Funny how things go. As a consumer especially, but even as a developer I don’t want the DMA to succeed and purposefully want iOS to be a walled garden. It’s literally one of the reasons why I’m on iOS!
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That's the nice thing about the DMA ... Nobody forces you to install a 3rd party app store, nobody forces you to install apps from websites, nobody forces you out of the walled garden. For you nothing changes. Those that want to use their 1000€ device differently than you now have the chance to.
As the “tech guy” in the family things might change actually.
(One of) the reasons why I like the walled garden is how it simplifies everything troubleshooting-wise. I have a few quirks to know, the rest is because of hardware failure and that’s it.
My peer not being tech-savvy might install stupid things from stupid places and it might be a problem.
The way it’s done it’s unlikely, but still it just complexify things for next to no reasons in my book. (Yes 30% is a lot; I personally don’t care, though I do recognize I’m a good position and I can afford not to–but then again, the most vocal about the 30% are not the most unwealthy…)
That's also solveable. For android you need to enable deep inside of the settings to allow 3rd party installs. Nobody is preventing Apple to do something like this. Or that you can create a profile that disables that setting that you can install on your familys devices. Nothing in the DMA prevents this.
Just because it makes your life easier as the family tech support is a pretty selfish reason to hope for a very good pro-consumer law to fail.
The way it’s going I’m actually pretty sure if they did that they’d get reprimanded…
Also it makes my life annoying when I open Safari and am presented w/ what can be told as the worst pop-up ever and have to spend literally minutes dismissing it for something I neither wanted nor needed. It’s the cookie banner all over again.
Does not seem like a lot, but as a developer I use devices in a factory configuration a lot, and it’s just as annoying as it’s useless.
Basically it’s the cookie banner again. Served no-one (at least definitely not the consumers), but annoyed a lot.
As for the “those that want to use their 1000€ device differently than you now have the chance to,” well……… nobody forced them to buy a 1000€ device did they?? They knew of the limitations; they had to, or they’re very dumb.
The law is not pro-consumer contrary to people say, it’s anti-garden, which is definitely not the same, and I’ll die on this hill.
Nearly no sites comply with the cookie-banner law, if they did, you wouldn't mind it.
It essentially says "Tell the user you're tracking them, give them a button to click not allow you to do that". If sites actually did that, I honestly couldn't care less about the extra second it would take to click "No, fuck off".
> Basically it’s the cookie banner again. Served no-one (at least definitely not the consumers), but annoyed a lot.
Oh no, you have to be given the option to not permit your data to be shared with ~1000 different partners with "legitimate" interests. Honestly, the only thing that is wrong with GDPR is that it came out too late.
90% of the websites today use google analytics which is not GDPR compliant, and yet nothing happens.
Ironically Apple did more for privacy than GDPR ever did, and was able to enforce it… by having a walled garden!
> yet nothing happens
Every time you dismiss a "we care for your privacy" banner, you're being made aware that your data is shared with hundreds or thousands of data brokers with "legitimate interest". The fact that vendors prefer to make your experience miserable rather than give up tracking is another example of "malicious compliance".
What happens is that you now have the right to request a copy of the personal information a site has collected and ask them to delete it. You can also sue them if they don't fulfil your request. You're welcome to exercise your rights as an EU citizen at any time.
> and yet nothing happens.
Not true.
https://noyb.eu/en/noyb-win-first-major-fine-eu-1-million-us...
> Also it makes my life annoying when I open Safari and am presented w/ what can be told as the worst pop-up ever and have to spend literally minutes dismissing it for something I neither wanted nor needed. It’s the cookie banner all over again.
Know what's cool? Firefox on android supports ublock origin. There are some chromium forks too with desktop extension support (on android). Funny what an open(er) market and easy of installing apps does, huh?
I have ads and pop up blockers already? What are you on about??
People (myself included) say the same thing about why they buy their tech illiterate relatives macOS computers. And it works. And guess what, it works despite Apple not getting a cut of every everything.
My girlfriend only install the handful of apps she wants both on her Mac and her iPhone and doesn't go back to the app store. She just put things on auto update. Most people don't fiddle with their computing device. And if installation steps are confusing, she just asked me to do it. I guess that's why Microsoft are enabling so many things on Windows as most users won't enable them by themselves.
That's neither here nor there for whether Apple has the right to insert themselves into every transaction on their platform and gets to decide which apps are allowed to exist.
And let's not kid ourself: Microsoft is enabling (and re-enabling and re-enabling and re-enabling) so many things because they are slowly turning their OS into spyware to make more money, not because they care at all about their users.
I'll re-iterate Cory Doctorow's quote: "Anytime someone puts a lock on something you own, against your wishes, and doesn't give you the key, they're not doing it for your benefit".
Apple does not put a lock on anything we own. They sell something locked and people buy it.
It’s absolutely not the same; they were clear from day 1.
It's perfectly reasonable to create even more walled gardens than the Apple walled garden, once you open up for different markets. That's the beauty of choice.
> My peer not being tech-savvy might install stupid things from stupid places and it might be a problem.
Yes, and they may also respond to phishing emails served up by the Mail app. Do your peers consider you responsible for fixing that too?
I doubt it. "Walled" and "Safety" are getting confused here.
I think you like the App Store for its safety. You trust it, enough to be happy with it.
What does that have to do with wanting others to be denied alternatives? That deliver however much safety and different benefits that other people want?
If safety is one of Apple store's selling points, then competitive app stores will push Apple to deliver even more safety. Perhaps new forms of safety others pioneer. Apple didn't invent security or sandboxes. While also encouraging it to loosen non-safety driven (and therefore quietly non-customer friendly) restrictions on innovation.
That can only benefit you.
For years Apple has placed deliberately crafted limitations on 3rd party apps that put theirs at an advantage. They've done anything but treat developers fairly. If they did, maybe this legislation was unneeded, but with the way they've been acting, it feels like a long time coming.
Edit: self plug: https://boehs.org/node/private-apis
Opening up the app store doesn't force you step outside the walled garden.
Until some apps are not in the App Store or a website is chromium-compatible only… Or that apps (e.g. youtube) outside the App Store is surprisingly more feature-complete than the equivalent in the App Store…
Don’t worry they’ll find a way to make it socially mandatory (the same way not having a google account nowadays seems impossible (I don’t personally but still do because of work for instance)).
And if you don't trust an app vendor without Apple's underpaid Chinese reviewers playing with it on an iPad for 5 minutes to guarantee your safety, then don't use those apps that pull out of the App Store. If YouTube or FB pull out of Apple's App Store and go to their own, Apple will have to cut it's hosting fees to get them back or lose that business and you'll suffer not because Google and FB pulled out of the App Store but because Apple pushed them out with exorbitant fees. You should want Apple facing that threat because it'll lead to lower App Store prices as developers won't pad a $5 app with $1.50 in extra cost to you to cover the exorbitant Apple fees. But you'd rather blame users who want to run what ever software they want on the computers they purchased than blame Apple's shitty business practices. That's on you, bud.
> And if you don't trust an app vendor without Apple's underpaid Chinese reviewers
This misses the mark so badly that it’s not even worth reading the rest.
App Review is based out of Sunnyvale and has more than 300 people that make on average $85k/y in their first few years, and mostly over $100k/y after three years.
Long tenured people, the ones that last more than 5 years and are advancing towards a decade of doing the work get close to $200k/y with some exceptions over that number.
Many of those 300 people are multilingual, some specialize in a specific language, but to expand and better serve non-English markets, Apple recently opened a branch in Ireland and one in Shanghai.
The latter mainly focusing on the Chinese market and the one in Ireland specializing in European languages and supplementing the English market.
Once again there are alternatives; nobody forced anybody to buy iPhones.
It’s not like Apple lied at any point saying “buy our phones and do whatever you want on them!” No. It’s clear. You do what they want. In what name should they be forced to “open” it to anybody?
What’s next? Force google to make their map data open? How would that go? It’s mostly the same thing.
You might want to familiarize yourself with the last 200 years of industrial evolution.
Spoiler: companies have been forced to do all sorts of things they really didn't want to do, and it often went fairly well for society at large.
Wait, children aren't forced to work in death factories anymore?!?!
Huh, guess it's just Foxconn then.
To be blunt, Apple, Google, and other tech megacorps should be glad that we as a society allow them to exist in the first place, even despite growing to the size where they are clearly hindering free market (by actively blocking competition). Never forget that corporations are artificial entities chartered by governments; and nobody has a natural right to a corporate charter, so those can and should come with hefty strings attached.
And nobody is forcing you to do anything.
I have no idea what your argument is here. That people shouldn't advocate for greater competition in the marketplace just because they already bought a phone?
It's not at all the same thing? Also there's a more apt comparison, which is forcing Google to make Android open and allow alternative app stores (oh wait, they already do).
App stores are a natural monopoly. An app store with more users attracts more developers. An app store with more apps attracts more users. It has a strong network effect and economies of scale. Natural monopolies should be regulated to prevent abuse by the first companies that capture wide market share.
Well, just don't use those apps, then, or use their website.
Yet somehow, when people suggest not to use an iPhone but instead an alternative device, that’s not an acceptable argument to many.
Funny how that works.