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Comment by jiofj | Hacker News Reader

>For example, now when a consumer sees an app doesn’t do well on their phone, they think immediately it is the app that is not really good. Very often it is not because the challenger app is bad but because the interoperability is missing because it is in the interest of the gatekeeper to make sure the experience is not the same.

This happens... when exactly? Do these people even know what they are talking about?

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"Do these people even know what they are talking about?"

I'd suggest they're better advised than you infer as the EU has enormous resources to access. Just because the EU develops policies that are distasteful to many doesn't mean it's ignorant about the issues (I say that as someone who has gripes with many EU polices).

Anyway, in this instance, I'm very happy with this policy as I'll be able de-crap my phone without having to root it (rooting phones is often a pain).

The difficulty you are experiencing here is that this is so effective people don’t even get started. There used to be non-Apple devices that could sync with iTunes. Apple sued them into the ground.

For example if background tasks get cut off in one android device but not in others.

PS: But I don't see how the DMA covers that specific issue

This also makes no sense because it's not in the interest of the "gatekeeper" to kill background tasks. It's done in the interest of battery life, ie the user.

It's sometimes done to game battery benchmarks, thus benefiting the manufacturer. Not sure how much of a thing it is these days, but there was a time when many Android OEMs shipped the phones in a basically broken state in a bid to do well in battery benchmarks; in particular, push notifications often wouldn't work reliably or at all in default configuration.

But yeah, I don't think the DMA's particularly relevant here.

I have experience with GPS related APIs in iOS. It’s a fucking nightmare to calibrate sensitivity and background activity. They keep changing parameters without warning or documentation. They aggressively suspend applications and services, even those categorised as navigation apps, unless a very particular set of criteria are met. Achieving background navigation was basically black magic. Every time we got it working, something would break.

Apple exempts themselves from all of these requirements for their own applications. They have access to the full specs, and have lots of advanced warning when change is on the road map.

> Do these people even know what they are talking about?

Yes, this is actually a good summary, as good as a layman can be expected to produce. Just because they don't use the right jargon doesn't mean they are stupid.

We have thousands of examples of big tech firms breaking interoperability on purpose, and it is in their interest to do so.

Weather apps are one example that comes to mind ..

Perhaps you haven't observed it because, well, it kills the app.

The classic, most malicious, version: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code

> Microsoft Senior Vice President Brad Silverberg later sent another memo, stating: "What the [user] is supposed to do is feel uncomfortable, and when he has bugs, suspect that the problem is DR-DOS and then go out to buy MS-DOS."

That's obviously a very extreme example (involving deliberately actively sabotaging interoperability), but private APIs, used to privilege first party software over third party software, are and were common.

What you've quoted is an explainer aimed at non-programmers, but I'm pretty sure they're talking about private APIs.

iOS has private APIs that only Apple apps can use, some of those can give Apple-developed apps an upper hand over competitors.

It’s not a perfect rule, but a lot of private APIs on iOS are private only as long as it takes Apple to nail down their design, with internal usage serving as dogfooding. That way they don’t end up with scores of third parties dependent on what are basically alpha/beta API designs which frees them to radically change designs until they’re satisfied.

In that circumstance I don’t think there’s anything with APIs being private since it’s only temporary.

Sounds like a dig at iMessage

That would be funny because other apps such as whatsapp or telegram work better than imessage.

Only because you live in Europe, where iMessage is useless because everyone picked Whatsapp and Telegram first. In the US it's the opposite: everyone picked iMessage[0]. The irony of this is that iMessage might actually be helped in the EU by the EU trying to break Apple's US monopoly on iPhones.

[0] I suspect the reason for this is because free texting was the norm in the US while EU carriers charged per message. While iMessage was free in both cases, it relies on you knowing that green bubbles are green because they cost money, whereas "just install Whatsapp and its free" is easier to know.

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