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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

#131

Post by kennysoona »

dividedbyzero wrote: post #38
twoodfin wrote: post #2

I expect Apple will react to this by scaling down the sophistication and breadth of features they make available to EU users. That most of these capabilities exist at all reflects Apple’s belief that they’re a way to differentiate their (closed) ecosystem through vertical integration. If the EU takes that away, Apple’s motivation to invest in these areas for EU customers goes away, too.

If they do then they'll just lose market share to Android, because the Asian manufacturers will offer all these features and they're getting more polished each year. For me personally, all Apple really has going for their products these days is being very stable and dependable, I can always just get the newest Pro phone and have something that'll work well for me. They used to be attractive because they weren't Chine…

> all Apple really has going for their products these days is being very stable and dependable,

That's not Apple that's everyone. Computers randomly crashing hasn't been a thing for a long time.

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

#132

Post by kennysoona »

troupo wrote: post #114
xvokcarts wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Apple in its infinite wisdom does not let you change the default epub reader on iOS/iPadOS.

Stuff like that is why I can never use Apple products. It's my device, not theirs; I own it, I'm not renting it. Let me do what I want with it. Or be honest and rent it out to people instead.

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

#133

Post by rstuart4133 »

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?

Bad example. It's a bad example because in order to achieve that Linux has has many, many sound API's over the years. Most of them interacted in bad ways. Often the new boy on the block had emulate all the previous ones to have a hope of being adopted. If a great, reliable sound system depended on the ability to iterate on API's Linux's should have been stellar in very short order.

That said, Linux's sound is very good now. Echoing other responses here, it's now much better than MacOS. Given your your "easy and painless" comment about it, I'm wondering it you've used a modern mac. "You can't hear me? Wait, while I turn sound off and or, restart the app, restart the laptop" is a very familiar ritual now work forces me to use a mac.

As for standard's causing ossification - you're wrong on that too. What causes ossification is a wide deployment. Once it's out there you can't change the API without breaking all the deployments. Yes, a successful standard means it's been widely deployed, but it doesn't cause it. Apple has so many watches out there it can't make breaking changes to the API it uses to talk to the iPhone. Publishing that API as a standard doesn't change that.

The way you fix API fragility isn't by avoiding standards. A successful API will become a defacto standard - whether you want it to or not. You fix the issue by designing your API's so they can be upgraded. This is why Google's Protocol Buffers allow you to add stuff at the end, and IP has a version field. Without those things API's based on Protocol Buffers would be hard to change, and we could never have had IPv6.

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

#134

Post by tpmoney »

rickdeckard wrote: post #129
tpmoney wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. That market being… software development for their OS? And the features they are regulating being OS features (see “newly developed iOS feature”). So they are trying to regulate the OS then right? Like if Apple r…

The market being the sum of iPhone end-users buying other stuff than iPhones. > The goal isn’t that Apple competes “fairly” on any arbitrary platform, it’s specifically that Apple competes “fairly” on the platform that Apple puts their best features on. It's about putting features on the platform which are beneficial only to other products of Apple. The goal is that if Apple offers products on the market it is gateke…

> The market being the sum of iPhone end-users buying other stuff than iPhones.

Which seems a little ridiculously narrow doesn’t it? Why does any hardware vendor have an obligation to open all of their APIs and functionality to all comers just because they open some of them? Why is selling a highly sandboxed product not a valid thing to do? And especially why is that not valid when there is an entire other half+ of the market that is completely open and exactly the sort of free for all people are apparently looking for?

Ultimately it always comes down to this. Apple is one vendor, selling one piece of hardware that runs one OS. You can not buy or run iOS on anything other than Apple supplied phones. You can not run anything on an iPhone except an Apple supplied OS. Apple does not force carriers or retailers to exclusively carry Apple phones. They don’t require hardware manufacturers to buy iOS licenses even when they sell a phone without iOS. They don’t require 3rd party iOS developers to sign exclusivity contracts when developing for iOS. They don’t fine developers for making better versions of their software for other platforms. They don’t do those things for accessory manufacturers either. Apple sells Apple phones that run Apple software in a way that Apple feels is best for that phone. Why is this a problem? Yes I understand that iPhone users who want a pebble smart watch are given a worse experience. But they don’t have to use an iPhone. Nothing at all stops them from buying any of the hundreds of Android phones on the market and having the ultimate pebble smart watch experience. This whole thing feels like the equivalent of demanding the government force GM to support CarPlay. GM has decided they don’t want to do that. They think they can sell a better product without it. That might suck for people who want a Chevy and also want to use CarPlay, but is that really unfair competition and worthy of government regulation to force GM to open up their in-car entertainment systems?

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

#135

Post by milesrout »

ForTheKidz wrote: post #65
milesrout wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No emoji is a reason HN is still good. Among many. Your comment IMO has little value to a reader. You forcefully state your opinions but give me no reason why I should adopt them or any basis on which I could challenge them. I am more interested in why you think what you do than in what you actually think. Why is that the only feature worth paying for? How are watches an "extension of this behaviour"? Why should ever…

Sure, but most comments on the internet (very much including this forum) offer zero or negative "value" to the reader. What we're doing now is typically called "socializing and discussing topics of the day", which is typically a non-transactional sort of relationship. Notably absent from this is any obligation to persuade you of anything. I won't waste my time; I know this forum and the kind of discourse people want…

>What I say on this forum is self-actualization and deep therapy saying all the stuff I can't say to my coworkers' faces when they wag their jaws.

This is not what HN is for. We should not use it as a place to vent frustrations.

>This doesn't change anything: apple still operates at deep cost to the public. All that profit could be being put to productive use outside the reach of centralized capital.

That makes no sense. If that profit were put to better use elsewhere it would be. Either Apple itself would invest it elsewhere or people would invest it elsewhere instead of giving money to Apple in exchange for their products.

If you think a business making money "costs the public" that money you fundamentally misunderstand the very most basic principles of economics. It is the equivalent of saying that you think integers in computers are stored in base 3 or confidently proclaiming that "single entry accounting is the standard way to do it" or something. It is so so so wrong.

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

#136

Post by makeitdouble »

mrtksn wrote: post #56

EU is still surprisingly naive and open for business. After TikTok getting banned(postponed for now) in US for national security reasons, and after US cutting military support and intelligence in Ukraine I was expecting for things to start rolling by now. They already start doing things on the military side of things with restricting the military equipment purchases to EU only with exceptions granted on the basis tha…

> If USA decides to side with Russia on the invasion of Europe

USA is still part of the NATO, siding with Russia while it hits any of the NATO member will be a problem beyond shutting down EU telecommunications.

Now if your question is whether the EU can sustain an open war with the US and Russia simultaneously, I honestly don't think so, irrelevant to whether Apple/Google sabotage their EU infra or not.

I naively think it would need to get China on its side, but that sounds like the literal end of the world.

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

#137

Post by ForTheKidz »

milesrout wrote: post #135
ForTheKidz wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but most comments on the internet (very much including this forum) offer zero or negative "value" to the reader. What we're doing now is typically called "socializing and discussing topics of the day", which is typically a non-transactional sort of relationship. Notably absent from this is any obligation to persuade you of anything. I won't waste my time; I know this forum and the kind of discourse people want…

>What I say on this forum is self-actualization and deep therapy saying all the stuff I can't say to my coworkers' faces when they wag their jaws. This is not what HN is for. We should not use it as a place to vent frustrations. >This doesn't change anything: apple still operates at deep cost to the public. All that profit could be being put to productive use outside the reach of centralized capital. That makes no se…

> If that profit were put to better use elsewhere it would be.

how economists managed to fuse math with mysticism I have no clue. This certainly never came from adam smith.

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

#138

Post by tpmoney »

rstuart4133 wrote: post #133
tpmoney wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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? Bad example. It's a bad example because in order to achieve that Linux has has many, many sound API's over the years. Most of them interacted in bad ways. Often the new boy on the block had emulate all the previous ones to have a hope of being adopted. If a great, reliable sound system depended on the ability to iterate on API's Linux's should hav…

> Often the new boy on the block had emulate all the previous ones to have a hope of being adopted. > ... > Once it's out there you can't change the API without breaking all the deployments. Yes, a successful standard means it's been widely deployed, but it doesn't cause it.

Yes, that was the point. A public API in use by its very nature will have negative impacts on future development of that API. Or as I put it in the original comment: "Open protocols are great but they are also absolutely a hinderance on change"

> Apple has so many watches out there it can't make breaking changes to the API it uses to talk to the iPhone. Publishing that API as a standard doesn't change that.

They can, all they have to do is push out an update for those watches. That's the point. Because that API is private an exclusively used by Apple and Apple's software, they can replace it as many times as they want provided they are willing to push the updates. On the other hand, if hundreds of third parties are using that API independently, even if they push an update they still have to contend with a whole ecosystem of products that will or won't update on whatever schedule those developers feel like operating on. Apple already catches a bunch of flak for the speed at which they update and abandon their current public APIs, hardly an incentive to also open up their private APIs.

> Without those things API's based on Protocol Buffers would be hard to change, and we could never have had IPv6.

I'm not sure I'd call the transition to IPv6 an example of a resounding success of fast iteration on a change to a protocol or API. It's only been 30 years and we're still using IPv4 for most things and slapping band-aid upon band-aid on the problems, never mind the list of headache switching to exclusive IPv6 (for example, unless something has changed recently, you still can't use DHCPv6 to manage IPs for android devices)

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

#139

Post by tpmoney »

kennysoona wrote: post #130
tpmoney wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. This sounds very much like an edge case. Why didn't you use Windows or MacOS on the mini PC instead? Was it because you were unable to do so? > Or how about t…

>This sounds very much like an edge case.

https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=linux%20radeon%20audio...

> Why didn't you use Windows or MacOS on the mini PC instead? Was it because you were unable to do so?

Because despite what you might assume from reading what I've written here today, I'm not against or opposed to open source and open protocol stuff. Everything I personally write I release open source. I push my own company to publish as much as we can as open protocols. I've been running some form of linux in one form or another since I first pulled down the MkLinux CDs over a 33.6 modem. I don't hate open systems. But I recognize that open systems have their own disadvantages and that a system being open doesn't inherently mean it's going to be a better experience or solution.

> The EU would only be interested in regulating this if it were an OS init controlled by a monopoly abusing their position.

And so as I've asked before in other places, what monopoly are they regulating here? If the other comments in this discussion are to be believed, iOS represents < 50% of the EU market. Not only that, but iOS represents a single os and a single hardware vendor. The only way to run iOS is to buy Apple hardware, and the only OS you can run on the Apple hardware is iOS. Meanwhile the entire rest of the cellphone market exists, has a fully open OS just like people want, and supposedly has an equal or superior experience to iPhone/iOS. Apple doesn't do anything to prevent retailers from selling non-Apple devices, they don't require app developers to sign exclusivity agreements, they don't require accessory vendors to sign exclusivity agreements. They don't require retailers to buy iOS licenses even for hardware sold without iOS. The only way one can construe Apple to have a monopoly is to say that they have a monopoly on the hardware that they manufacture. Which is a tautology. Sony has a monopoly on their TVs, Bose has a monopoly on their stereos, and Nintendo has a monopoly on their consoles. This is not a useful definition of a "market"

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

#140

Post by milesrout »

ForTheKidz wrote: post #137
milesrout wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What I say on this forum is self-actualization and deep therapy saying all the stuff I can't say to my coworkers' faces when they wag their jaws. This is not what HN is for. We should not use it as a place to vent frustrations. >This doesn't change anything: apple still operates at deep cost to the public. All that profit could be being put to productive use outside the reach of centralized capital. That makes no se…

> If that profit were put to better use elsewhere it would be. how economists managed to fuse math with mysticism I have no clue. This certainly never came from adam smith.

Where does mysticism come into it? It is logical reasoning applied and confirmed by observations.
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