This is egregious and deeply disturbing behavior from Apple. At this point it feels wrong to own an iPhone. I'm at a loss for words describing what Tim and their leadership team has done to this company that I used to admire so much.
I used to think these were my devices, but Apple has been making it crystal clear lately that they consider them to be their devices.
"We own the customer" is the new mantra of Apple.
Maybe it was always that way, with the iPod and iTunes, etc.
Thankfully I've never felt that way when using a Mac.
This is a great point. The thing that sucks is the market is down to two main phone companies - Apple and Samsung. Unless you're on a carrier where some of the import phones like Xiomi or ZTE work, we're all stuck between two companies who increasingly are abusing their positions in the market because they can.
Apple seems not to care any more about customer sentiment and does things more so for the bottom line than anything else right now. I guess that's what we should've expected when the guy who ran the supply side of the company with an iron fist gets promoted to CEO.
I switched last year to a slightly older Android phone running Graphene OS and have been using that but have realized there are drawbacks to doing that.
Depending on what carrier you have, you can also check out some of the other Chinese imports that are competing well with Samsung and Apple. A lot of people I know are just using a personal cloud storage with their phones and just offloading their stuff there which is pretty easy to set up. Hell, even Microsoft OneDrive is easy to set up syncing with. iCloud is just one solution for backup and storage these days.
Imagine if you couldn't run software of your choosing on Windows either. And the only way to publish an app on Windows was to agree to give Microsoft 30% of everything. That's the exact behavior your enabling by using Apple products.
The people who are really affected by these policies are the normal people who don’t own computers. For many people their phone is their one and only computing device.
Especially for kids, if I had grown up with only an iPhone I doubt I would have become a programmer.
Once they started with the App Store revenue and especially taking a cut on all transactions, they were locked in. It's a public company so number must always go up. If number doesn't go up, executives are gone and replaced with people who will make number go up. That means it's impossible for them to back out of the App Store revenue channel. They'll have to be forced out by government action, in which case they can write it off as unavoidable and appease the shareholders and maybe not be replaced.
The basic principle here is that when a company takes on a revenue stream, it becomes addicted to it and it's incredibly difficult to give that revenue stream up even if it's destructive to other aspects of the company or brand. This is very closely related to the innovators' dilemma. In fact that might be seen a special case of the same failure mode.
If Apple ever goes really into advertising, that'll really be the end of them as a good brand. Advertising revenue destroys everything it touches. It's possible that they could recover from this debacle but a pivot into ads is the end.
So where do they go from here?
They should do more acquisitions. Buy Anthropic for starters. Absolute no brainer. Make Claude the new Siri and roll out powerful on-device models too.
All of the privacy and app tracking restrictions conveniently relate to them having all of the tracking data and third parties not having it. Your data is "private", to everyone except Apple.
This is the reason Apple is violently opposing any software coming from sources they don't control.
The way the DMA was written is a convoluted joke. It could have been a lot simpler: hardware device makers shouldn't be able to block third party software. A more extreme case could prevent companies over a certain size from manufacturing hardware and the operating system.
Making a law is inherently a messy job, if you think you can replace a 100 page document with 100 words, there's a good chance you are overlooking a lot of complexity.
Governments have the same problem. Once you start taxing, it becomes hard to give up the revenue stream.
In 2023, they processed $89.3bn in IAP, a 2.8% increase from 2022. Their top-grossing app was TikTok with $1.9bn in IAP. At a 30% split that's $520m to Apple. And that's just from one app that doesn't really push IAP as egregiously as games like Fortnite.
I think Apple is trying to ensure a new product cough Apple Vision Pro cough to offset losses from the alternative app stores.
They know the EU won't ever allow them to do what they're currently doing to "comply" with the DMA. But all they have to do is stonewall long enough to Vision Pro or some new service/product/etc to replace the revenue lost from the DMA.
A company failing to meet revenue goals due to governmental compliance? No investor wants to take that sort of gamble, their stock would take a massive hit.