European iPhones are more fun now | Hacker News Reader

European iPhones are more fun now

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94 pointshilux92 comments

It's absolutely amazing that europe is a thing. A world with just the US as the main western power is so lame, everyone cares just about money, no other values, sounds so boring.

Now the average american can look up to something and demand it from the policy makers. God bless Europe.

Seconded! I think competition like this between governments is a good thing. Let the best laws win.

I don't know that I want a second US, though. I have reservations about the first one.

> Let the best laws win

The Brussels effect implies that for now, the EU is winning.

The EU is not as altruistic as it seems, a lot of good looking policies are backed up by bad intentions.

Not having the possibility of a 3rd party app store means that you can never have an app store in the EU, where the 30% stays in the EU.

I also don't believe that the EU is doing a great job, the cookie law didn't accomplish anything other than force companies to pay monthly for a cookie banner service and waste millions. GDPR failed, it just created legal black holes and it's now fine to transfer data to the US, rendering the whole thing ineffective.

I'm an EU citizen and I'm not sure if the EU would have been so keen on USB-C if Apple would have been a company in the EU. This talk about saving the environment fades away at the first sign of economical inconvenience.

AFAIK, there's no such thing as a cookie law, it's about PII consent.

I'm fine knowing in advance how scummy a website is even before I use it by their dark patterns on cookie warnings and thousands of "legitimate interest" partners.

Edit: People should stop whining about the cookie warnings and start being concerned that selling PII is such a common (and not even looked down upon) practice. It's disgusting.

Having annoying banners that cost a lot of money to make doesn't solve anything. If the EU would really care, they would outlaw these practices altogether.

It is also very ironic that you have to record the consents in your database by generating a unique id for the visitors.

Having technology illiterate people making laws about tech also doesn't help.

Brave did way more for my privacy than the EU ever could.

I'm looking forward to the EU banning these practices altogether. Until then I'm happy to stop using sites that sell my PII.

Good luck having Brave protect your PII.

I really don't think "the average american" has a good awareness of events, let alone government regulations, outside the country's borders.

Presumably Apple has some internal calculation of how much $$$$ they would lose by globally standardizing the "European iPhone." But we're unlikely to see that number.

Incidentally, the CrowdStrike snafu had its roots in European regulations.

How were european regulations to blame for the crowdstrike incident?

Microsoft sells security software that is using kernel modules. Some years ago in a anti-trust thing they agreed to let other security software vendors use kernel modules too so their own product wouldn't have an unfair advantage.

They now claim that if that hadn't happened they would have banned their competitors from using kernel modules and thus crowdstrike couldn't have fucked up kernel code. What they don't mention is that they could have made it possible to implement such software without kernel modules, like other platforms do, and banned everyone (including their own product) from kernel space, leading to both "no security software in kernel" (not even Microsofts) and "Microsofts security products do not get a special unfair exception", but of course there is a crowd loving that argument as broken as it is.

Wow - that was over 20 years ago - and microsoft are blaming that (and by extension their own security model!) instead of crowdstrikes internal process? Thats insane. Its like microsoft are asking to be held accountable for it!

"Incidentally, the CrowdStrike snafu had its roots in European regulations."

That is some truly twisted logic. Let's blame Microsoft-specific disasters on antitrust regulation. It is not even worthy of being called logic. It is lowbrow spin.

Why not ditch Windows and keep the antitrust regulations.

Oops, we can't because meaningful competition does not exist.

Do you understand the semantic difference between "had its roots" and "is entirely due to"?

I know regulation isn’t as popular on HN as it is on, say, Reddit, but note that this is going to be enabling a lot of innovation in mobile apps in the EU.

on iOs.

These innovations have existed for many years now.

It's not popular because the costs usually outweigh the benefits and when they do, there's rarely a correction. The EU will do something great (roam like at home) or minor but positive (like OP, however we've had USB-C, Firefox, and sideloading on Android anyway) and then annoy you to no end with cookie banners and attached bottle caps.

> and then annoy you to no end with cookie banners and attached bottle caps.

The only reason cookie banners are so annoying is due to the people implementing them wanting them to be annoying.

It doesn't need to be, the directive explicitly states that giving or withdrawing consent should be equally easy. All of these annoying cookie banners requiring you to manually toggle 5+ checkboxes for opting out are illegal.

Maybe, although I'm skeptical, but regardless: if a regulation backfires or becomes unenforceable and the regulator cannot correct course, then I'm gonna blame the regulator.

You wouldn't accept blaming the user if a UI caused wide-spread issues. Legal systems aren't that different. They're made for people and they have to work for people.

You can read the actual regulation instead of being sceptical. And the most annoying ones are being sued already. The change may be slow, but we'll get there.

There is no regulation to make cookie banners annoying, afaik. Plus there are addons that solve this problem.

Could you explain your annoyance with bottle caps?

They are attached to the bottle permanently, and tend to get in the way, depending on how the manufacturer decided to implement the regulation.

They're referring to new rules mandating tethered caps. Drives some people nuts.

https://www.euronews.com/green/2024/07/02/why-are-bottle-cap...

I'm not posh enough to routinely pour my drinks into a glass so an attached cap either drips, scratches, or gets in my way and I have to tear it off and then usually remove the plastic ring since it now comes with prongs that only sometimes come off with the cap.

Attached cap is also less convenient when screwing the cap back onto the bottle.

friends. you understand that you can just.. take it off, right?

fully unscrew the cap then just either continue twisting the cap over the the edge - honestly effortless - or just.. pull it off? the cap still functions as a cap, afterward.

apologies, but i don’t understand the furore over this change.

But you can flip the cap so that it stays open and in a single place when attached. There is often a small bump at the bottom of the cap that makes this easier. I also drink straight from the bottle and I find this unobtrusive. Even helpful - I no longer misplace a cap; I guess that was the goal.

If I remember correctly, people had the same issues with the soda can tabs. Back in the days they were detachable (and people simply tossed them wherever). So they introduced various attachable designs before settling on the current one. It took some time for people to adjust.

An article from Slate: https://slate.com/human-interest/2012/09/can-tabs-how-alumin...

> The EU will [...] then annoy you to no end with cookie banners and attached bottle caps.

You know there's no EU cookie banner insertion agency that intercepts traffic and injects cookie banners - the sites could handle this way less obstrusive.

I'm with you on the attached bottle caps though. It's just a minor annoyance but you really gotta ask: Are environmental benefits really worth the negative reactions to regulation this will spur in the population every time someone tries to drink from a plastic bottle?

> Are environmental benefits really worth the negative reactions to regulation this will spur in the population every time someone tries to drink from a plastic bottle?

Yes.

We fucked up our ecosphere so badly, every little bit to counter our effects helps. Sure, it's just a goddamn bottle cap, but as a friend of mine uses to say: "No one snow flake feels responsible for the avalanche." Can be read both ways – all our small "misdeeds" accumulate, but all the small "good deeds" do, too.

Regulation helps, people will get used to it, and quickly, especially when it's just about minor inconveniences.

Regulations are backbone of societies. Most of engineering is heavily regulated except for computer engineering.

I see less targeted ads, when I click "reject" on cookie banners. Also more & more has "reject all" opinion on the top level.

It should be checkbox on browser settings, but overall it works and I like it better than creepy notifications to sell me things that I randomly googled.

That is the general idea behind global privacy control[1], though Firefox still has it hidden behind about:config.

[1]: https://globalprivacycontrol.org

There was also "Do not track" earlier, but if it's not regulated, businesses will not give a crap.

Guess what, the EU never mandated websites to add cookies banners.

The reason cookie banners are annoying is because they show you in plain sight how much the site you are visiting doesn’t respect you as a visitor. Worse is that it’s always written in an hypocritical language.

Those websites had a disrespectful and dangerous business model that needed to be regulated. The GDPR have been announced 8 years ago and is implemented since 6 years. It’s nearly a decade old and those websites decided to change nothing except to ad banners.

Otherwise, there are a hella lot websites that don’t show banners because in the first place they decided to have a business model which was respectful of their customers /users.

I would say it is working as intended if the regulators are able to mildly inconvenience you to achieve a greater goal.

Bottle caps are under the top 10 single-use plastic products most often found on European beaches [1], IMHO that’s good enough reason to mandate they be attached to the bottle.

[1] https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_19_...

Where will it all end? Somewhere perfectly fine, probably. But still, I wonder about the far limits and edge cases to this logic. If it was in all cases considered preferable to mildly inconvenience you to achieve a greater goal, that sounds like the cumulative effect would cease to be mild and would in fact be a bad thing. Maybe that could be fixed by regulation regulations?

it's a continuous cost-benefit optimization.

if it would be cheaper to clean beaches we would just do that. if it would be cheaper to put some manners into beachgoers, we would do that. if it would be cheaper to "police" beaches, we would do that too.

regulations also have costs, such as annoyance, inconvenience, enforcement, etc.

we will see how these will turn out culturally. (as in which "external rules" will turn into internal ones.)

I would click on any banner you want as long as I can use my one cable for everything and use Vivaldi browser on my iPhone with uBlock origin built in so I can browse the internet on my phone without the need to worry about catching AIDS or cancer.

Like, apple not allowing to use a browser with an adblocker is like not letting people use condoms. It's spreading diseases.

Good thing Europe is yet again taking the responsible adult role for the sake of the rest of the world.

Saying that USB-C is a minor benefit feels like American propaganda, or someone bitter.

> annoy you to no end with cookie banners

That is due to o malicious compliance. The actual problem is the amount of advertisement cookies, how invasive they are, and how advertisers really don't want to let them go.

> and attached bottle caps

What major problem is that?

So the law was aimed at reasonable and compliant money-grubbing wrong-doers, but they all turned out to be unexpectedly malicious.

Its not malicious. The moment you see a cookie banner you know the site is planning to plant tracking cookies in your browser. Before it did it without your consent now it gives you the option to avoid it if you want.

>I know regulation isn’t as popular on HN as it is on, say, Reddit,

This is an aside, but I remember when Reddit was Liberty Central.

I'm getting too old for this.

It's going to be interesting to see the state of things in a few years.

I'm admittedly in the less pro-regulation camp, but I'm not hopeful this is going to enable much meaningful innovation, rather I'm expecting enshittification via oligopoly.

Sure, there will probably be some apps that use new EU features / APIs to do something cool. Most likely Apple will add those in the "standard" API set. Similar to how jailbreakers and Android have paved the way for e.g third party keyboards or call blocking api's. Emulators are the first example of this.

We will go from the "apple monopoly" to probably an oligopoly, where companies with enough pull effect will start their own stores. To get more info about the users, "own" the relationship, skip (part of) the apple tax etc. Great, now I'll get the pleasure to create yet another account or jump through 47 hoops to cancel my subscription.

I'm also expecting this will sooner or later put the nail in the coffin of the last substantial non-chromium browser user base. "This page is best viewed in Chrome for iOS". Also really looking forward to when some German MDM company will figure out they can innovate some custom phone/messagings apps to improve the "security posture" of my employer.

> I know regulation isn’t as popular on HN

Increasing freedom using regulation is not the right way to do it for our libertarian brethren.

It’s always interesting to share the Mises Institute talk on how intellectual property restrictions are an unfair government-created monopoly on ideas that harms capitalism and see how libertarian the person really is. Many people, of all backgrounds and creeds, have a politics of convenience that is only pro or against things when it benefits them, despite claiming to have a principled stance.

https://youtu.be/cWShFz4d2RY

Made me chuckle that this praise of the EU over USA regulations was unreadable behind a large green privacy notice starting: "We and our 843 partners store and access personal data, like browsing data or unique identifiers, on your device."

I recieved no such notice. I'm in the EU, use an Ad Blocker, and NoScript to block JS.

There’s also Consent-O-Matic (https://consentomatic.au.dk/).

Is that supposed to mean that no banner and thus no consent is somehow better?

Without regulation they just sold your data to hundred companies without any chance of you knowing, or ability to deny... and that's better?

Cutting to the chase: How can I location fake my iPhone in Australia to act as if it was purchased in and currently in the EU.

Bonus edge question: Is an iPhone visiting the EU an "iPhone in the EU" and subject to the same EU data and open OS etc. regulations as every other (local) phone?

I believe it was tied to the Apple ID and ALSO had some countermeasures against faking location but I might be wrong.

I imagined that was the case, I was also starting a mental countdown clock until the first dot point side loading Ich bin ein Berliner iPhone guide appears.

Might be waiting a while. Just like iOS jailbreaks and Cydia stopped being a thing, I doubt Apple's gonna let publicized workarounds work that don't involve a ton of effort to work for an extended period.

AppStore location country can only be changed if you have a credit card from a bank in EU with customer address also in EU.

And these days there are strong regulations in EU about bank accounts that pretty much ruled out an option to get a EU credit card while being a tourist that was possible like 8 years ago.

I travel between different countries every now and then and sometimes need to install apps that are only available in a given country. At least for that case, Apple uses your billing address, which is verified by a payment method. E.g. you need a Dutch domiciled payment method to configure your app store location to be the Netherlands and install apps that are available to locals only. These days many apps are available without geographic restrictions, but far from all. I would imagine they use a similar setup for the whole EU only perks.

I could not install the Italian train app while travelling in Italy due to this.

I had similar problems with a local train app in Germany on Googles store. The organisation when asked said to install another app instead, that was not linked anywhere on their homepage.

It’s definitely at least partially tied to the Apple account location and just not physical location. I’m a Canadian and have been living in Europe for three years now and don’t get any of these new Europe only features. I’m guessing because my Apple account is still tied to Canada / I use a Canadian credit card on it.

My phones region is Lithuania, iCloud is Lithuania, VPN'd via Lithuania in Airplane mode via Wifi and I still can't get in.

Which kinda sucks because there are legit reasons where you could get caught by this.

Tangent: Unsure what my Homepod region is set to, but after updating my _iPad_ to iOS 18 and changing it's region to US so I get new Siri - the Homepod is not able to execute "Siri find my iPhone" command and bitches about mismatch regions... IIRC I had to change regions too so I get Heyless Siri.

If I wanted an open system I could have bought an android. This is a terrible change, can’t wait to see what my less technologically competent friends have been talked into installing.

In America people keep forgetting that in Europe, everything has 2 years warranty HANDLED BY THE STORE.

Picture Amazon which sells everything. Now, everything that breaks from. Amazon can be returned within TWO YEARS.

European laws are way ahead.

Is there already a browser with its own engine? Does any browser have this planned?

Firefox? Available on Android since forever.

None exist yet AFAIK, but at least Chrome is on its way. See e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/PWA/comments/11is5ew/first_look_at_...

Why is there only one Apple, anyway? It does not make sense to me. Their niche is luxury consumerism + overbearing paternalism. I don't think that is hard to replicate.

Since BlackBerry gave up on making smartphones, there is no other phone manufacturer trying for the same market. Sure you can buy an Android with cutting-edge tech specs, but you don't get the Apple customer experience and the brand recognition.

Samsung and Pixel are trying but Apple has the advantage of the integrated ecosystem. Samsung is supposedly approaching it from the angle of their home devices but I don't know how valuable a seamless integration between my phone and a washing machine is.

Also, high-end phones aren't really like luxury goods. I think the margins on a manufactured phone are only ~50%. That may sound like a lot but is pretty close to manufacturing of most not-dead-simple stuff.

It's unfortunate that with Samsung phones you can't uninstall the myriad of bloat apps, not to say of their telemetry volume (compared to Apple at least).

I only have a Samsung tablet and I could either disable or uninstall all of their apps. Also, I think you can remove them effectively with `adb`, without root, but haven't tested.

Do you have source of telemetry comparison?

A friend of mine once had a Samsung phone that had advertisement on the Home Screen and was having a hard time removing it. He did reset the phone and all.

This was ten fricking years ago, and I never really looked close to know what it really was, but it was enough to put me off the brand forever.

Until recently, of course: I thought about getting a TV from them. But I ended up with an "OK" brand dumb TV instead of a Samsung because the Samsung TV on the shop also had an AD in it.

Samsung can become another Apple, but it's gonna take some effort.

> Samsung can become another Apple, but it's gonna take some effort.

For sure, and I hope they will, further competition is always good. I dont know numbers but I guess the ad revenue must be significant since the "generational leaps" and innovations on the mobile department arent there.

> I think the margins on a manufactured phone are only ~50%.

On Android phones, the margins for OEMs are a few % at most, sometimes even in the negative.

Their niche is trust. You cannot replicate overbearing paternalism as a USP without trust.

If Microsoft only allowed installs from their App Store people would switch to Apple en mass.

> I don't think that is hard to replicate.

Oh, sure. Heck, I can do that for you. I'll just need a few billion dollars to pay for the design, hardware and software engineering, manufacturing and QA, and to pay for the massive amount of marketing required to establish a new luxury brand.

Then, in order to beat the network effects of the App Store, I'll need another billion dollars or two in order to bribe the most popular apps to make ports for our new platform, and hire more software engineers to make an API emulation layer... and hire lawyers to defend against Apple claiming the emulation layer violates their IP rights.

(There's no guarantee you'll see a return on those billions, btw.)

Nope, not hard to replicate at all.

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