Why would you run something else than the latest iOS?
One good reason is that Apple doesn’t support the latest iOS on perfectly good hardware. Other ones could be that the older version takes up less space or that the new version is less useful for some users.
Also, FTA (emphasis added): “Apple has six months to implement sideloading in iOS 17 and potentially older iOS versions”
iPhone 7, that's as far as it'll update. I understand the difficulty in porting things and adding features, but I don't think there's an exemption in the law for when complying is too difficult yet still possible.
Main thing that got me wondering about this was "app store" being listed seperately from iOS in the EU supplied image.
This is a win for openness (good!), but I am worried about the downsides. I worry many less tech-savvy users will end up with a lot of garbage (spyware, scuzzware, whatever) on their phones.
Not that this problem doesn't exist via Apple's own store, but I worry it will be worse. Time will tell.
I think it'll be a big thing in tech circles, but I don't think the average user is going to install a third-party app store. It's also a lot of friction to convince people they should care and guide them through the process, meanwhile you can bet Apple and Google will have campaigns against it.
Of course, people will make alternate scammmy app stores to prey on less savvy users, but someone could also make one with more moderation than Apple and force them to get better.
I think the biggest change will be for developers to use their own payment system and keep more of the money, but there'll also be more risk of bad implementations leading to stolen card data.
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I have no idea how my mom gets her computer spyware-infected throughout between my visits, impossible for me to prevent that. Best idea so far has been to get her an iPhone and an iPad.
Don't worry Apple will surely be as pity as plausible when side loading anything just like they are with every pro-user.
You want to install this app? Ok, first we will send you a verification email to make sure it's you, but before we do that you will have to wait a cool down period to make sure you want this app.
I don't doubt that Apple sells a lot of iPhones to rich western European countries. But, uh, I gotta call the quality of data from that website into question when it shows North Korea as having 99% iPhone share ;)
It sort of makes sense. They're getting market share by using geo-ip and browser agent strings.
Either a bunch of hackers in NK are pretending to be iPhones, or some small lab of iPhones was marked as NK in the geo-ip database. But since the numbers are probably tiny 99% probably isn't too hard to achieve.
That decision would be an insanely huge monetary blow to Apple that is absolutely not in line with the few percent drop they might get from a slightly fewer installs on the AppStore. Even if the EU law is instantly reversed, that would still make a lot of people angry at Apple, or they might have already bought Android and won’t turn back for years.