Earlier quoted context omitted.
Privacy by design isn‘t enormous effort, as every European engineering manager will tell you. It‘s just another reasonable and straightforward set of requirements. Of course, if you want to have privacy-less features in jurisdictions permitting it, that‘s a different story and that‘s a choice.
DMA is about competition not privacy. Apple has privacy concerns with complying related to 3rd party access to customer data. Another aspect here is that even if Apple tries theirto best to comply, the EU could decide they didn’t do a good enough job and fine them 10% of global revenue. Honestly Apple just might not want to take that risk.
DMA is reasonable. It‘s not their job to be concerned so much as to block that access completely. Alternative approaches do exist. For example, they may require independent audit of submitted apps if they do not trust regulators and collect small fees to cover operational costs of dealing with audit ecosystem.