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EU sends Apple first DMA interoperability instructions for apps and devices

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Re: EU sends Apple first DMA interoperability instructions for apps and devices

#111

Post by rickdeckard »

tpmoney wrote: post #102
rickdeckard wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Open protocols are great but they are also absolutely a hindrance on change. If you’ve ever worked on a public API you know how painful making a breaking change to that API can be. I worked on public API's. If there's a justified need for a breaking change, make a new API and deprecate the old one. It can of course be harder than this, but its complication mainly comes from proper PLANNING of the action and AWARENE…

Agreed it is an OS. How many years will it be before audio on the Linux OS doesn’t suck? It’s way better than it used to be, but I still spent weeks this year trying to sort out what magic combination of alsa, and pipewire and pulse-audio and wireplumber setting, configs and launch timings would get HDMI audio to not come up muted on a mini PC with integrated Radeon graphics in Ubuntu. Surely the openness of the x86…

> How many years will it be before audio on the Linux OS doesn’t suck?

to be blunt, it doesn't seem to suck whenever someone designs a consumer product around it. I have DVD-Players, BluRay Players, Network Radios, all based on Linux OS, and I never have to hassle with alsa and pulse-audio. In fact I never interact with the underlying Linux, just like accessory vendors don't use linux APIs to communicate with iOS.

> If we imagine a world where os init was regulated by the EU

We don't need to imagine anything like this, the EU is not regulating any OS. The EU identified that Apple is a gatekeeper to a market and simultaneously a player there, controlling the market in its favor.

To ensure fair competition, Apple is required to ensure that it's a fair market for all players.

As stated elsewhere, Apple is still enjoying a significant advantage, because they could still develop i.e. a Airpods feature which relies on a newly developed iOS-feature, launch both simultaneously and be the only one on the market using it.

The only major impact is that they are not allowed to restrict competitors from ever catching up with them.

Re: EU sends Apple first DMA interoperability instructions for apps and devices

#112

Post by rickdeckard »

zoobab wrote: post #31

DMA does not provide any means to run Linux on Apple devices. I don't want their shitty OS, but I like their hardware. Unfortunately, the law makers prefer to cement oligopolies (Android-iPhone), instead of installing fines for not documentating how their hardware works.

It is not the scope of DMA to identify and regulate an OS, or demand a hardware-vendor to open and document his OS at his own expense.

They identified something more abstract and much less arguable:

They identified that Apple has created a closed market of significant size, made themselves the gatekeeper and invited companies to compete there.

But ON TOP Apple decided to enter the market also as a player, and skew the playing field in their favor.

So it's an unjust market where forces are unable to flow freely, and the EU is attempting to rectify that.

Re: EU sends Apple first DMA interoperability instructions for apps and devices

#113

Post by makeitdouble »

tpmoney wrote: post #93
rickdeckard wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing restricts Apple from continuing to be this unified in their ecosystem. What the EU DMA tries to break, is Apple's "weaponization" of iOS to gain an unfair advantage in sales of accessories. So if Apple (the product-company) requires changes in iOS to realize a new feature in an accessory product, the changes in iOS will have to be opened to accessory-competitors as well. They would still be first-to-market wi…

Open protocols are great but they are also absolutely a hindrance on change. If you’ve ever worked on a public API you know how painful making a breaking change to that API can be. Inevitably something you want to change becomes some one else’s “hold space bar to heat room” feature. And sure you can have “private” Or reserved spaces in APIs, but that can often lead to messes like needed 5 different vendor specific CS…

If your question is whether it will be more work for Apple, the answer is yes, to some point.

If you're also wondering whether Apple being mildly inconvenienced matters for the EU court or most users in general: honestly no.

They're at fault in the first place, and if for a new feature that took 2 years to build, users have to wait some extra months because of that decision, so be it IMHO. That has always been happening with the US only launch features, and nobody's been crying a river.

Re: EU sends Apple first DMA interoperability instructions for apps and devices

#114

Post by troupo »

xvokcarts wrote: post #100
FeepingCreature wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe, but when regulation made by activists starts touching the lives of people that don't care about the thing activists want, they may not like the idea of activists deciding for them. That's not just any regulation, that's any act of government. > we don't know how most people will react if suddenly something they want is not available to them because of a minority that think their expertise is above their want…

> My best guess, tbh, is apathy. That's rather why they're not activists in the first place. Exactly. A few people want interoperability and everyone accepts it because they don't care since it doesn't affect their lives. I'm not a policy expert, but this seems a bit like riding the high horse. The answer to "what's best for others" should not be "that which we want for ourselves" regardless of expertise. We're not t…

> The answer to "what's best for others" should not be "that which we want for ourselves" regardless of expertise.

Do unto others what you would do unto yourself and all that.

On top of that, a lot of people want interoperability, they just don't know how to express it in terms that the regular highly technical divorced from reality crowd on HN understands.

An anecdote: My mom has used Apple's Books it since it first came out. Apple keeps redesigning the app, and making it worse and more cumbersome to use. Even if there is an app that better suits my mom, I can't recommend it to her because Apple in its infinite wisdom does not let you change the default epub reader on iOS/iPadOS.

And it's just on anecdote out of hundreds. There won't be a single person who wants all of the interoperability. There will be multiple people with multiple different requirements for interoperability. From epub readers to navigation apps to Pebble watches (https://ericmigi.com/blog/apple-restricts-pebble-from-being-...).

Too bad they can't express their wishes in terms of "we want interoperability", and instead express them in terms of "why the hell Apple redesigned Books again" and "why can't Pebble show notifications". Then their wishes don't count, apparently.

> We're not talking about regulation improving human lives in general. We're talking about regulation that will stick it to foreign companies we think are too big

How did "Let's make platforms more open to increase competition and the umber of things people can do on those platforms" become "it's bad, and only exists to stick it to big US companies" is beyond my understanding (and defies all logic, if we're honest).

Sure, let's just have supranational companies create walled gardens with arbitrary rules. Nothing bad has ever come out of that.

Re: EU sends Apple first DMA interoperability instructions for apps and devices

#116

Post by burnerthrow008 »

roblabla wrote: post #90
JKCalhoun wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I play an Apple apologist online (sometimes). Most here would agree that a public API is a liability regardless. Anything you can keep private (SPI) you should. Opening up an API that has all manner of hooks into your Apple device is going to be (obviously, I think) one of the most challenging of API to expose. While a 3rd party watch might needs these API, a whole lot of n'r-do-wells (looking at you, Meta) will like…

Apple has many, many tools to prevent this from being a problem. To name a few: - They can lock the API behind entitlements that must be manually requested and reviewed by Apple - They can lock the API behind a user approval - They can regularly prompt the user if they still wish to share notification data with the watch (same way they do to keep giving an app localisation data) - They could enforce that the notifica…

> - They can lock the API behind entitlements that must be manually requested and reviewed by Apple > - They can lock the API behind a user approval

Not if the EU has anything to say about it. Apple is already in trouble for requiring prompts for 3rd party vendors, and you know that already.

Same for entitlements.

Re: EU sends Apple first DMA interoperability instructions for apps and devices

#117

Post by rightbyte »

rickdeckard wrote: post #88
milesrout wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They famously did basically nothing to Microsoft and Microsoft continued to maintain a near monopoly for many years and do all the same things it had always done to keep its monopoly.

Some people apparently don't remember Windows 98 and how Microsoft tried to demonstrate that Internet Explorer is suddenly such an integral part of the OS that it's technically impossible to separate it. It didn't work, they were forced to decouple it again (which was susprisingly simple), and despite the somewhat weak result for Win98 I think we can be thankful for that. I don't want to imagine how Windows 2000 woul…

> Some people apparently don't remember Windows 98 and how Microsoft tried to demonstrate that Internet Explorer is suddenly such an integral part of the OS that it's technically impossible to separate it.

Heh ye. That was obvious BS. Wasn't there like, sometimes, it looked like IE was running as a widget inside an window? Like search or something?

Re: EU sends Apple first DMA interoperability instructions for apps and devices

#118

Post by burnerthrow008 »

piva00 wrote: post #18
twoodfin wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Apple has the choice to give up developing products in a controlled, vertically integrated manner OR losing a substantial fraction of EU device and accessory sales, I don’t think that’s a hard one for them. We already see it in another regulatory regime, with AI features coming much later to the EU, if at all.

Losing 20% of global revenue is not really an option.

Losing 20% of global revenue while also losing 20% of global COGS is a much better option than losing 10% of revenue and incurring an extra 10% of R&D.

Re: EU sends Apple first DMA interoperability instructions for apps and devices

#119

Post by rickdeckard »

rightbyte wrote: post #117
rickdeckard wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people apparently don't remember Windows 98 and how Microsoft tried to demonstrate that Internet Explorer is suddenly such an integral part of the OS that it's technically impossible to separate it. It didn't work, they were forced to decouple it again (which was susprisingly simple), and despite the somewhat weak result for Win98 I think we can be thankful for that. I don't want to imagine how Windows 2000 woul…

> Some people apparently don't remember Windows 98 and how Microsoft tried to demonstrate that Internet Explorer is suddenly such an integral part of the OS that it's technically impossible to separate it. Heh ye. That was obvious BS. Wasn't there like, sometimes, it looked like IE was running as a widget inside an window? Like search or something?

You mean the "Active Desktop" I think, some small widgets on top of the desktop wallpaper which usually showed 404's because you didn't dial up to the Internet yet :)

Re: EU sends Apple first DMA interoperability instructions for apps and devices

#120

Post by tpmoney »

sealeck wrote: post #110
tpmoney wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Open protocols are great but they are also absolutely a hindrance on change. If you’ve ever worked on a public API you know how painful making a breaking change to that API can be. Inevitably something you want to change becomes some one else’s “hold space bar to heat room” feature. And sure you can have “private” Or reserved spaces in APIs, but that can often lead to messes like needed 5 different vendor specific CS…

Apple can change the API interfaces as they see fit, no?

Physically can they? Sure. But there’s costs associated with that too. They’re clearly not hugely concerned with developer relations right now, but an ever changing “public” api certainly can annoy and drive off your developers in a way that a private and non existent api won’t. Likewise there’s an argument to be made that a constantly changing public API is also anti-competitive. If every iOS release winds up with breaking changes that force developers to update their devices and kill off devices that aren’t being updated anymore is that really any better than a private API? We already see a lot of anger over Apple dropping 32 bit libraries or how quickly they drop developer support for older OS versions and “force” developers to keep making updates to stay current on their public APIs.
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