I don’t think Apple’s pettiness is gonna work in their favor.
I am not in the EU but my next iPhone is almost certainly not gonna be an iPhone despite me having used a non iPhone for about 6 months in the last 15 years.
Their throwing their customers under the bus just to throw a tantrum in the EU does not bode well for how they would treat their customers in other situations.
Whatever they manage to eek out in the EU, is the future of what iOS will be in the US and worldwide eventually. If they go with fully fledged PWAs that the other browser engines will enable - there’s little reason to use the Appstore, hence Apple losing their 30% commission.
From their perspective it’s not so much throwing a tantrum but clawing and screaming their way into giving up as little revenue as possible.
And as a developer, I see how I'm going to be collateral damage, and am less likely to do anything that gives Apple more power over me and my customers. If that means a bookmarked web app, so be it.
We also know 70% of revenue comes from games. And there's no way proper game is going run on a PWA.
I also invoke Android again... PWAs exist, Google still holds the lions share. Google has freaked out about it too and is being sanctioned as we speak for it, but most customers simply aren't going to look for an alt app store outside of niche uses.
In particular, all game streaming services (Geforce Now, Xbox Game Pass etc.) have until very recently needed to exist as PWAs since Apple would not let them into the App Store.
The crucial PWA feature here is being able to display them in full screen, without Safari's navigation bar.
Im going to ditch my iPhone in favor of a Pixel. This attitude has pushed me over the edge, and the device isn't really any better than Android. Some aspects yes, but other are much worse. Dark patterns like the appstore/web/browsers restrictions and iCloud upselling are a big no-no. Never again.
I still can’t fathom how people can look at the pixel range with their multi-generational emergency call issues and still think “yep, that’s the phone for me”.
I own a Pixel 7a and an iPhone 14. Battery life is too similar for me to notice a difference. I never systematically tested it though. Pixel 6 was the same as well.
The only phone I owned recently that had really terrible battery life even when new was the iPhone 12 mini.
> I am not in the EU but my next iPhone is almost certainly not gonna be an iPhone despite me having used a non iPhone for about 6 months in the last 15 years.
Did you just subconsciously equate phones to iPhones in your rebuke of Apple?
To be honest an iPhone and a phone have been synonymous for me for 15 years. The 6 months was a period of madness (or genius, considering I actually loved it) when I was using a Windows Phone, until basically all the 3rd party apps I used dropped support.
I don't get it either, but that seems to be the plan. Either peer pressure or they are just dragging their feet in inevitable litigation. Trying to get a few more years of max monetization before a niche of users and apps exist outside of IOS (without jailbreaking, if that's still a thing).
Then you don’t know Apple fanboys. If Apple releases an automatically installing iOS patch that bricks everyone’s iPhones (including theirs) unless they agree to subscribe to a Hardware Maintenance Plan™ of 19.99 USD per month, the first reaction from fanboys would be “Was waiting for Apple to do something like this. This is how it is supposed to work. It took them so long. Good on them getting rid of non-serious iOS users”. And this chorus will come long before Apple had to say anything on the matter in a press release or so.
What customers? The ones that use PWAs? I would bet a good portion of my arm that fewer than 10% of Apple’s user ship relies on PWAs.
This is Apple saying “if it’s important to you dozen folks out there who use PWAs or care about installing a non-web view browser on your phone, that you can continue doing that, we’re not the company for you.”
To work for their salary to comply with the country they serve in and still continue to be a trillion dollar company. Yes. I don't know why people are trying to spin this as if Apple operates on thin margins.
In the very worst case, they either get fined out the ass until it's unprofitable to play these games, and/or sanctioned as a whole and lose the whole EU market, a market of 750m users. What other business gets to ignore laws and still operate in that land?
I'd personally love a sort of anti-trust czar who can just very unbureaucratically slap large tech companies with sensitive fines.
If you had someone like that in charge and the moment companies engage in malicious compliance (for example cookie acceptance dark patterns) you go "now you pay 2% of your revenue in fines, you pull the same thing again we'll double the fine next month", how long does it take until companies play ball?
You do realise that this position is by appointment by a council made up of members voted in by representative democracies, right?
That there are checks and balances (courts and oversight committees) that weigh in regularly on decisions made by these kinds of appointed offices, right?
Well, if they have to allow other engines then those browsers should be able to implement PWA features and web push on iOS instead. Then user can hide the trash that is safari on iOS and never use it again. Win win.
Trick the customer how? By winning a sale in a competitive marketplace? The whole value proposition of Apple products is that they Just Work. PWAs reduce Apple’s ability to do exactly the things that make their devices appealing to consumers.
This entire mindset is wrong and is exactly what the DMA is trying to address. Apple, Google and other big tech companies aren't just small random companies whose product you can switch between every time they do something you dislike. Due to a lack of interoperability there's huge switching cost associated. They're digital gatekeepers with platform effects massively working in their favor.
But I do like the way Apple does things. To be specific, I want to buy Apple hardware and I want to run Linux on it.
What I don't like is the little digital fiefdom they created. When we buy stuff, we're supposed to own them. The problem is they just refuse to give us the keys to the machines. So we absolutely should make it a matter of law.
While I agree philosophically about owning stuff, this isn't about that. If the only problem were "Apple doesn't give you the keys", then competition is a solution.
The problem is network effects. An app developer cannot just choose to develop for Android, because maybe 90% of their business comes from iOS users. A user cannot just choose to use Android, because half their friends use iOS and cannot have a decent group chat experience outside iMessage. So, choice is illusory.
The point is to make the choice real. In this case "giving you the keys" is really about giving app developers more freedom to choose how to reach users.
Giving Apple users more control over their own freely-chosen devices is more like right-to-repair. Similar, but kinda different.
> If the only problem were "Apple doesn't give you the keys", then competition is a solution.
A solution. The solution is to make them to do what's good for us by force of law. We can't afford to wait a century for some open mobile hardware platform to become available to us. We want good products now. Apple computers are good products and we should have every right to run whatever software we want on them now.
There is no technical impediment to it, the only reason they don't let us do it is it would destroy the little digital fiefdom they have created for themselves. Digital fiefdoms should not be allowed to exist in the first place. Society should actively work to dismantle them. Giving us the keys to the machine will swiftly put an end to them.
> The problem is network effects.
Absolutely. Network effects should work to our advantage, not theirs. Basically anything that lets corporations "own" users should be straight up illegal.
> A user cannot just choose to use Android, because half their friends use iOS and cannot have a decent group chat experience outside iMessage.
We should mandate interoperability there too. Why is it that every corporation gets to have their own messaging system? They should all work with each other via the same protocol. Just make sure that end-to-end encryption is fully supported and there will be no problem.
Actually here's an even better idea. Just make it legal to reverse engineer and interoperate regardless of what contracts say. People will do it adversarially if they need to. Make it so you don't need their permission. Make it illegal for corporations to retaliate against users for using things like an alternative messaging client. Get rid of nonsense like anti-circumvention laws. Then all of this will just happen on its own via market forces with no need to actually regulate anything.
Do you not consider the software part of the product? By any reasonable measure, the software is the product, and the hardware enables that product to operate.
> Do you not consider the software part of the product?
No.
> By any reasonable measure, the software is the product, and the hardware enables that product to operate.
That's what they want people to believe. It's actually just a general purpose computer. They put "IP" on it and suddenly they own it forever and control everything people do and if you resist it's felony contempt of business model.
I'm not really sure what you're getting at—the statement is that it was too much work to make the feature compliant with the rules of the DMA, so the feature was removed since few people used it.
Are you arguing that Apple is lying about how much work it was to execute that?
I am not in the EU but my next iPhone is almost certainly not gonna be an iPhone despite me having used a non iPhone for about 6 months in the last 15 years.
Their throwing their customers under the bus just to throw a tantrum in the EU does not bode well for how they would treat their customers in other situations.