Apple Pushes EU to Repeal Tech Rules Over Feature Delays, App Vulnerabilities

Some of us are able to navigate the minefield through a lot of hard won experience acquired over years if not decades. I lived through the J2ME era with compromised JARs, premium rate scams, carriers monopolizing things, and all the bullshit that came along with it. The App Store, for all its MANY faults basically solved all that for normal people in one fell swoop.

A lot of people aren't going to realize what they might be giving up until it's too late. Apple is at least trying to mitigate this by keeping as much processing as possible on device and trying to secure those devices as best they can. For a lot of people who aren't technically inclined this is a godsend. DMA somewhat counteracts that because it forces Apple to give up some of the control that is keeping these bad actors at bay.

I am super happy with the DMA (and DSA) and have been an Apple user since 2007. Monopolies, duopolies, and oligopolies should be regulated by law. The law is above Apple. Apple should deal with it and stop whining like a spoiled child.

For me the most egregious thing is when China asks to jump, Apple asks how high. When a democracies ask, they fight it tooth and nail and go full malicious compliance.

tl;dr: yes, it's a shame we are missing out on some features, but protecting the rules established by democracies is more important than a bunch of features.

Take for instance iPhone Mirroring; on paper it's not a technology affected by the DMA at all (in fact, I can literally use my Android phone and adb/scrcpy to cast my phone screen and audio to desktop right now, screen casting isn't some super sacred tech), but Apple has claimed it does for the DMA. Their argument for claiming this is pretty floppy (the way I understand this is that Apple wants to use their own proprietary protocol and doesn't want to provide the protocol specs/cross-platform ways to use that protocol, which is what the DMA asks of them since they're that big of a player - Apple publicly says it'd compromise security, but it should be noted that Apple trots out security as the reason for almost every consumer hostile thing they've ever done in recent memory), but making a big show out of how the EU is evil helps them more, rather than the reality just being wilful noncompliance.

Apple has been bad faith on the DMAs contents from day one, and basically all of their complaints come from that bad faith attempt to comply with it. Junk fees like the CTF/CTC, requiring one million dollars in the bank for app stores and still trying to gatekeep non-app store apps, withholding random features because making them compliant takes a bit of effort: they are all examples of Apple thinking that if they're just obstinate enough about non-compliance with the DMA, that the CJEU or the EC will make the law magically go away by giving them an inch. That may work in the US, but so far it's not exactly been doing wonders in the EU, which tends to just get more pissed off.

Currently it's impossible to differentiate real issues of the DMA from Apple being in active resistance.

They themselves are not a trustworthy source on this because it endangers their power and income.

Personally I still support the act and urge the EU to stay it's course. Once Apple returns to sanity and compliance we can talk about reasonable improvements where required. Right now they apparently still think they can bully themselves out of any obligation and this must not succeed.

Users will live without mirroring and AI translation for a little bit.

I bet Jolla and others would gladly take over.

There is almost never consensus on HN. I would be shocked if that ever occurred.

It's often claimed that HN readers believe this or HN readers believe that, but that this to be an exaggeration. The readership has diverse opinions.

The EU fined Meta 200 millions euros for failure to respect the DMA regarding their data collection policy. That's on top of the 1.2 billion euros fine Meta received in May for failure to respect GDPR.

That certainly looks like curbstomping to me.