Apple announces ability to download apps directly from websites in EU

You are not a big fan of the EU after this? They seem to care more about privacy and rights of the people within the majority of the countries that make up the EU then any other outside country that I could name.

Then again, I'm not American so I can easily see the influence your country has on most other countries, so to say the "EU have enormous capacity for overreach at the expense of participating countries and their citizens" is completely ignorant and oblivious.

I'll go further in one regard: the App Store in fact hurts Apple because it has caused a kind of filtering of apps down to those that are the sleaziest.

I used to enjoy exploring the App Store — I resent it now. I'll download half a dozen apps only to delete them within minutes of launching them because of their rent-ware attitude or just plain shitty functionality.

Not to disagree with your main argument - but high end real estate often works that way. The developer is often cut into the topline of the stores.

I’m very curious how you have this position yet have a MacBook. Why not support a better company like framework?

Overall -- a great post.

This part:

   > If commercial real estate charged XX% cuts of all sales from a business

As I understand, for luxury fashion brands, this type of contract is sometimes used.

> If commercial real estate charged XX% cuts of all sales from a business, every business would crumble with enough time

FWIW, at least in the US, this is actually how a lot of commercial/retail real estate works. Every mall or shopping center you visit charges rent based on sales revenue.

> If commercial real estate charged XX% cuts of all sales from a business, every business would crumble with enough time, and only the big hitters would succeed with great resentment towards their gracious corporate overlords.

That's more or less what happens in real life. If you are having any success with your physical business, you can bet your ass that your landlord will increase rents. They keep a keen eye on this. Sometimes they'll even state that it's not more than fair that they should get more in rent, since your business is doing so well.

It is not even a tax on app profits, it's a cut of all sales

Look up 'turnover rent'...

Why are you no big fan of the EU ?

have you considered not buying apple products?

Before this, if you had an alternative marketplace, you had to accept submissions from other developers. You are still allowed to accept submissions from other developers, but are no longer required to.

> All of this just makes it crystal clear what Apple's goal is: to prevent competition.

Web Distribution requires stricter app and developer review than Marketplace distribution.

> it's all about maintaining their app store monopoly.

Does this only makes sense if you assume payments are tied to the App Store? They aren’t.

If you remove payments from your list of motivations, what do you presume Apple’s motivation is to encourage apps to list themselves on the App Store and not a third-party marketplace?

debating about how they run the store is totally valid, but there being only one store absolutely does make iOS safer overall

> How does that count as a "marketplace"?

I'm assuming that Apple is going to profit from that catalogue.

Apple is just trying to protect users from scammers! I'm sure all this sensible authorization and notarization business will continue even after the fees are removed from the equation

The EU has always been enthusiastic about the spirit of the law, and Apple is not used to this. You can see their temper tantrum unfold every time they find this out.

> I am really impressed how much time and effort Apples legal department spends to find every single loop hole in the wording of the DMA.

Maybe this is an American trait, but I would be surprised at any company that wouldn't be doing this. A law has been made that affects our business: How do we comply with the law with as little impact as possible to us?

Some of the comments here seem to expect Apple to simply give up, as though a parent just walked in the room and said "You better do it or else."

If it's really the spirit of the law that counts, then the law should require no specificity. A simple "Treat everyone fairly, installs can come from anywhere" would be sufficient.

There is also an explicit clause about on anti-circumvention in the DMA so they're on thin ice here.

Article 13 is the fun one for Apple: https://www.eu-digital-markets-act.com/Digital_Markets_Act_A...

Theres literally billions of dollars of pure profit on the line here. Id be surprised if they dint do absolutely everything they could to keep the app store the way it is.

Being a complacent market leader may come back to bite them in the backside.

The world is getting more technical. People will demand openness. If I buy a product, I should have reasonable flexibility to use it how I want. Even if I break it, repurpose it or improve it, I want the choice to do so, just like I have with pretty much every other thing I own.

People will vote with their wallets if Apple refuses to open things up a bit.

Complying with what you guess at the lawmakers' intentions was/were is a fool's errand. The law is the text, nothing more, nothing less. That's the point of the law. If the law falls short or has loopholes, it's a bad law and it's the legislature's job to fix it, not citizens' to suss it out.

To assume the law means things that aren't written in the law is, quite basically, undemocratic.

To be fair, this evolved naturally.

The TI calculators were progamable, my brother used those.

Then the pocket pcs (windows ce) had 3rd party programs, those were distributed as files by the publisher. Program stores were webpages were people sold their files. I used the skyscape medical books; you installed the program as usual, then you bought a code specific for your version and file. All that done through a webpage

Then we have android. Google had the Marketplace (now playstore) as we know it today, except packages didnt use google services to validate licenses, Many times it was just a package (a file) The main progress was ease of use.

Then comes iOS and their extreme BS of not being able to "sideload" "apps" The store is no longer a convenience, it is a requirement. For your safety, of course. The main "progress" here is that they convinced many "Americans" that a commodity affordable phone with a painted cartoon of a bitten apple is "Exclusive", as VIP only. I compare it to the NFT phenomena, except the fruit cartoon did stick.

Oh, the tragedy of what could have been: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_OS

> The whole app ecosystem(android and apple) is carefully constructed for maximum market owner value extraction, user value is a secondary consideration.

And it has become the norm because both developers and consumers have readily and happily accepted that deal.

> The web was designed to deliver pages, this was well designed

It was well designed, using Hypermedia. Which works extremely well for hyperlinks and forms. Instead of leveraging and improving these primitives, corporates¹ and web-devs threw it all out and re-invented it. Multiple times².

¹ The worst offenders obviously being those that have held back web-apps just so they can extract more money from native apps. i.e. Apple.

² jQuery, then Angular et. al. Then react. Now WASM. In which we throw all all the REST concepts and push a mongrel data format, JSON, over the web. When we had XML with strong typing, meaning, hypermedia, permissions, etc. We have - by now- reinvented all these on top of JSON, but worse and poorer. And, finally we are full circle back to HTMX. How often will web-devs keep re-inventing wheels? Why can't we see that problems have been solved since early '00s and that improving these is also possible?

There’s literally nothing stopping someone from distributing their app as a web app, and no PWA isn’t necessary for distribution.

> and have an app that had more than one million first annual installs on iOS in the EU in the prior calendar year.

In other words the option is still a joke not worth using. "Yes, you can distribute independently... as long as you've already been popular on the iOS App Store in the past year".

I really hope the EU regulators won't let this slide.

I suppose the next stage of malicious compliance will be to allow absolutely everyone to publish apps everywhere, but with some technical warning that is designed to be ignored.

What a joke. No such restrictions on MacOS or Android. It is completely useless and doesn't solve anything.

If indie developers were to quality, anyone would qualify and security incidents would inevitably increase. That's what Apple is trying to prevent. Keep the attack surface small.

Apple's philosophy is similar to the justice philosophy of nations like Singapore. Freedom in exchange for security. Some people like the trade off and some don't. And if there is anything that we know for sure is that when it comes to tech, freedom is the last of people's priorities.

That's the thing that would prevent me from buying a Vision Pro down the line. It's going to be an iOS-like walled garden experience. If it could run arbitrary macOS apps on device, it would be infinitely more useful (but probably cannibalize the MacBook market and why would Apple ever roll out a new product line that doesn't force developers to pay them 30%?)

I've wanted to be able to do this on video game consoles for ages. I have a powerful computer with a big screen in my living room but I'm locked out of it.

I hope once the EU starts to look at Sony and Nintendo next.

Altserver+Altstore. Altserver will resign your apps, and altstore can background "refresh" your apps so they _shouldn't_ expire on your.

It refreshes when your on the same wifi network as altserver, for me it works most of the time, but sometimes I need to kick altserver to get the phone to see it.

Doesn't fix the issue, and its a limitation that annoys the hell out of me too, but at least helps mitigate it. (Though it doesn't solve the number of self signed app limit)

I'd even be willing to pay the $99 a year, I just want the signature to last longer than a week, ideally forever. For years when I don't feel like updating the app, I won't pay the developer membership fee.

Is a PWA good enough? Depends what you want your app for but most don't need the native-only features limited to native apps

To my users I'm on the app store for ease of installation, that's all. No one knows how to install a PWA.

When I'm building just for me, it's web every time

So they should be forced to develop the SDK and the dev tools for free and provide that support for free? I mean it would be very nice of them to do so, but legally forcing them to do it? I don't know about that. It is a shortsighted "solution".

Sideloadly?

The rules aren't really strict enough it seems. The gatekeeper should not be able to have any control over app distribution at all. Notarization and other forms of code signing must be possible to turn off and should not place the gatekeeper in a privileged position (for example, it should be possible to enroll other certificates).

Wow, I can't believe how blatant their non-compliance is. That'll be some interesting legal advice they have.

> so much of this is focused on the developers, and that is the problem here. How many users actually want this?

How many users actually understand the issues at stake, though? I don't say that to be patronizing but it's a nuanced, thorny problem. I bet if you simply asked "do you think it should be allowed to download porn apps?" a good number of users (if asked anonymously!) would say yes. How many users understand why they can't subscribe to Netflix through the iOS app? How many know what Apple's cut even is? The government has all kinds of regulation in what my utility providers can and can't do, in ways I'm not fully clued into. I see this as similar.

> I have less control over my phone, not more.

> Developers I also hope quickly realize that if they try to push me to subscribe outside of the App Store they will get $0 from me instead of 70%.

To my mind all of this comes back to the free market: you're free to ignore all this stuff and keep getting everything through the App Store. If you and many others do the same thing then the market will prove the idea to be a dud.

I find it interesting that some pro-Wallet garden folks argument is:

"Don't like Apple? Don't buy it then."

Well I can use the same argument for apps.

"Don't like this third party app store or their dark patterns? Don't buy it then."

Vote with your wallet, goes both ways.

Or, hear me out, let's regulate so neither Apple nor other vendors can abuse their customers.

And it's not like Apple's protection is effective. AppStore is full of subscription scams.

I agree. People with some experience in marketing - not the scammy kind, but the stuff where you learn to identify what is valuable to paying customers - can probably see the problem here. Apple has intentionally curated a walled garden, and people like it in there. I run void linux machines at home because I customize everything - but my phone is an iPhone because my previous Androids are a morass of unsynchronized semi-crap apps.

Now the people outside the walled garden want in, and they're tearing down the walls to do it, and they seem to be completely clueless that by doing so they'll destroy the very thing that makes it so desirable.

Apple's app store monopoly deprives users of the freedom to install apps that Apple disapproves of on their own devices. The benefit to users is that you can install apps that violate app store policies such as games about the US Civil War that feature the flag most commonly associated with the losing side of that war[0]. That's one of the more well known examples of Apple practicing censorship of their App Store.

The dark patterns such as making it extremely hard to cancel subscriptions or not reminding users that they're about to charge should be made illegal as deceptive billing practices.

[0]: https://techcrunch.com/2015/06/25/apple-bans-games-and-apps-...

> The walled garden is why I chose an iPhone and continue to stay with the ecosystem.

I only chose an iPhone because I don't really like Android and there is nothing else. Only two different platforms is simply not enough choice, so you have to create choice within those platforms. While you like the walled garden I would like a native Firefox with the Firefox engine and uBlock Origin.

I find the situation is similar to right-to-work laws. If you find the walled-garden/closed-shop beneficial, you will not want it to be forcibly cracked open. Even though an individual can opt to remain with the App Store (or union), the influence of Apple (or the union) has diminished relative to the employer (or Facebook, Epic etc).

In the end, despite all the marketing, neither issue is about user or worker freedom. It's about which entity has more power.

I do often think people forget that when the iPhone app store was released it was a game changer. The whole idea of a single place to download all apps and games was huge for most people including developers. It meant that everything was there, in the one place and managed through that one app.

Now a decade has passed and we're asking for change. That's fine, but we can't forget that when the app store first came out there wasn't this hysteria around the need to sideload. The app store as a place for developers to publish their apps was huge, Apple did the publishing for you. How that we all have more choice, we're expecting Apple to change to provide more choice.

But we can't forget how beneficial the app store and the "walled" approach was.

I do agree with a lot of your points. Now there could be an aspect of predatory behavior by Apple in the way they charge developers etc, but that's where I feel the problem should be tackled.

If the iPhone walled garden app store approach is so bad, then why is it so successful?

> The walled garden is why I chose an iPhone

And that's fine

The feature is not for you

You can keep using your iPhone as you always did, through the Apple app store

But, there's a but: how many users would answer "no" to "would you like to download our app and get a 30% discount for the same exact features"?

> The walled garden is why I chose an iPhone

It's obviously not the case. Not you, not anyone else.

You obviously aren't mad about how unsafe MacOs is because Apple doesn't restrict installation on it. And you shouldn't be mad that the iPhone walled garden is no more, you did not buy it for that reason.

It's somehow concerning that the company has so much grasp on your perception of reality that you are spitting out their propaganda like this.

It's not focused on the developers. As the DMA intends, it is focused on the digital market of mobile apps, which is currently anticompetitive.

I’m bothered too. I’m looking forward to the first viral app distributed in an alternate App Store with a zero day that can infect iPhones that do not have that app or store installed. I bet Apple will be blamed somehow.

There’s a correlated relationship between open platforms and security but people in this thread seem to imply this has zero security implications.

I think most users don't care about the app store and would love a significant discount. Like if you have companies and users the choice people wouldn't willingly pay more for it

See, that's the cool thing about open markets: if companies start losing money because their customers prefer the walled garden, they will go back to it.

You could open your eyes and look at reality and not imagined universe. Facebook apps are still on Android store, Facebook users do not install the application from some shady store. The issue is that Apple is a greedy bitch, they do not allow the developers to put a text on theier app that would inform the USER that they have a CHOICE to purchase a book/DLC/music from a website.

See above I bolded for you that Apple is removing choices from the user.

What happened last week? Could you please provide context?

The one million requirement is where you start paying them the 50cts per install, right?

~20% of Apple's total earnings (not revenue) could come from the App Store: https://deepwatermgmt.com/apples-app-store-is-an-important-p...

When you look at the multiple on services - the App Store could easily be >40% of Apple's total market cap.

They're going to stick their fingers in their ears as long as they can to defend that.

You don't give up the golden goose. You defend it.

In other words, you're only "eligible" for web distribution if you meet the threshold to pay the Core Technology Fee tax? (on top of the other requirements). Sounds convenient.

Charging per install rather than per subscription is hilarious, almost as if all of this is designed to wind up the EU and cause the largest possible fine.

It's sad to see Apple adopting kind of an Oracle way of business. "Kind of"...

They were screwed by Microsoft in the past. And now they're the ones screwing every single small and mid-sized software shop everywhere.

When will we stop buying their products?

That's probably to prevent the most obvious workaround of creating a new shell company for every million users. (Which would be not so ridiculous as it sounds, there is plenty of software you cannot buy directly but only through a reseller. Epic could become a pure b2b shop on paper and sell Fortnite clients to regional distributors, or something like that.)

Some time ago somebody made an alternative App Store for emulators, https://altstore.io . I think it works by having users get a developer's certificate and installing the apps like an in-development app. I think it would be really neat if this model got tested in court and declared completely legal.

Agreed. Apple's stubbornness and clear attempts to retaliate against everyone for these changes are not going to go well for them, and they need to realise that at some point.

It's genuinely shocking how petty the company is acting with these changes, and how obvious their attempts at only doing the bare minimum to follow the law are.

I'm a little bit playing devil's advocate here, but: concerning how?

> you have to have at least one million first installs annually on iOS to even qualify

That's not what the site says at all? "Membership in the Apple Developer Program includes one million first annual installs per year for free for apps distributed from the App Store, alternative marketplaces, and/or Web Distribution." That seems to indicate that there is no minimum, and installs up to 1 million are free. That means that (wild guess) 99.5% of all apps ever released will pay no fee. EDIT TO CORRECT: see below, you have to have an app over 1 million downloads in the previous year to participate, but this description of the fee structure is correct. Which is...weird?

> I doubt Epic and the like would be considered in good standing as far as Apple is concerned.

If Apple plays games like this, they deserve consequences. But does it make sense to take this interpretation rather than just assuming the language means what it means: you haven't been kicked off the platform, and you've been around for two years?

They’re the same terms as those required for an alternative app marketplace.

Unfortunately this is backwards for me. My mac usage is direct download (when possible) for small developers, but get the advantages of the mac app store when using an app written from someone big. So if I were inclined to download something from Epic I'd want to use the app store anyway.

For phones though I don't have the tools I do on the mac (ios is too opaque) so if I couldn't get it from the Apple app store I just wouldn't download the app at all.

These are some cult-like requirements. The term "good standing" comes not from business, it comes directly from the domain of authoritarian-destructive cults.

Apple is going to have a hard explaining if the regulator asks why it costs €0.50 per first annual install when it's free on Android.

Isn't the point of third party stores being able to not interact with Apple gatekeeping whatsoever? What's this €0.50 per install thing?

On my pixel I can download and install any .apk I want. Easy breezy. Isn't this what the EU intended with the recent veredict?

I do own an iPhone, but I do like the idea of Apple filling up the EU economy by paying out the fines that the EU lawmakers serve and will serve onto them.

What does "quote unquote" mean in this context?

Yeah it's not much of an 'announcement' at all. In Holland we call that "making someone happy with a dead sparrow". My cat tries that sometimes:')

> The gears of EU turn slowly, but grind finely.

What would happen if big companies simply refuse to pay? Will EU put the European employees in jail? Would they put Americans in their jail? Will they do DNS block? Credit card block? Remove apple products from physical store? Many of the EU countries like Germany are export driven and certainly they don't want to close the market.

And at some point, the effects may well ripple back to the US as well.

"The gears of EU turn slowly, but grind finely." QFT.

Apple legal's playbook is contempt:

> "So while the U.K. court did not find Samsung guilty of infringement, other courts have recognized that in the course of creating its Galaxy tablet, Samsung willfully copied Apple’s far more popular iPad." - https://filklore.com/wordpress/2012/10/are-apple-in-contempt...

Edit: Removed, I used too harsh language for Apple

Realistically, if Apple is determined to fight this, it may drag on for years.

"Always wait for a point release". It seems for this we need to wait for the _next_ point release. It should become clearer for EU side of the movement also - it is far from certain that Apple to be the one f*cked.

Sounds malicious. I expect their defense to consist of "can't spell 'App' without taking a portion of 'Apple' and therefore ...."

Or maybe that's their hail mary for the next round.

> Though, to be fair, for most indies the App Store with the old rules is probably the best deal available to them.

How do you figure? Given the choice, many indie Mac developers continue to distribute their software outside the Mac App Store.

Tell your mind it's an appliance/console.* Still baffled? Because nobody seems baffled they can't run arbitrary software on their Amazon Echo Show, AppleTV, Xbox, Playstation, or Switch.

* If your mind is struggling with this, you might need a bicycle for the mind to help. ;-) But seriously, Apple's brand and value prop since original Mac has been to toasterize compute and make it friendly approachable and non-fiddly for normals. If you're bent about this, it's a values alignment issue. And Apple should have a right to have a brand proposition that sets them apart from the majority of PDAs, STBs, and PCs.

The inability to run a real web browser (with extensions!) has been holding me back on the switch to iOS for a long time now. Reviewing Apple's behavior in the EU, I'm not really expecting that to change any time soon. Android is annoying in a lot of its own ways, but at the very least I can run whatever software I want on the thing, and that's too valuable to give up.

If you're up for something experimental, then Genode on the PinePhone is coming along pretty well:

https://genodians.org/nfeske/2024-02-15-fosdem-aftermath

Android Firefox lets you have uBlock origin, among other things.

Same here. But, I'd like to wait until iOS 18 so that text messages from various contacts are less painful.

„Real“ Firefox is now possible in EU.

The dichotomy of how real world looks and functions and how it does according to the big corpos is astonishing and terrifying. And this is the yet another example - there's no failure in this rose-tinted corporate world, just a minor difficulty which will be portrayed as a success.

Honestly, I'm surprised Apple didn't come up with the overused standard reply #1: "We are excited to announce (...)", or the standard reply #2: "We've been working hard making XYZ experience better for you (...)"

"We're happy to announce the door lock we built now accepts coins"

> allowed them to split up (Baby Bells)

That's some pretty baldfaced revisionism you've got going on there.

They were ordered to do this by a court: https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=120938923478579...

I dunno. Do you really fault Apple for wanting to hold onto their vice grip of the AppStore that gives them license to print money at ridiculous margins? I mean, their better angels would have them be so confident in the value of their own store that they'd allow other stores to compete on the merits but honestly ... if we were Tim Cook or in charge of Apple I think we'd all fight tooth-and-nail to keep this cash cow.

What regulations are you referring to wrt AT&T? Are you saying that UNIX and C were a result of regulations? If so do you have a source?

I like this story. Nay, I love this story. But it is a just-so story.

None of the regulators had a clue it would go this way, it is a lot of magical historical accidents, and there is no reason to think interference guarantees positive outcomes.

For example, HN seems to bristle at the subject of AI regulation as a game incumbents play that hews towards regulatory capture.

Apple is clearly in the wrong here but how to best untangle things is not trivial.

Splitting up needs to happen for big and monopolistic US companies, no ifs, no buts. That is if they still want to keep a technological edge in the next 10-15 years.

I personally don’t think that the forced split-up will happen, the direct interests involved are too big for that to have any chance of success, but it’s the only way forward for the US as a whole (when it comes to IT).

What technologies are we expecting to be open sourced from those companies?

(We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39679103)

I don't think the smartphone market is that consequential either way. It's a mature and played out end-user product already, not comparable to the early AT&T. If Apple could somehow be forced to properly support third-party app stores then so what. Forcing full PWA support would be much better, but still. I don't think it'd usher in some tech boom or meaningfully help consumers.

Personally, I don't fw apps anyway so whatever. Even if the govt wants to force iPhones to be like shitty Android then that's alright, I'll keep my old iPhone then deal with it when needed.

Ironically AT&T is bigger now than it was when it was broken apart.

Or alternatively, that the manufacturer shall have no special privileges when it comes to software. The OS APIs needs to be public and if Apple can do something, someone else unauthorized should be able to do it also. This would also apply the play store privileges on Android, but that is a much less egregious violation than what Apple does.

No, not “period”. As if Apple wouldn’t attempt loopholes around that rule as well. What defines an “artificial restriction”, or what’s “gateways exclusivity”? Things need to have definitions and laws have contexts. No EU regulator is reading random internet comments and thinking “ah, if only we thought to put in that one random sentence from sword_punisher_69, it would’ve made the law airtight. Those arm chair regulators sure know their stuff”.

People in tech are in dire need of some humility. We don’t know everything, we don’t have all the answers, we can’t just jump into someone else’s job and immediately do it better. Is the law flawless? Probably not. Would all its issues be solved with one sentence? Definitely not.

The EU will still want to protect their capabilities to spy on people's phones, now, or maybe in the future. They will not want to mess with that by giving users too much control over their phone.

Because the EU wanted to be able to target specific companies and not others. The way the DMA is written they can pick and choose to enforce it on whoever they want.

There are also security requirements imposed by regulation. A free for all would not be compliant as far as I understand. Also arguably not in the user’s interest.

When the App store was new, the "free" apps were actually free. Now practically all of the "free" apps featured on the app store are not free at all. Half the time you can't even do anything without paying, but you only find this out after going through the hassle of downloading the app.

A better app store would make pricing actually clear before you download the app, instead of the nightmare that pretend "free" apps have created.

You don't have to fantasize, Android phones have had this possibility since the first version of the OS.

> other gatekeepers

Because they are not "gatekeepers", a term defined by the DMA which focuses on specific sectors.

Also the video game ecosystem is pretty healthy these days, with nearly every major game available on Windows at launch or a few months later. As a matter of market competition, letting you hack your game console or smart TV or whatever just isn't that relevant.

They're not general purpose computers, even if architecturally they could be.

Apple amply touted the iPhone's capacities ("there's an app for that") and smartphones are defacto a core component of our lives. The Switch isn't.

Access to gaming is not critical to participation in a modern economy. Whereas a phone gives you access to banking, government services, medical services, emergency services, education, information, news, wayfinding(GPS), shopping (especially if you live somewhere remote) are just some examples of things people do with their phones. And that's not just some people, like 80-90% of all people.

It's not the same.

That would be cool if they did. And lets extend it to all devices. Once I pay for a device, I should be able to do whatever I want with it.

Because none of those businesses are considered as "gatekeeper" in DMA.

Existing law surrounding anticircumvention already singles out game consoles as deserving special protection. i.e. the Copyright Office made it explicitly legal to circumvent the iPhone's DRM in order to install otherwise legal software, but they refused to extend this to game consoles. While you are technically correct that we should be treating game consoles the same as smartphones, in practice the industry treats game consoles as a locked down box to handcuff users with while smartphones are not.

I suspect if half the console market was unlocked ala the Steam Deck, the EU would be pushing for the other half to also be unlocked, too.

We also have to keep in mind that Epic sued Apple, not Microsoft, Sony, or Nintendo. A lot of monopoly maintenance involves obfuscating the business relationships that make the monopoly work. i.e. Apple doesn't report how much money they make from the App Store[0] because that information would be very useful to regulators looking to undo their monopoly. The discovery on the Apple lawsuit published a lot of this previously hidden information. In other words, the EU had Apple land on their plate ready to cook and serve.

Epic will not sue their console partners. The damage to their business would actually be a lot worse: instead of merely seeing Fortnite taken off the various console stores, the console manufacturers would be sending repo men to take away all the devkits Epic uses to test Unreal Engine, demanding they delete the console ports of the engine, and refusing to cert any new games using Unreal Engine, forcing all their partners to license different technology and rebuild their games from the ground up. It would be immediate and total financial suicide.

In other words, the console manufacturers are "getting away with it" because they had way more control over their niche than Apple did.

[0] Related note: there's an unenforced SEC rule that specifically forbids not reporting this information, to prevent monopolies from obfuscating their profit centers like this.

Because smartphones have become an ubiquitous and essential part of everyday life (communication, information access, and services) for large parts of the population, which is not true for gaming consoles.

Don't divide your firepower between multiple targets at once. Instead, line them up and knock them down.

It seems disingenuous to compare video game consoles with smartphones

these zero days are already the status quo?!

if the eu hits them with enough billion dollar fines eventually they will comply. apple can avoid this by complying the first time, but if they want to give away 10 billion dollars before coming into compliance i'm more than okay with that.

That “complete failure” has already made Apple backtrack on their plans multiple times. It’s absurd, given what has happened in the last few weeks, to think everything is going to stay exactly as is.

Because locking yourself from 1/6th of global economy is a non-starter when chasing returns and stock price, which are also the reasons why Apple is pulling such moves in the first place.

They can, and that is the alternative to complying. Apple wants their €€€ and to eat it too.

As much as I like to joke about Apple starting a nuclear weapons division and tattooing "POOR IMPULSE CONTROL" on Tim Cook's forehead, the reality is that corporations are not actually sovereign nations, they just cosplay as such. Apple's investors will not tolerate Apple abandoning a huge chunk of their iPhone revenue over what is effectively a religious precept.

I guess it is? No one can force Apple to sell iPhones in Europe.

Because Europe constitutes a quarter of Apples revenue, a large part of which is iPhones and related services.

Important limitation if you click through to the "Getting ready for Web Distribution in the EU" page:

> To be eligible for Web Distribution, you must [...] be a member of good standing in the Apple Developer Program for two continuous years or more, and have an app that had more than one million first annual installs on iOS in the EU in the prior calendar year.

Alt stores also require specific insurance, which doesn't seem to be the case here.

"Wait, it's all feudalism?"

"Always has been."

Silicon Valley's original sin is Steve Jobs conning Steve Wozniak and a bunch of tech contractors into building his business empire. Every company in the Bay Area is a politically implausible liason of a very specific kind of Objectivist control freak CEO[0] and the hippie nerds that can actually build what they want to sell.

The hacker mindset of openness is very easy to confuse with Jobs-types that want openness for thee but not for me. It's very easy to complain about people currently abusing their power (remember Google's "Don't Be Evil" poking fun at Microsoft?) but hard to recognize incipient abuses of future power. The only way to unambiguously avoid this is to go full Stallman[1] and categorically distolerate any amount of control or ownership over one's work.

To make matters worse, this industry is one in which you really can't make money unless you're selling something that's closed off and locked down. The people who actually do play fair get bankrupted any time the government is looking the other way on antitrust.

[0] Yes, I am calling out YCombinator. You're part of the problem.

[1] To be clear, RMS very much has Jobs' personality, grafted onto Woz's morality and skill. He would have become just as awful as Jobs had he not insisted on Free Software early on.

There were mobile devices with large screens and web browsers doing "web apps" years before iPhone. I know because I worked on Gecko browsers for two different OSes on those form factors starting with Pocket PC in 2003-ish all the way through Windows Mobile 5 in 2007ish. We also got running on Maemo with big screen handheld devices in early 2004, collaborating directly with Nokia and that Linux-based OS team. A full Gecko browser worked on multiple big screen 3G mobile communicators doing ajax apps before Gmail invites were a thing, years before iPhone. Apple didn't pioneer here; they fast followed us and others. Heck, we were running Gecko on the iPaq 64MB devices in 2001 and third parties were distributing that in 2002. Not some WAP browser, not some brew joke, but Gecko, the same Gecko that was taking the web by storm with Firefox pre-release versions (and of course Mozilla 1.0 and Netscape 6-7) the same Gecko plus DomI that inspired web apps and ajax to take off in the mid-2000s.Web apps were a thing in 2005 and so were mobile web apps. Joe Hewitt, a co-conspirator of mine on Firefox, who gave us both DOM Inspector and Firebug, was a web app master having built the entire Firefox UI out of XUL, CSS and JavaScript and Mozilla's and Netsape's UIs and themes before that. He wrote iUI, the first ajax framework explicitly for iPhones in the period before Jobs suckered everyone into the App Store and sunk those who'd invested substantially in the promise of web apps that Apple fully abandoned. iPhone was no surprise to us, nor Apple running a powerful browser as an app framework, as we and others had done the same thing with Gecko (Ever see the Mozilla Amazon Browser, an entire Amazon client written on top of Gecko back in 2002-2003 not much different than what we see so many Electron apps today. Multiple books were written on all of this. It's not a secret and yet everyone seems to insist that Apple was the first smartphone with a capable web browser and browser-based apps. They got it right where everyone before had failed in some way, but they were not the pioneers, they were the swift following colonizers that came to pave the cow paths that we and others laid down, only to abandon the suckers who believed they'd keep investing in the web on iOS, something that has only just started to happen in the last couple of years.

The average/majority of the population were not going to navigate to shitty mobile websites or desktop websites on their mobile browser to download apps in 2008. If the app store was such a bad place to put apps then why did they boom? Why do people use the Android play store at all if they can sideload, if the need to do so is so highly valued.

I do think people forget that when the iPhone app store was released it was a game changer. The whole idea of a single place to download all apps and games was huge for most people including developers. It meant that everything was there, in the one place and managed through that one app.

Now a decade has passed and we're asking for change. That's fine, but we can't forget that when the app store first came out there wasn't this hysteria around the need to sideload. The app store as a place for developers to publish their apps was huge, Apple did the publishing for you. How that we all have more choice, we're expecting Apple to change to provide more choice.

But we can't forget how beneficial the app store and the "walled" approach was.

Now there could be an aspect of predatory behavior by Apple in the way they charge developers etc, but that's where I feel the problem should be tackled.

Your negotiating power to make any app list in the any app store is approximately zero. If Facebook decides for any reason to leave, neither you nor Apple can stop them so this imagined power you think you get from Apple's App Store policies is just that.

If Apple is forced to allow FB an alternate path and FB takes that path abandoning Apple's App Store, you can blame Apple for the extortion fees in its App Store that are driving FB and others away. Had Apple not been so greedy, there wouldn't have been suits and the EC wouldn't have forced their hand, but Cook's gotta cook for shareholders and leaving even a single penny on the table would be against his commitment to them.

My grocer, who does far more for my well being than Apple, makes 2-3% store-wide markup and he still manages to invest in his store, feed himself and his family, and employ a decent sized staff on that ~2.5% -- and that's the case for most grocery stores, big and small, and we're all real good with that and have been for several decades, these people building actual buildings and gathering up the best foods the world has to offer from hundreds or even thousands of suppliers and paying people to cut open boxes and stock shelves with these amazing foods and mop the floors when we break jars of food that we never pay for he and his crew take sh*t from customers who had a bad day (who might even rob or assault them) and all for 2.5% margin while folks here, on a hacking forum of all places, simp for a walled garden that's extracting 30% from mom and pop hackers for providing what amounts to web hosting.

C'mon. Get real.

These limits are and should be placed by the operating system.

Android has sideloading yet Facebook still uses the official store.

Why even terminate the warranty? It's for the hardware. It's a law in many countries that the warranty still applies unless the manufacturer can prove that you yourself broke the device.

something something security

I work across the street from a well-known security research group who has been on HN front page before.

Every one of them uses iPhones because they cannot be rooted and are encrypted by default.

Venn of old people and at least one group of security professionals.

If you need to infantilize your relatives because they cannot be trusted with their devices, then MDM them, or even have that be the default. But we do not need to surrender in the war on general purpose computing for it.

> As a user, I cannot recommend iPhone to my older relatives if there is a way to run arbitrary code beyond Safari’s JS sandbox. Simple as that.

This is a false dichotomy made in bad faith. You can have open computers and security for those who you wish to infantilize. Chromebooks for example have physical write protect screw inside to do exactly this: https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Remove+the+Write+Protect+Screw/...

I fully expect the company that engineered the Vision Pro to come up with something like this if they wanted to. But they choose to spread FUD to continue collecting rent on the appstore instead.

How does this have anything to do with the US?

You shouldn’t let people’s decisions around phone purchases bother you

PWA's were taken away as punishment.

I think your account has to be an EU account, whatever that means. Maybe billing address and other things. But, would be nice if that wasn’t the case. Also, I could be wrong. Try it and let us know?

> worried if they ever allowed unsigned apps to run

I see this stance often - Do you mean worried for the wellbeing of the easily manipulable (e.g. children) on the platform, Or worried for the quality floor more generally?

The former has an argument, the latter does not in my opinion. Even then while I welcome a requirement for apple to notarise apps for regular install (particularly as a means to verify the source), I'd also demand the ability to run unsigned apps unrestricted - whether the barrier is self-signing, a settings checkbox, make me stare at a 30s countdown, whatever.

> There are plenty of “free Vbucks” and survey sites that show you how to enable sideloading on Android to download said app that is just pure malware.

And yet the world hasn't collapsed due to every Android users' identity and bank accounts being stolen.

Maybe users aren't as dumb as Apple pretends they are.

yes, very worrying to be able to run software you want on the device that you purchased

I think they should allow unsigned apps to run in a similar way to developer mode on the Xbox.

You can enable unsigned apps, but you'll loose Apple services (e.g. iMessage). This should be enough to convince normal users not to do it, but allow those who really want to do it, to do it.

So how is it possible, that I can run unsigned, unnotarized applications on MacOS?

> provides developers through ongoing investments in the tools, technologies, and services that enable them to build and share innovative apps with users around the world.

That's what the 99$ fee for the developer program is for. The 50ct Core Technology Fee is just Apple showing the middle finger to successful developers. I hope the EU goes after this fee first. The whole reason for the DMA is that developers do not use Apple's platforms to bring apps to the user's devices. The user has paid for the device and the operating system, the developer has paid for the developer account, so I am really interested to see how Apple justifies that fee in a court of law.

Having tracked API changes fairly closely on macOS and iOS for many years now, I can’t think of too many that were just pointless furniture shuffling. Nearly all of them were to enable addition of new features or to improve developer QoL in some way — dropping 32-bit support for example allowed them to make long desired improvements in AppKit that were impractical prior due to quirks in the way Objective-C works.

That said I also don’t think it’s a reasonable expectation for old binaries to continue to work indefinitely. Maintenance is a reality of life of a software developer, and personally speaking if I found myself unable or unwilling to do quick spot checks on each platform my apps run at least once a year, I’d just drop support for those platforms or discontinue the app.

That’s not to say that Apple is blameless here, but I think Microsoft has set an unrealistic standard (while also making some things much more difficult for themselves… Windows on ARM for example will never materialize so long as developers expect to be able to toss a binary over the wall and abandon it for a decade, because no matter how good an x86 compat layer is, it’s still significantly worse than native).

Reminds me of this: "The intent is to provide players with a sense of pride and accomplishment for unlocking different heroes.

As for cost, we selected initial values based upon data from the Open Beta and other adjustments made to milestone rewards before launch. Among other things, we're looking at average per-player credit earn rates on a daily basis, and we'll be making constant adjustments to ensure that players have challenges that are compelling, rewarding, and of course attainable via gameplay.

We appreciate the candid feedback, and the passion the community has put forth around the current topics here on Reddit, our forums and across numerous social media outlets.

Our team will continue to make changes and monitor community feedback and update everyone as soon and as often as we can."

> I am intrigued by what kind of drugs the PR team at Apple is taking

No drugs. PR teams write what helps their company to succeed. They don't have to believe into what they write.

The amount of backwards compatibility that Windows has built in is frankly insane. I've been going through a catalog of games and making sure they can run on modern Windows. Other than games that were written strictly for 16-bit, I haven't run into a game that can't be made to run. Sure, some require patches in the form of DLL shims, but it's rare that I even have to break out compatibility mode.

Allowing an alternate OS would allow users to avoid continually paying Apple to make use of their device. It will never happen

Google pays Apple $19b to keep it as the default search engine on iOS Safari, so there will never be an iOS VM running Android.

What's "decel"?

In the current proposal even those apps would have to go through vetting of Apple, and apparently selecting them on a webpage would have the device show a summary-page with app-details fetched from an Apple server...

It's more like a solution engineered around the headline of allowing direct-downloads, in the end Apple is still heavily involved in the release-process of the app...

Don't overcomplicate it. They want to preserve their Services revenue, because Tim Cook is a bean-counter and wants to maintain the profit margin. "After Steve" by Tripp Mickle provides some background.

Many Apple indie devs and fanboys are literally screaming. I bet many people @Apple are too. There are so many things the company could do to regain geek-cred. Package manager and windowing on macOS. Align Mac App Store policies with the more liberal Windows 11 Store policies. Let people run what they want, even outside the EU, including other web engines. Invest in Proton so old Windows games can run on Mac (but then, no App Store tax). Keep OpenGL and Vulkan around for the scientific computation folks (and others). Commit to keeping Rosetta2 around indefinitely, because compatibility is your #1 job as a platform. Open-source more stuff (god forbid, your OSes! why not?).

But they've gotten timid and conservative. Top execs see risk, and VPs seem to think they're making products only for the stereotypical technophobic grandpa, rather than power users.

So, this is a strategy that has actually worked quite well for the likes of Facebook in dealing with the GDPR; they did eventually get some pretty nasty (>1bn) fines, but it took a long, long time.

Early indications are that Europe has learned from the mistakes of the GDPR, and enforcement of the DMA is going to be a lot more proactive. Notably, Facebook seems to be scared of it; the delay to launching Threads in Europe seems to have been for DMA/DSA compliance (in particular, it's not login-walled anymore, at least in Europe). Hard to imagine them delaying a product launch for GDPR compliance...

At this moment, I’m really scared that the EU might not react.

They are deeply involved. If it’s that bad for developers, drop the iPhone and develop solely for Android.

Developers need the iPhone and Apple needs developers.

Genuinely curious: people throw around the term „malicious compliance“ a lot. It seems the platform fee is explicitly allowed by the DMA, so Apple demands it. Again, I am not trying to troll but what would „benevolent compliance“ look like and what would Apple‘s incentive be to give up the fee?

>For one, this makes deploying a free app on an alternative store (that becomes popular) simply impossible?

You can monetize it with in app payments or ads such that wealthy people subsidize other users.

If the app is from a nonprofit they can get the fee waived.

At this point, I want to see a responsible person at Apple getting a literal fucking slap in the face for all that shit this company pulls off.

They're doing stress tests with the law.

The iPhone revolution was that your phone used to be owned by the carrier, but now was owned by Apple, and Jobs got away with it.

I don't. This is a stark realisation that I have had over the past few years. I would once staunchly recommend iPhones for their strong security, in particular app isolation, on-device AI, and physical device security.

However, over the years there have been more and more instances where Apple decides what I can do with my phone. From restricting APIs to give their first-party apps advantage, to, most recently, not having any (local) method to move voice memos off my Apple Watch.

I've realised they are orchestrating their hardware and software to build a truly solid wall from within which they can extract continuous rent from their captives.

I don't own my device because I cannot freely run the software I create on it (without paying Apple and gaining their approval, which is impossible in some cases).

I'm done with Apple... but there are no acceptable alternatives. Android is bad in other aspects.

This is not a free and fair market; it's a duopoly.

I genuinely pray weekly for a phone like the Framework Laptop, where I can run my own software (Arch Linux) and repair and replace the hardware as needed.

It's been a 'rent, not own' model since day one, since batteries are non-user-replaceable.

I just wonder how products like game consoles would be viable under a law like this. I assume they would have to cost much more and there would be far less incentive for their development in the first place.

Then again, we are at the end stages of game consoles. Microsoft in particular seems to be considering the idea of not even bothering with hardware. Software is where the money is, Chinese hardware companies can make hardware like you see in the retro handheld scene.

Yeah, I don't get it either. All the Android fanboys seem to be wanting iOS to turn into Android for some reason (what, the blue bubble is so bad?) and I also don't understand how a company that isn't a monopoly (because there is in fact choice in the market) can be dictated to how they run their app distribution. That's akin to telling me, a software consultant, how I should do my software consulting. Maybe the EU will soon tell me what IDE I have to use or I will get fined. Maybe I have to start offering my services on some public forum where everybody can bid on my time equally.

Step 1 would be to identify those in government who accept lobbying from Apple.

https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/apple-inc/summary?id=D00002...

Why can’t you pay your 30% for the App Store?

It's closer to Ford forcing you to drive only on Ford™ roads or charge your Ford EV at a Ford™ certified $$$ charging station.