Between this and the PWA decision, Apple seems to be flailing. What is leadership doing?
"We are a walled garden and will not interoperate or tolerate alternatives" is in Apple's DNA, and no decision maker at any level at the company will risk suggesting otherwise for fear of being branded a traitor, even if it is a very good idea.
We are a walled garden and will not interoperate or tolerate alternatives"
Because Microsoft reneged on a deal. You make Apple sound petulant when they were standing up to a 800lb coercive monopoly.
Naturally there was a lot of backlash, and so Apple reversed their decision and will continue to support PWAs with WebKit in the EU. This suggests that perhaps the European Commission told Apple that it was okay to do this as it does seem to violate the "don't prioritize your own browser" rule, but as of the last I saw on this it was still unclear.
It's a system level feature and uses the system provided web engine.
Microsoft doesn't let you swap out EdgeHTML or Trident for applications that use the native OS web frame.
But apps shouldn't be forced to use that web frame is the issue the commission had and the DMA attempts to resolve.
I remember quite clearly a gecko (firefox) implementation of the trident COM interface
But the system still needed a WebView for when Play Services were not available, so they made a way to toggle between them.
Rubbish. The DMA became law in November 1st 2022. A trillion(!)-dollar corporation had approximately a year and a half to work this out.
Maybe there were behind the scenes concessions made and I'm completely wrong, in which case I owe Apple management an apology. But my impression as an outsider is that there is no real strategy here; executives at the company seem to be throwing their weight around and picking fights at random, getting slapped down, and immediately retreating.
If you are flexing your muscles and end up loosing, you are probably loosing your jobs, because shareholders and everyone else will be angry with you
If you act like a bully, and then recede at the slightest resistance, you just come off looking like a fool.
They need enthusiastic small developers to help build the Vision Pro ecosystem, and so far it doesn't seem to be going that well.
Apple will make the change that they're forced to make. Developers aren't forcing anything at the moment, but what exactly are they being forced to do by the EU? That's what's being learned.
As a long time Apple fan myself I'm certain, Apple fans have never been happy. :)
What is happening seems to benefit mostly massive competitors like Epic or Amazon.
At the end of the day, developers are users first and foremost, and as users they are thrilled with Apple. Things would have to get pretty damn bad before Apple would need to worry about losing developers.
There's an observation that computer programs tend to reflect the organizational structures of the company that developed them. I would go further and argue that company cultures are a reflection of the founders that built them.
In the case of Apple, Steve Jobs was an emotionally manipulative psychopath that was very good at conning people, making anyone he talked to buy into his bullshit. When he didn't get his way, he'd cry like a child and throw tantrums. Everyone at Apple absolutely lionized the shit out of Jobs, even during the interregnum period where the company was being torn apart by idiots. All of the upper management was his own hand-picked successors, who have largely continued doing exactly what Jobs was doing, just with higher scale.
The world largely did not notice this because the actual product (at least, when Jobs was actually in the driver's seat) was good. Part of the capitalist social contract is that we don't care about how the sausage was made so long as we aren't assuming the risk[0]. But this is still very much a religious cult that just so happens to be shaped like a for-profit corporation, run by people who were hand-picked by its dogmatic, emotionally unstable founder[1]. It just so happens to also employ actual geniuses.
In the Apple religion, there are commandments, and one of them is "thou shalt not install unauthorized third party software, for it is the malware of the beast". Like other religions, the commandments are based in some kind of plausible system of rules, we can absolutely Chesterton's Fence them, but that rationale has been forgotten by true believers who take them to axiomatic extremes. Apple is not exactly going to die on this hill[2], but they are going to try to make the system as restrictive as possible within the DMA's constraints, because they've RDF'd[3] themselves into thinking their greed is protecting users.
[0] Also, most of the people Jobs really fucked over were the kinds of people society did not care so much about in the 1980s.
[1] This also applies to the FSF, except it's rules are "thou shalt not bind the user to your tech cult". It's an anti-cult cult.
[2] Though I've had the urge to make fake sales pages for an Apple Nuclear weapons program and photoshop the words "POOR IMPULSE CONTROL" on Tim Apple's head.
[3] Reality Distortion Field, not Resource Description Framework