The EU is fundamentally a centre-right, liberalist, pro-business coalition, but what that means is that it is pro-competition. What's really impressive is that it seems to mostly refrain from devolving into protectionist policies, giving no preferential treatment to European businesses against international (intercontinental?) competitors, despite strong populist tendencies in certain member states.
Add to that feel-good green initiatives like a packaging initiative that might lower packaging waste from European companies, but more likely will just make European goods more expensive and cause Europeans to buy from Temu instead.
> just make European goods more expensive and cause Europeans to buy from Temu instead
Temu is under active investigation for breaching these laws, anyone operating within EU is subject to those laws, not just European companies (e.g. https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/news/commission-ope...)
Then show me the handful of European, medium-sized companies competing for customers. The problem is that you pass DMA, DSA, GDPR, etc. which Google, Apple etc. can fight for years in court and if they have to pay a few billion, so be it.
Instead what's happening is that European alternatives (the kind that's actually good, not the kind that's European and half as good) don't exist and the incentives to build one shrink because any scaling company is instantly hamstrung.
Competing in category chemicals:
BASF, Akzo Nobel, Lanxess, Air Liquide, and a bunch others
Competing in category engineering:
Siemens, Bosch, ABB, Alstom, ThyssenKrupp, Airbus and a bunch others
Competing in category metals:
Aurubis, Umicore, Norsk Hydro, Gruppo Riva, ThyssenKrupp, and a bunch others
Competing in category pharma:
Novartis, AstraZeneca, Novo Nordisk, Bayer, and others
Competing in category electronics:
Nokia, Ericsson, Alcatel-Lucent, Electrolux, Schneider Electric, and lots of others
> any scaling company is instantly hamstrung
You are assuming scaling this way is a long-term positive for consumers, investors, employees, and/or markets. I can find no such evidence.
European companies compete with US companies, including Apple, in areas where there is competition. In music software, music streaming, engineering and finance software, services and so on.
Apple has around 33% smartphone market share in Europe. Where is the US competition? Google at 3%. The actual competition is non-US in Samsung and Xiaomi. You can argue that Google competes with the Play Store, but then there is no competition with the Play Store on Android from the US.
Big US tech companies don't compete with each other as much as one might think. Most of their revenue comes from dominating one area or platform, with little competition from the rest.
So therefor the common conclusion that Europe should be more like the US to have competition also doesn't make sense as the big US tech companies don't have serious direct competition in the US in their core businesses.
You can't compete with the big tech companies by creating a Google with 3% market share in smartphones to compete with Apple, a Walmart with 6% online retail market share to compete with Amazon, or a Microsoft with 4% search engine market share to compete with Google.
In addition to them there are also countless small to medium sized companies that nobody's ever heard of, that don't experience hypergrowth but have slow and steady growth - especially in the B2B sector. I've worked at some such companies.
HN is sometimes incredibly biased towards consumer tech.
This is exactly what the GP was saying: you're looking at B2C companies as if they matter more, when in reality the vast majority of commerce (but not profits) is B2B.
Engineering plastics used in automotive and electronics applications. Styrenes for same.
Automotive OEM and refinish coatings - one of the bigger suppliers. Industrial coatings and paints.
Some of the bigger fungicides, herbicides, insecticides.
Catalytic converter components, battery components, cathodes, etc.
I do have one concern though.
Established markets are more entrenched, and hearing that smaller companies may have "slow and steady growth" here seems excellent.
Yet emerging markets move incredibly fast, and the goal is to discover those trenches and occupy them. Being held back in such a market can be troublesome.
So this is what I'd worry about.
Well, only if you make it a goal to occupy all the trenches. The EU has realized that it does not want all possible trenches occupied. For example: There is a lot of market share to be had in waste disposal by dumping it in the rivers and oceans. Regulation generally prohibits this, because we don't want our rivers and oceans full of waste.
Capitalist market self-regulation wouldn't have done this without external pressure (regulation, litigation, etc.) because the capitalist market would externalize all costs if it would increase profits.
Yeah, there's a whole lot of American exceptionalism going on in this thread, assuming the way things are done over here in the states is the best and only way. I live here and let me tell you, it's not. Just the fact that we have gigantic tech monopolies with more money than several nations combined is proof of that - that's not a thing that should ever happen.
Sure, but I doubt there's any country in the world that aspires for its citizens to be treated like American consumers.
Let me ask you guys something else, if EU hates large monopolist companies so much as you claim, then why are all its car companies monopolistic mega conglomerates that rule the world like Volkswagen, Stellantis, Daimler Benz, BMW, and Renault? Where's EU's equivalent of Tesla if they supposedly hate all these big companies?
I'll tell you why: Just like the US, the capital controlled EU also supports its domestic monopolies and only bitches about foreign monopolies in sectors they don't control and threaten their economic hegemony. That's the cold hard truth, everything else is just political hot air and virtue signaling for brownie points, and I'm pissed people are not only buying it but also parroting it when the goal to monopolize business sectors is as strong in EU corporations as it is in US and Chinese ones.
Europe is just more stricter now with controlling large (mostly foreign) corporations since its own economy lost a lot of ground to the US and Chinese ones (it has now half the real GDP it had 2 decades ago), and since it can't create new large companies, all it can do now is protecting what it has left from foreign companies taking over their turf. The upshot being that a lot of those rules are congruent with the consumer protections which also end up globally favoring consumers abroad.
You just named 5 companies, that’s competition.
US has 1/2 companies controlling 90% market share in several markets. That’s monopoly.
Perhaps the problem here isn’t that smaller brands don’t exist, it’s that if we give examples of smaller brands then you’ll argue
“Never heard of them. Thus proof that the EU is holding them back”
And if we mention household names then you’d argue
“Those aren’t small companies”
You’ve basically crafted an impossible to satisfy condition. A question that would be equally impossible for you to satisfy with US firms as it is for EU firms.
———
By the way, there’s quite a few car manufacturers that are small listed here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automobile_manufactu...
A few of them are relatively big names despite their small company size, for example Noble Automotive.
Tesla Q4 sales: https://ir.tesla.com/press-release/tesla-fourth-quarter-2024... approx 500k.
So Tesla are not the biggest anymore (which honestly surprised me).
Anyway, I’m not celibate. It’s just an excellent vehicle, if you don’t care about hivemind strangers glaring at you.
We don't need cars from fascists.
To be fair, that’s not what they said. I believe they’re asking where are the car companies of Tesla’s size and market position.
Like, Tesla are very small (in terms of cars sold) but very large in terms of valuation. Seems like a once-off, not something that would be replicable (anywhere).
Really? Because look up on the history of VW, BMW, Porsche, Fiat, etc and their founding families, some of who still own a large part of the shares of those companies today. Most of them worked with fascists no problem, some by force of the era some by opportunity but none of them opposed them.
You see this is the typical European hypocrisy that I dislike. Pointing fingers that Elon is somehow a fascist cause he raised his arm once, but Porsche or BMW who used slave labor from work camps is somehow not fascist now because ... reasons I guess.
Explain me that with logic and reason, and not with the "Elon is a fascist because reddit told me he is".
LOL, what?
Tesla has a bigger market cap than those companies COMBINED. And more. How is it a "medium" player? I don't agree with that market cap, to be clear.
It seems that Tesla is the Schrodinger's automotive manufacturer: snappy young upstart when that's convenient, world's biggest/strongest/brightest when that narrative is convenient.
I will just go to the record store get some vinyls.
It only costs to somehow keep doing the abusive things they exist to prevent.
It's impossible to express how little sympathy this deserves.
I use our product, it's better than GCP for my use cases.
We've got Hetzner in Germany doing the same thing we are.
And how do you compete with the big tech companies without it? It's been decades without anyone being able to do it. Not in Europe and not in the US. OpenAI might have a chance, but they also have billions.
The days where someone could drop out of school and start a company in the garage is over. Cost of living is up, so is competition. Companies need to expand and regulation like GDPR makes it easier to do so instead of having to deal with multiple countries regulation. The US always had an advantage in regulation like the DMCA.
To spell it out, before regulation European companies had to...
Deal with privacy regulation of each country. Which in the EU was supposed to be similar, but wasn't entirely. With GDPR not only is it the same in the EU, but other countries are now following the same model.
Register for VAT in every EU country it sold (enough) products in. Making many not sell to other countries at all until Amazon ate their business. With VAT MOSS you only register in you own country.
Accept many form of payments with many different fees since credit card adoption and cost could vary wildly. With interchange fees capped you increasingly only need to accept common credit cards.
Pay large roaming charges when traveling, making starting services like Uber or Airbnb less relevant since you couldn't assume someone had data in another country.
Try to compete with big tech companies that were charging for access to their platforms while minimizing their taxes through royalty payments, VAT deals and offshore holdings. Giving them a huge advantage. This is still the case, but lesser so.
For actually running a company it is a lot better now.
There are other problems with EU regulations. Some things are natural monopolies or in other ways doesn't do well as markets. Privatization and state-aid rules prevent European countries from effectively managing these areas. Any advantage Europe had over the US in cost of living and public services is rapidly diminishing.
I don't care about any companies like Americans do with American business centric laws that hurts normal people. Life isn't about lowest price at any cost model. Buy from china (as everyone is doing but try to hide it) if you want low cost. I don't give a damn if all those companies die for not complying GDPR, fuck them.
This is a very inaccurate view. I’ve worked with multiple SMEs and no such “complexities” ever become operational challenges. Even as a indie developer, my compliance is a default provided I’m not trying to do something shady.
Looking into the EU regulations, in most cases what they want you to do (or not do) is common sense.
The biggest headaches/issues are normally local regulations (country specific or even more local). The EU directives are more frameworks with a lot of flexibility and well grounded on common sense + expertise. How the different countries implement them in their own laws (with their own historical laws) is a different story.
The US has 50 sets of regulations and I don't hear anyone complaining. Although they should - you're almost certainly controlled by California law because, surprise surprise, complying with 50 sets of regulations is hard.
The DMA (that this article is about) applies to gatekeepers (massive companies like big tech), not mom and pop startups
The same company can have provide CPSs, with different status. For instance, Google is a designated gatekeeper of Android (OS) and Google Maps (Intermediation), but not Gmail. So the DMA won’t dictate anything related to Gmail, even if Google is a gatekeeper in other areas.
It's not national law that can be bent locally, it's EU law that applies to all companies of certain size.
I think the EU learned the hard way that they can't rely on its members to prioritize common interests
(see Ireland vs. Apple tax avoidance, Germany vs. Car evolution, Austria vs. Reduction of Russian influence, Hungary vs. everything)
But that model you describe is cracking: Cost of living is going through the roof in Europe, taxes/social contributions going up every year, etc.
The problem is that Europe is like an old, rich person who now lives off of the principal of their wealth. For a person that's fine because they'll eventually die. For a government, you should strive for an environment that lets you keep growing wealth.
Cost of living is increasing in the US too (in large part due to geopolitical reasons), and social contributions are rising because of demographic factors. I'm not sure how market liberalism is magically going to fix that latter issue.
Re: demographics. It's relatively straightforward: To keep contributions constant while supporting more people, you need either:
-more people via immigration (which is extremely tricky to get right) who are net contributors, not beneficiaries of social systems -massively increased productivity through innovation/technology -cut benefits from social programs
If you do none of those things, the systems will either collapse or you need to raise taxes/mandatory contributions which are de-facto taxes.
> Add to that feel-good green initiatives like a packaging initiative that might lower packaging waste from European companies, but more likely will just make European goods more expensive and cause Europeans to buy from Temu instead.
Does this actually happen or are you just making shit up?
Is Temu exempt of any packaging requirements?
Are you arguing that 27 different sets of laws was a better approach? That these countries would just gladly lie down and never regulate the societal-level harms, systemic lawbreaking, and massive infringement of privacy across the board? I don't think so.
For a moment the political system in the US seemed to get to the same conclusions as the EU under Bidens FTC and anti-trust cases. But the conclusions of that remain to be seen.
There's the EU-Inc initiative that the EU has basically made pointless (by wanting to introduce 27 new standards, not one, just making things more complex).
Note that I'm not arguing for zero regulation.
There are no 27 sets of laws to do business in Europe. It's not perfect, but it's a SINGLE MARKET, if you comply to the EU regulation you are allowed to sell everywhere.
It does however not absolve you from additional local market demands to be competitive, i.e. local language support, service infrastructure, etc.
For example: Miele is one of the largest washing machine manufacturers in Europe. They have their front panel translated to local languages for most of its markets. You can sell a washing machine with a English front panel, but you won't be able to compete in e.g. the German/Italian/French market
To be fair, the regulations are there because companies are out-of-control paperclip maximisers. For example, the cookie banner didn't have to be obnoxious - companies choose to comply maliciously to adhere to the text and shit over the spirit of the regulations, which have to become more and more verbose and explicit.
The DMA really isn't particularly complex though. And what complexity it has only becomes complex once you're a manager of a whole consumer platform (a "gatekeeper" in its jargon).
To wit: your point is backwards, the DMA is structured such that the only companies that need to bear its burdens are "big tech or Europe's legacy players". If you're a little company wanting to add a paid app store to your Tiny AI Robot Virtual Experience or whatever, go nuts. The DMA absolutely won't stop you.
If you compare annual revenue to GDP all of a sudden these so called maegacrop are tiny.
Likewise, market cap is measured in monetary units, dollars, euros, etc., while GDP is measured in money per the unit of time: $XXXX / year.
Merely doing monopoly regulation won't help. We have to actually destroy the monopolies.
That said, you can't argue that this isn't protectionist - we simply don't have any gatekeepers here, so if we're fair the DMA is only hitting international competitors (except Spotify maybe?)
Zalando has three enforcement actions against them since June 2023
Booking.com has one
Technius (mainly streaming) has two
WebGroup CZ (Adult entertainment) has five
edit: I looked it up - you are talking about the DSA (digital services act) while I was talking about the DMA (the one including the gatekeeper specification) - so that's not really what I meant....
Booking would love that to be the case. And last I heard, Zalando is currently fighting the EU over having to comply with the DMA.
The DSA tells platforms how they must keep users safe and transparent, the DMA tells the largest gatekeepers how they must behave toward competitors and business users.
It looks like you're right that Zalando is on the DSA list, though.
It hardly cares about unions beyond what the ECHR and ILO treaties demands, i.e. it's obviously not left wing. If it was inherently left wing it wouldn't have the kind of parliament it has, but rather something like Yugoslavia or the DDR did.
It's also not conservative, hence why that movement has had to bolt on militarisation and stuff like Frontex.
If you know of some other institutionally left wing bureaucracy you consider more appropriate to use as an example, name it.
Like, lots of the Treaties are pretty neo-liberal (private services, competition is always good, privatise stuff) but lots more are more left wring (the anti-monoploy stuff, the social charter etc).
Really though the EU is 27 governments in a trenchcoat, so it tends to reflect those governments (which change over time).
The social charter is firmly liberalist, though not distinctly of the neo- flavour.
Due to the institutional structures and processes EU rule making tends to be quite resistant to immediate political fashion. For one the power of framing from interest and lobby groups is quite strong, hence the influence from expert groups and lawyer like people. It's why conservatives are pushing towards a kind of United States of Europe direction, they'd prefer a centralisation of power in areas currently governed by the founding agreements.
Yeah, look it could go either way.
> Due to the institutional structures and processes EU rule making tends to be quite resistant to immediate political fashion.
I don't really agree with this. For an example of why not, the AI act is a good one. This was a great Act that got a lot of LLM nonsense pumped into it following ChatGPT. While I get why that happened, I would have preferred that they wait, as the original stuff made lots of sense, and the less well thought through AI/LLM stuff significantly weakens the act.
> It's why conservatives are pushing towards a kind of United States of Europe direction, they'd prefer a centralisation of power in areas currently governed by the founding agreements.
Can you give me some examples of people (national governments particularly) pushing for this? I think that lots of governments are pretty happy with inter-governmentalism even though it has lots of problems.
Socialism means "corporations are owned by the people working in them", as in co-ops. State-owned corporations under brutal dictatorships are in no conceivable way "worker-owned". They all called themselves socialist just as they called themselves democratic - as in, basic propaganda.
This is very relevant in a discussion of left-wing VS right-wing economies. The Soviet Union and China are firmly in the right wing in reality, just as much as Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy were. They just had different propaganda.
A small note: state owned companies under actual Democratic societies is a more complex topic on the left-wing VS right-wing debate, that I won't go into here.
As soon as it's possible to run efficiently a large enterprise (Thanks to the telegraph, and an extensive rail/road + automotive network), economies of scale will favor consolidation.
I recommend using more precise language about what you are talking, at the moment you just sound very confused.
https://www.foiaresearch.net/sites/default/files/styles/body...
I would consider ALDE center-right still, and S&D the first left coalition.
> "They managed to convince the courts that iPadOS is a separate operating system to iOS (it's not), which delayed iPadOS being designated as a gatekeeper for almost a year. They are currently challenging all of the rest: the iOS, Safari, and App Store designations, and successfully managed to avoid iMessage being designated at all. They have taken the DMA law to court for an apparently ambiguous comma in article 5(4) - the payment one, and for somehow infringing on human rights law in article 6(7) - the interoperability one."
Looking at the actual filing[1], Apple says:
> "First plea in law, alleging that Article 6(7) of Regulation (EU) 2022/1925 is inconsistent with the requirements of the European Charter of Fundamental Rights and the principle of proportionality, and that Article 2(b) of the European Commission Decision of 5 September 2023 is unlawful insofar as it imposes the obligations under Article 6(7) of Regulation (EU) 2022/1925 on Apple in relation to iOS."
For context, here are the full contents of Article 6(7):
"The gatekeeper shall allow business users and alternative providers of services provided together with, or in support of, core platform services, free of charge, effective interoperability with, and access for the purposes of interoperability to, the same operating system, hardware or software features, regardless of whether those features are part of the operating system, as are available to, or used by, that gatekeeper when providing such services."
[1] https://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf;jsession...
It's clearly a win for Apple.
In no way am I suggesting that Apple are on the way out, but they have definitely started to turn the same corner that IBM and Microsoft have in the past. They are becoming seen as 'big business' instead of 'challenging underdog'.
That early built up reputation has got them far, and I would say has continued on for about another decade or so after the iPhone launch. Since that, their coninued lawsuits and anti competitive practices have been more and more prevalent in mainstream media, and that previous reputation is now begining to tarnish amonst normal consumers. When the standard user sees them as big business and not the challenging underdog anymore, it paves the way for a new cooler small tech company to come and steal their bacon.
I believe that tipping point has come.
The decline takes a long time to set in though. MS had lost the plot by 2012 (the release of Windows 8), but they’ve been shambling on for more than a decade since then.
Since then their reputation has been slowly eroding with the average consumer with the combined stagnation of product design, and the string of high profile anti consumer and anti competitive moves highlighted in the media. We have seen this before in big tech, and I look forward to the next cool disruptor taking their place.
They were also doing visits to universities showing how great it was the BSD / NeXTSTEP foundations of OS X, for doing UNIX related stuff.
Similar to how NeXT used to position itself against Sun, and other UNIX workstation vendors.
During my CERN stay at 2003 - 2004, they did visits to our IT telling more or less the same.
Had the coloured Macs with OS X Aqua or the iPod failed the market, that was it, yet another footnote of remarkable computing history company now gone.
We techies always saw it, but the average consumers are only just begining to catch up.
I'm nearly there myself. The problem is, and what the EU in theory is trying to solve, is there's no real competition. My choice is Apple, which while an anti-competitive PITA, provides some real nice quality of life features and some privacy protections, or Android which can be a mixed bag from needing to connect every new phone to my computer and use ADB to get rid of crapware, or Pixels where Google is increasingly expanding Gemini's tentacles into every aspect of your life to harvest data all while taking actions to slow down Graphene OS by limiting access to device trees.
Linux is fine enough on the desktop, but for everything else? (Phone, watch, etc.) I can either live within the walled garden and just accept it, or take my pick of crapware loaded devices, or sketchy vendors that don't patch their stuff, and have all my data sold to the highest bidder.
We desperately need more competition in the mobile & wearables space, and I don't mean many different flavors of Android, I mean more competitors that care about user experience, preserve your privacy to an extent, and aren't using the platform as just yet another way to serve ads and harvest data.
TANSTAAFL. User experience costs money. Privacy costs money. Not serving ads is an opportunity cost for more money.
Take away the app store royalties, and the obvious path forward for Apple is to compromise on the other legs of the stool.
Linux will never have the UX of macOS simply because a lot of what makes macOS great is boring and tedious work, and nobody does that for free.
And I must admit, this phone has already had a good run. If it lasts that long, I’ll be impressed for sure.
Siri being bad is a huge flashpoint on this issue, and I think its causing far more negative sentiment than Apple will admit or even knows about. If they had any intelligence left in their leadership, they would have just paid ChatGPT $10B/year, wrote a nice system prompt, and that's Siri v3. They could have done that in literally 2023, keep investing in their own models, maybe come 2027 or 2028 flip the switch. Instead they went so far down the rabbithole of personal context that they built nothing, meanwhile there's intermittent reports on reddit and elsewhere that Siri has begun to lose the ability to even set timers for some people [1] (I have not ran into this issue).
My take is that we're going to see this sentiment get worse in Q3/Q4 this year when iOS 26 drops. Liquid glass is actually wildly divisive among the people I've shown it to and who are using the betas. Some people like it, but some people really dislike it. When you add that on to their other issues; I think overall the next two years are going to be pretty good for Samsung and Google.
[1] https://ethanbholland.com/2025/07/11/apple-has-lost-its-mind...
Apple isn't in the position it is just because they make factually good hardware or because of their business practices - they are where they are because the competition constantly shoots itself with a sawn off shotgun.
Tech savy windows users that are trying out Apple are finding that it very much doesnt 'Just Work' anymore, and that sentiment is starting to creep out more and more.
Take a look at Linuses recent evaluation of macOS by using only a Mac for a solid 2 months. His conclusion is that it is no better or worse than windows, and definitely doesnt 'Just Work'.
His metric for "just works", like many users, is "works like Windows". Such a metric is inherently flawed because any piece of software will always come up second-best to Windows.
When he did his Linux experiment stuff, he approached everything with a Windows context. And, when things didn't work the same, he didn't sit back and say "hmm, is this new way of doing things better, or worse?". No, he immediately rejected it because it's not like Windows.
And look, I get it, it takes on the order of decades to learn an operating system inside and out. I still find Windows GUIs I've never seen before in my life. But the way he approaches software reviews is incredibly frustrating. He takes the most closed-minded mentality and then acts surprised when it doesn't work.
Even with all the faults and degrading quality, it's still above any of proprietary alternatives, particularly Windows. I'm running the Tahoe developer beta, and in comparison to my Arm surface laptop 7, it's still light years better. I have no problems with Bluetooth, which is an endless struggle on Windows. I don't deal with windows update failures, windows installer service crashing and requiring a PC restart to install an MSI (happens constantly on the Arm devices), I don't have copilot being shoved down my throat, I'm not nagged to start an Office trial, or redirect my folders to OneDrive, or have ads in my app menu, etc.
Even Apple at its lowest is still a better experience than the alternatives because the alternatives just suck worse, and have chosen the path of data harvesting and monetizing the hell out of its user base over anything else.
Thats your subjective opinion based on what you do on a computer and how you like it to work. Thats absolutely fine, just dont state the like its a fact. The only real fact you can say is they both have pros and cons, and its up to each user to decide what their personal preference is.
Related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43243075
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34299433
This wouldn't be much of an issue, of course, if Chrome would just run on iOS like it does on any other OS, so Google can implement PWAs themselves.
This was the way developers were supposed to develop apps for the iPhone when it was released, before Apple introduced the App Store.
Jobs framed it that way, but IIRC, all you could do is create bookmarks. Creating an icon on the Home Screen? Impossible. Reliably storing data on-device? Impossible. Backing up your on-device data? Impossible. Accessing your on-device contacts, photos? Impossible.
Also, Jobs made a vision statement about web apps in June 2007, but Apple announced a SDK only four months later (in October 2007) and shipped it in March 2008.
⇒ I’m fairly sure he knew about that SDK when he made that statement.
Apple invented installable mobile web apps.
Link about the needed metatag: https://www.mobilejoomla.com/forum/4-feature-requests/330-ip...
Steve Jobs introducing web apps as the way to develop apps for the iPhone in 2007: https://williamkennedy.ninja/apple/2024/01/30/steve-jobs-int...
I'm not 100% sure no other mobile OS allowed this before to be honest, but I'm pretty iOS is the one that popularized it.
Also that was precisely the idea behind Windows 9x Active Desktop apps.
Symbian I just never had an Phone expensive enough to use like that.
In the end none of them really worked out I guess.
You do understand that the reason it doesn't is because Apple won't let it, not that Google don't want to?
Google does something quite similar, though; Chrome can install applications into Android's app drawer, but that requires privileges other browsers can't attain, needing to resort to things like widgets instead. Firefox doesn't care about PWAs and Apple doesn't care about any platform but their own, so it's not as obvious a problem, but Android is full of "you must be the manufacturer or Google to compete" permissions. Android is just a lot better at fair competition than iOS, to the point you'd barely notice.
The problem is rather that PWAs would prove a viable path for universal cross-platform applications, taking away the gatekeeper role the OS-vendors have.
Paradoxically PWA-support is also part of the "we're no gatekeeper" narrative, so it's in the OS-vendor interest to keep it maintained as a hampered alternative to native apps.
No it can't. The web will never support what's necessary for parity with native apps. Imagine trying to implement Liquid Glass in CSS.
Second (even though it's completely beside the point), especially Liquid Glass could be implemented in PWA, because it's a rendering effect the OS could put on top of appropriately tagged elements of the application. And voila, the same webapp could render in Liquid Glass in IOS26 and in less-gaudy Liquid Glass in IOS28, and meanwhile in no Liquid Glass at all on devices that don't have it...
Android accomplishes this by allowing devices to connect to private app stores and repos, which enable companies to issue their own apps on their own terms. As Apple plays hard ball on this front, the only way is to use a PWA.
Install and discoverability is still hidden. Push is gated behind install. Safari’s scroll bugs haven’t been fixed despite us extensively documenting them, emailing to Safari’s leadership and raising them every year as the number one bug.
The number one thing we’ve asked for is third party browser engines on iOS.
What goalposts do you think have moved?
Smart phones took over from personal computers, because people want something which works and they hate having to fiddle with their device, trouble shoot and fix things. They don't care that they can't install an Arch Linux terminal on it or download torrents. And if they need something more pro, they go for an iPad or a Macbook when they can choose. Openness is only important for programmers and people who love to mess with their device, not for the public at large.
I can get root access to my pixel.
I can replace the operating with an open source fork on my pixel.
Google is not using its monopoly on the hardware to get a monopoly on the software - they're competing on software primarily on its own merits and the convenience of being the default.
No other phone company that I know of even develops their own operating system.
Apple really is unique in their attempt to control the software that runs on the mass market general purpose computing devices that they sell.
Apart from being irrelevant and whataboutism, this is the narrative Apple is playing, particularly towards its userbase.
The EU regulation doesn't focus on Apple in any way, the purpose of the DMA is to have objective criteria to identify a scaled market of digital goods with an uneven playing field for all players.
The EU DMA has identified that Apple created a closed market of significant size, made themselves the gatekeeper and invited companies to compete there. But Apple participates in the market also as a player, and skews the playing field in their favor.
So it's an unjust market where forces are unable to flow freely, and the EU is attempting to rectify that.
The reasons why Apple is in such public focus on this are #1 because they operate an unusual amount of closed markets and #2 because they WANT this: it is part of Apple's strategy to rally publicly against the regulation and shape a different perception of it.
Apple creates vertically integrated devices. For many people, Apple dictates their entire digital life - far more so than any megacorporation on the mere level of, say Google, could ever hope to, considering Apple owns the hardware, software, and everything in between. So they are in a position shared by no other company - they are entirely unique in this. You cannot buy a device with entirely Google-designed hardware and software - Pixels with Android come close, Chromebooks come close, but nothing reaches Apple, even without custom silicon. I would say the closest company that exists in terms of vertical integration is Oxide Computer, but those aren't consumer devices.
So it's not that Apple is the only company doing this. It's also not that they're "doing it worse than any other company". It's that when they do this it affects people on a level not shared by any other company. It has a much larger impact than anybody else ever could.
For the record, I don't mind Apple's vertical integration, in fact that's one of their main selling points for me. It just gives them the greatest possible leverage to implement these sorts of practices.
I don’t really understand this distinction. How is eg a Pixel 9 Pro running Android with GMS on a Tensor any less entirely Google-designed than an iPhone 16 is entirely Apple-designed?
Android is developed by the Open Handset Alliance[0], which is not just Google:
Its member firms included HTC, Sony, Dell, Intel, Motorola, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, Samsung Electronics, LG Electronics(formerly), T-Mobile, Nvidia, and Wind River Systems.
I will say though I'd never heard of the Tensor until now, that's very interesting. I guess I am out of date on Pixels.
Apple owns manufacturing and patents for most of the tech they use in their phones (e.g. batteries, biometric sensors, and so on). Google Pixels use third-party suppliers (e.g. their fingerprint sensors are usually from FPC, Goodix or Qualcomm), they follow the same sets of protocols as other Android devices, and they use many of the same drivers provided by the third-party component vendors. For this reason I also wouldn't say the Microsoft Surface is vertically integrated. At best it's designed to work well with the software that's on it, and the software has had some features added for the device. Maybe that's some measure of vertical integration, but not quite to the level of Apple.
Apple certainly doesn't own everything; for example the actual display panel in an iPhone usually is manufactured by Samsung or LG Display. In my opinion though they still own enough to be far more integrated than Pixels are.
If I buy a Google phone, no one is going to comment on it. If I buy an Apple, or a Tesla, or luxury vehicle, people are going to comment on it.
If Apple is known to be scummy and you buy it, it makes you look bad. I think we are seeing that with Tesla now, I doubt too many liberals are buying a cybertruck.
_How_ do they claim that this section is inconsistent with the European Charter of Fundamental rights?
Maybe they are just different-thinking, artistic, humanist underdogs after all.
The only exception to this is I bought the game, Vampire Survivors, no wait. It was free. (because of clones in the app store) Anyway.
The funny thing is I do actually have like 100 (free) apps installed. I just never use any of them except for Brave. I basically immediately forget about them the second I install them because just using them is so awkward. They know they have a usability problem but they can't really square it with their massive app ecosystem except in the most slowest, methodical way possible. In the meantime, more UI annoyances are popping up twice as fast.
iPhone used to compete well a decade ago in usability for things like copying text from a webpage into an email. Despite the phone being much larger, I find it much more difficult to do today, perhaps because selecting text is just so unpredictable with the way web standards have become a pile of cruft. Despite whose fault it is, ultimately it's much worse now. I would only bother trying that on a desktop today unless absolutely necessary.
Sometimes text just becomes impossible to edit in certain circumstances. There's like three different things that can happen on a tap and hold and none of them are consistent. It feels absolutely random which one it does. I used to be able to select text from images, now I have to go through two to three cycles of "hold tap menu" -> "select text from image" until it works. It actually still works fine on my old iPad. How is the regression this bad?
The keyboard touch areas also seem offset from Android and I end up one row off too much of the time.
Now that's not a big deal until it happens 3 times in a row randomly and now something that would take less than half a second on a keyboard is taking over 20 seconds. Not only that the random behavior is extremely frustrating which just makes you avoid it in the future.
It's not "just", because you have to switch from the more natural "tap where you want to edit" to a separate gesture, which also takes longer and is less precise. You might also use a different keyboard with better layout/symbol visibility that doesn't support this gesture
Do you know why QRCodes are by far the most popular banking system? Because, Apple didn’t like it if apps use NFC for payments that’s not Apple Pay. There was a time BLE beacons had to be iBeacons too etc. it’s really decades of pressure in all kinds of ways.
The worst time ever was Swift 1.0 + Core Data, two broken things combined, that was like Dark Castle on CD-i.
This has been a myth for the last decade. I'm even using GNU/Linux on my smartphone, which is arguably not ready for the average consumer but can be good enough for the HN audience.
Think about banks, insurance companies, TV broadcasters, train timetables and services, cars management, etc.
I believe iOS App Store has been groundbreaking specifically in how it allowed a solo developer to start distributing work to millions of people across the entire globe with very little friction, taking care of things that are not just boring but actually not in reach of an individual—pricing in different currencies, accounting under different legal and tax systems, zero friction installation, discovery (at least before it, thanks to the aforementioned qualities, became ultra competitive and overwhelmed by businesses who outsource development and/or by less than scrupulous people wanting to earn a quick dollar), etc.—and just getting you paid. If there was a comparable precursor that I am not aware of, I would be keen to know.
Play Store Apps is contemporary to App Store, no?
From now on I'm an Android user and only building PWAs.
There's nothing complex and impossible about removing some "if" statements responsible for code signature enforcement.
For reference, in 2023, Apple produced a little less than Romania or Hong Kong, and a little more than Egypt or the Czech Republic.
Hong Kong is small (though not a lot smaller than the Czech Republic); Egypt is big.
--- edit ---
I accidentally compared Apple's revenue in 2023 to the IMF forecast of GDP for 2025. For 2023: Apple produced very slightly more than Hong Kong or Nigeria, and a little less than Malaysia or Iran.
Nigeria is even bigger than Egypt. It still produced less than Hong Kong.
I agree - such a small player like checks notes "the 3rd most valuable company in the history of humanity" has no chance at implementing these troublesome rules.
Iran's GDP is artificially depressed.
One of surface, it's a lot LOT more work than that, the very obvious is "it's probably not if, but assumptions made everywhere, so it's not remove a condition but add a lot of check and rethink the whole process to ensure it's still consistent and safe";
Two, that's not what the issue is. It doesn't matter if it takes a lot of work or not. Nobody would accept something like "unfortunately, it's impossible to do all the complex engineering to comply with the YourCarCannotHaveA50PercentChanceOfExplodingWhenStarted regulation", which is an exagerated exemple on purpose; whether it's hard or not has nothing to do with anything being discussed, it's only a PR cop out.
These sort of things can be tricky to refactor and more complex than they first seem. For example I recently spent the past 12 weeks or so just moving some fields around on a CRUD app (not adding or removing - just changing their order!) because there were assumptions built on assumptions built on assumptions about what order things are in and what comes first and what has already been done or not and so on. What ostensibly seemed trivial, actually required almost a complete rewrite of whole parts of the CRUD app to overcome the assumptions and implied behavior of what happens when and how.
(Disclaimer: I may be wrong, I haven't done much of my own research, it's just things I read in various articles over the years)
On the surface, it's easy to do. But that is also based on the assumptions where they had to maintain some first party apis vs now having to create and maintain them so that third parties could use it. If they are committed to security which apparently DSA mandates, they have to devote many resources on it to ensure there are no threat vectors. Plus, there is no set guidelines on how much the APIs need to offer, it will be another session where competition asks for more and they will be asked to do that too.
I agree that a lot of websites (mostly news websites) have the "ad tracking or subscription" model, and I'm not sure if there has been a clear ruling in it yet, but maybe the DMA makes this stricter for Meta since it is a Gatekeeper
But DMA regulators dont agree calling it a false choice and asking meta to monetize by non personalized ads. The thing as you mentioned is how other publishers have the same model, which was never objected by any authority under GDPR either (so they clearly seem to think the model is valid). Its obviously a sticky situation where rules are different for different companies in the same jurisdiction when they are offering the same thing.
A counter could be whether if Meta isn't allowed, would no one else be allowed, but you already know the answer to that question.
It's unfortunate that Apple thinks of these as opportunities to lecture them on their own laws instead and unsurprising that approach doesn't work.
I understand a situation where what they want is literally impossible via tech, but then if EU is already talking to others in the space, they would have the same understanding. Otherwise, why keep the regulations vague?
Based on various accounts it does not seem these workshops are looking at arriving at a consensus either. Morever, it seems Apple did consult with EU regulators while rolling out their changes.
Apple knows the intent of the law and thus they know what to do. They just don't want to and so try to but-actually their way around it with bad-faith interpretations like they would in other systems. What they don't get is that that's just not how things work here.
> When interpreting EU law, the CJEU pays particular attention to the aim and purpose of EU law (teleological interpretation), rather than focusing exclusively on the wording of the provisions (linguistic interpretation).
> This is explained by numerous factors, in particular the open-ended and policy-oriented rules of the EU Treaties, as well as by EU legal multilingualism.
> Under the latter principle, all EU law is equally authentic in all language versions. Hence, the Court cannot rely on the wording of a single version, as a national court can, in order to give an interpretation of the legal provision under consideration. Therefore, in order to decode the meaning of a legal rule, the Court analyses it especially in the light of its purpose (teleological interpretation) as well as its context (systemic interpretation).
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2017/5993...
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/browserenginekit
They needed to engineer, maintain, document and support a whole class of APIs so that third parties can create their own competitive browser engines (that offer JIT, etc) while still maintaining iOS sandbox security. There are going to be hundreds of frameworks, thousands of APIs, that will need to come to ensure compliance with the DMA
Apple has a significant engineering challenge to turn their current operating system into something that allows side-loading similar to what Google offers. It's not a matter of "commenting out an if statement"
The current developer SDKs Apple offers are strongly tied to their services, which cost them money to run. So first thing is, they have to decouple that so developers can implement applications using a baseline SDK that does not use Apple services (no iCloud, no Maps, no HealthKit and so on)
I think it would be great for users if they did do this. It would be akin to what Google does by shipping and updating Play Services separately from the base Android install
The reason I linked BrowserEngineKit is because if you want to do this properly, you have to build something like Apple has built with that framework (which was built to comply with these policies). Take for example, implementing your own JIT: because arm64e uses pointer authentication, the system uses PACs to ensure that pointers into executable code have not been tampered with. Apple now develops and supports a whole slew of APIs like `be_memory_inline_jit_restrict_rwx_to_rw_with_witness()` in order for developers to manage this themselves.
You saying "just let their pocket computers run software users download and install" is not like every single other computer ever made and sold. This is a gross oversimplification of the modern state of computing, both on mobile and on desktop. There are reasons you don't want random developers loading code into your OS kernel, and Windows and macOS both have protections for this (though the CrowdStrike crashes recently shows what happens when those protections are lax!)
For example, I don't think it would fly that they could say to the EU: users who want a third-party browser just have to enable root access and lose access to all Apple services and authentication
Well. I guess they'll have to choose between opening it up like every other company does or acknowledge that it's a separate pay for service then.
They do a lot of that kind of thing and my answer for all of it is the same: Open it up to everyone or acknowledge it's a pay-for cloud service that has nothing to do with the actual phone OS. If people have root they can (and will) develop their own services that won't need that which would comply with the DMA.
Hell, just releasing my own personal code as open source — auditing it, decoupling libraries, removing internal stuff, it's a huge multi-week effort for me to do. For any company with as much code as Apple, it's pretty daunting
We believe in the same thing, our devices should be free like speech. But the whole thing turned into a show because some rich software companies don’t want to pay Apple 30% while they have no problem with other platforms like gaming consoles.
Why would you think they don't have a problem with the cut game console manufacturers take?
It's also different kinds of companies: Epic and Spotify have quite different concerns, for example.
Because they haven't sued them in the US nor lobbied the EC to label game console manufacturers as "gatekeepers".
The record labels are charging artists up to 50% for an album and nobody is even betting an eye about it or talking about regulation. That's why I find all this noise so artificial.
Apple initially did that to protect the ecosystem from malware and make sure all apps meet their quality standards. Also to make distribution easy for indie developers. All commendable goals. But as the iOS market share grew, this turned into a very convenient revenue source that they can't let go now.
The digital market should be regulated for sure but what’s happening is a bunch of companies who are in the digital market (and not regulated themselves) exploiting the public sentiment and the regulatory processes.
Spotify and others fail to mention that they were able to access billions of Apple customers without paying a single dime to Apple initially which is unheard of in business relationships.
The whole "user agreement" thing is one of the biggest problems, because it means Apple thinks you buying an iPhone doesn't inherently entitle you to the advertised functionality of it.
Which is, to out it mildly, highly misleading and potentially illegal. The "small print" shouldn't contradict the big picture. You can't pretend you're selling a device and then turn around and declare that those sales were only about raw hardware and not actual functionality. That's not how products work, and most importantly, not how consumer protection laws see it.
The reason why Apple is so adamant in this line of reasoning is clear once you factor in the App Store rationale. From that perspective, any time a third-party app runs on a user's device and calls iOS APIs in order to actually function, it's not part of what the user actually paid money for. Any execution of any software that uses those APIs is an additional transaction altogether, dealt with separately through the iOS EULA. In short, Apple's position is that any time iOS does anything, either by default or powering a third-party app, it's not actually part of the functionality that was paid for in full by the iPhone's owner, because the owner never paid for ANY functionality at all, only the hardware.
According to the App Store policies, if I remember correctly, technically all the customers belong to Apple. Although, the developers are also correct to see it the other way around as well.
The ecosystem was built on the assumption that hardware would be sold with its own profit margin and software would have its own separate profit margin to sustain its own operations, tools, and libraries.
The DMA made the entire software branch unsustainable and everybody thinks that Apple earned enough and they should give the software for free. Well, it's their platform and they're entitled to profit from it as they're pleased. Even the European Commission admitted that as well, because saying otherwise is akin to confiscating their intellectual property. I wouldn't bet the house on it but I think Apple would give up the European market before the core technology fee.
Yes, Apple may deserve a cut when a user was acquired thanks to the app store alone. Like in that case when you're an indie developer and the app store putting your app listing in front of potential new users is genuinely helpful. However, to many developers, and especially large ones like Spotify that do their own marketing, the app store is a hindrance. It's an obstacle they need to clear. It provides no value to them.
Spotify is able to "access billions of Apple customers" because Spotify spends millions on ads and because statistically some people who would like to use Spotify on their phone happen to have an iPhone. Apple has no part in this at all. Simple as that.
Apple designs and manufactures incredible hardware and software. The ecosystem they created is beautiful, secure, and intuitive to use. When it was first announced, many people started using it even before they allowed apps on it. Apple later launched the App Store and allowed 3rd party developers access to their platform in exchange for a percentage of the sale price.
And this is where most people trip, it's their platform, not an open ecosystem. Apple is granting Spotify access to billions of Apple's users in exchange for a cut of the sale price. It doesn't matter if one person bought a subscription or one million, the platform still belongs to Apple. And in exchange billions of Apple customers are likely to purchase a subscription from Spotify.
If a company builds a 50,000 people capacity football stadium, and I open a concession stand in there in exchange for a percentage of the sales, can I say I want to sell to all these people without paying my contractual obligations? Spotify is free to sell their subscriptions and install their applications wherever they like but that's not the contractual agreement they had with Apple.
Private ownership is essential to our economy, Apple created this platform and their own it. Forcibly taking it from them would give all the wrong signals to everyone else about what could happen to them next. Who knows, maybe someone says you voted for the wrong party.
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Digital marketplace, not just Apple or gatekeepers or whatever, must be regulated from the first principles. A couple of rich software companies cozying up to regulators and trying to force changes that will increase only their profit margins is not the way to do it in my humble opinion.
No. Those users control themselves. They are not Apples users. They own their own device and they are free to do whatever they want with the hardware that they own.
> the platform still belongs to Apple
No actually. The device is owned by the user.
> billions of Apple customers
They aren't Apples. They own their own device.
> e but that's not the contractual agreement they had with Apple.
Or instead of that, they can completely ignore apple's copntract, and force Apple by law to allow them access to this market. If apple doesn't like it, then they can leave the EU entirely, or accept 10s of billions of dollars in fines.
> Forcibly taking it
Its not Apples. The device belongs to the user.
> must be regulated from the first principles.
Ok, and what about the first principle of "A user owns there own device and should be free to pay Apple exactly 0 dollars for the ability to install spotify on the device that they own".
I'm not allowed to install any software I want on my car's computer, the platform belongs to them. They don't provide the tools, libraries, the know-how, or even sue the people who share it online. And similarly, according to Apple's EULA the devices cannot run any app that is not approved by Apple and they can even revoke their approval or even disable the phone.
Those were the license conditions the hardware sold under, which sounds very user hostile. Regardless, nobody has to buy their products, they chose to buy it because the benefits it provided surpassed the limitations. When Spotify created their developer account they knew what the limitations were as well. This isn't an open platform. One can sue Toyota to get access to install Spotify to Corollas and get another 500 million customers, but that also wouldn't work either.
The only thing that can stop Apple is people not buying their products and developers not making apps therefore reducing the value of their ecosystem. Only then they will by themselves would open the ecosystem, which they should've done 5 years ago.
Regarding the EU forcibly taking stuff over. Well, if push comes to shove, do you think the US would allow a 3 trillion dollar American company to be bullied, go after European companies or would they react in a really unpredictable way?
Apple devices are successful because they provide a great value. They didn't just sell the hardware like Nokia did, they kept delivering software updates and spend billions of dollars sustaining the ecosystem. The limitations were put to improve user experience, for example they didn't allow apps to run continuously in the background so that users can have all day battery life. The high level of control they have allowed them to provide greater value than other ecosystems which brought more users and so on. This requires continuous work to keep it running and they're entitled to be paid for their work.
And again, nobody has to buy their products, you can buy other products and install whatever software you want on those, and do whatever you want there. Android has a bigger marketshare and some people still use Nokia or Blackberry.
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A digital marketplace consists of everyone that participates in the digital economy not just Apple. All the websites, service providers, apps, hardware manufacturers, users, companies, and their interactions.
When someone buys a car, they usually don't expect to run third-party software on it. They use it to get to places. They expect to use the built-in entertainment system to listen to music and maybe use CarPlay or Android Auto, and that's it.
When someone buys a smartphone, they expect to be able to install apps on it. That's the smartphone thing, that's what sets it apart from dumbphones. Third-party apps are what sells smartphones.
> Apple devices are successful because they provide a great value.
Uh sorry??? It may have been true 10 years ago, but an iPhone costs around $1000 now. That's outrageously expensive for what it is. You can say that about midrange Android phones, but definitely not about iPhones. You pay this much and still don't get to actually own the damn thing.
> for example they didn't allow apps to run continuously in the background so that users can have all day battery life
How is that related to the app store? Android does that as well. An app only gets to run in the background if it starts a "foreground service" which shows a persistent notification.
Sandboxing apps and enforcing their behavior does not require limiting what the user can do with their own device.
> This requires continuous work to keep it running
It absolutely does not. If iOS stopped getting updated 5 years ago, no one would've noticed. It's been a finished, feature-complete product for a long time.
Security is relative concept. For most people being able to browse internet, add/remove apps, and be sure that they will not break things goes a long way.
I think Apple has done a great job of protecting non-technical people from a lot of the possible harms of malware. There's a lot of incentive for them to make sure security is handled right. I'm convinced going back to the 90s and giving every software developer full access to users phones would create a lot more problems than it would solve.
But only when they can be overridden. MacOS around 10 years ago is a good example. It came out of the box in a foolproof state — only apps from the app store or registered developers would run, and SIP is enabled. But if you know what you're doing, you could disable both those things without any loss of functionality.
It doesn't seem like the average Android user is worse-off because of that, security-wise.
But iOS requires that everything be signed by Apple in one form or another. Even debug builds of your own apps you run on your own device from Xcode. IMO, it is absolutely unacceptable to market your devices as general-purpose ones, make the SDK public, but still be an intermediary in app distribution for no good reason whatsoever. I'm surprised the EU is so seemingly patient with Apple's clearly contemptuous conduct.
If Apple wants to offer something similar, now, they are going to have a lot of work cut out for them.
You're not thinking this through, it's not a magic button Apple presses. They are going to have to develop a ton of frameworks just to get something like installable APKs.
Apple allows developers to use iCloud and Maps for free. Presumably because you distribute through the App Store. So if they allow for side-loading they're going to have to lock down and split their App Store "services" into a separate framework — hey, sounds familiar? Just like Google Play services.
Separating out all of Apple's authentication layers, paid and cloud services, and ensuring apps can be cleanly distributed without dependencies on those things it not a trivial engineering exercise.
I'm not trying to imply that Apple should not comply with the DMA. I believe they should. I also believe that it would be a seriously complicated thing to extract their App Store services from their developer APIs in such a way that people could develop against a baseline SDK sans Apple services.
You think side loading on Android cost Google "nothing" to implement and maintain? No, it costs them engineering resources to support that feature. It's a good feature to support and it's beneficial to users. But it's not free, it doesn't magically insert itself into the Android codebase if they "comment out an `if` statement" as the GP suggested.
Also, Android is gradually adopting many iOS-like permissions and security models. We recently updated our Android apps related to reading and writing to the file system. Why is that? Because the free-for-all they shipped with was heavily abused by developers.
There's a severe lack of character in Tim Cook, I think the best thing to come out under his reign is the M-series hardware and return to sane computer design. He's timid, and his penny pinching fuckery is costing Apple a lot of goodwill that's a lot more precious and harder to gain back.
Maybe it's a shareholder problem, whatever—the early 2000's spirit of Apple was splendid.
Are you comparing Cook to Jobs as an Apple investor or as an Apple customer? As an Apple customer, not an investor, I don't care at all about the company's stock market valuation.
Investors seem to love Tim Cook. Warren Buffett recently said that Tim Cook made more money for Berkshire Hathaway than Buffett himself did. But as an Apple customer, I don't give a crap about Buffett or Berkshire either.
The difference between Cook and Jobs is that Cook is a money person and not a product person. According to his biographer, Jobs lamented that Cook was not a product person. And IMO the products have suffered under Cook: not in terms of profit, but in terms of design and functionality, the things a discerning customer cares about.
I think what's special about Jobs was that, ironically, he had no special training. Of course he was smart, ambitious, and charismatic, but he wasn't an engineer (before Apple, Jobs outsourced some of his work to Woz and took credit for it), wasn't even a professional designer, and he certainly wasn't an MBA. He had no qualifications whatsoever to start a tech company. Jobs was simply a computer enthusiast who had the great luck of meeting a computer genius, Steve Wozniak. Since Jobs was ordinary in many respects, he was able to empathize with ordinary computer users; that was one of his primary roles within Apple. Jobs cared deeply about the user experience, from a first-person perspective. Few if any other massive tech companies have been built by such a founder.
Cook has plenty of leadership vision. He's led Apple into the VR space with Vision Pro, and has pushed into services/content (Apple Music, Apple TV+, Apple Fitness+), and wearables (Beats acquisition, Apple Watch, AirPods). He's defined Apple as a company that cares about privacy, and it's because of him that Apple is so stubbornly fighting regulation in the EU and US.
If anything, you could criticize Cook for being too ambitious, if you thought that his attention to these areas came at the expense of iPhone & Mac quality.
My God, No. The privacy thing started with Steve Jobs. Steve was such a private person he would change his car every few months to avoid having car plate. He started the war against Android on privacy when 99% of media including HN thought Google was NOT invading on privacy and were the media darling.
>actually a number of key decisions made by Tim Cook
>He's led Apple into the VR space with Vision Pro
Engineer Led.
>has pushed into services/content (Apple Music, Apple TV+, Apple Fitness+),
Eddy Cue lead and actually worst decision ever. The services you listed are burning money. And as I have repeated again they are only there to dilute the real profits from App Store and Google Pay search.
>wearables (Beats acquisition, Apple Watch, AirPods).
Beats acquisition was about streaming. None of the hardware headset engineer actually made into AirPods. AirPods are done by old guards Apple who Steve brought in from B&W. Apple Watch was Willian's and Jony Ive project.
As someone on HN once said which I think sums it up perfectly, Apple has been left on AutoPilot since Steve Jobs passed away.
I still see unopenable devices, batteries glued to death and even more closed systems. Next they reverted to liquid glass UI, is that sane?
Back in the early 2000's when Apple was still the cool, alternative, underdog computer company, it did things very differently, but for the same reason as it always did: make a profit.
Apple Watch for example gets a huge boost from being the only wearable that integrates with iOS. But it has a lot of quality issues, and is by far the worst Apple product in my opinion. Apple would have a lot more incentive to improve it if they had to compete with other smart watches on a level playing field.
The Apple watch suffers in your scenario. Not necessarily Apple.
I think even for Americans who like the anti-gatekeeper regulations, you might worry about the precedent for the powers European governments get over these tech companies as the other thing they want is removing as much encryption as reasonably possible, which you may not want. Those changes seem quite unavoidable though so maybe it’s not worth thinking about them together.
The more damning thing IMO is the whole ‘America innovates Europe regulates’ trend. I think it seems pretty important that the EU (and U.K.) work out how to escape the anti-innovation troughs they have found themselves in. Or perhaps by 2050 the EU will largely be a tourist destination where citizens watch ads for the American tech companies to make profits to be highly taxed by the EU to fund subsidies for the German auto industry to sell cars to Americans and Chinese.
This is mostly a false dichotomy that Apple likes to push. macOS has strong security with sandboxing, code signing, malware scanning, etc. I have never encountered someone among my direct acquaintances who had their Mac compromised. Yet, it's perfectly possible to make an alternative app store, circumvent code singing, etc. on a Mac.
Even with the freedom of an EU iPhone, you can still choose to completely stay in the Apple ecosystem and pretend that the extra freedoms that you have gained aren not there.
The thing is that Apple knows that people will purchase from an alternative reputable store if the prices are lower because the margins are lower. Or that developers will move there because they can increase their margins. And then Apple will actually have to compete on price (app store fee) and features.
It has very little to do with security and mostly with Apple wanting to keep their 15%/30% because it's hugely profitable.
the precedent for the powers European governments get over these tech companies as the other thing they want is removing as much encryption as reasonably possible
This does not make any sense at all. Why would you remove encryption, you could just accept an additional root certificate as a user and be protected by the same encryption.
I think it seems pretty important that the EU (and U.K.) work out how to escape the anti-innovation troughs they have found themselves in.
We are doing fine, we just don't believe in profit over everything. Moreover, the current US tech feudalism makes it harder to innovate and develop competitors, because you only get to do what the feudalist overlord permits you to do. Regulation is necessary to make it a fair marketplace again.
The EU and other countries had some pretty compelling competitors which got more or less slowly crushed by the US.
After over 30 years of this, a handful of the remaining US megacorps turned around and started fencing their own little profitable field, disallowing anyone else to even try to get in.
EU is the only non-purely adversarial entity to uphold laws also to these seemingly untouchable megacorps.
What I find weird is that there is a selective memory in people who are either from the US or pro-big businesses where on one side they are openly against these claims the EU makes (calling them anti-innovation) while also being a fervent supporter of "liberal" policies like medicaid, right to repair, warranties and such. As if they do not realise that they stem from the exact same place, and often they do come directly from Europe.
I'm at a point where I believe that if someone is against what the EU is doing against these megacorps (not saying everything the EU does is gold btw) has either A) vested interest in such companies, B) hates the concept of EU and anything it touches, C) they are rich and don't really care about anything, D) not very bright.
This is the wish of a vocal, but powerless minority, not an actual law. It often gets misused as anti-EU FUD.
I'm not sure how we could enforce that, but maybe the law could stipulate that a certain minimum percentage of users must use 3rd party app stores, or use web apps. They should pay a fine if less than say 5% of apps are distributed outside the app store, or if less than 5% of people use a 3rd party browser engine.
If a competitor wants market share they have to build a better service. Forcing users to go with a bad deal gets the incentives all wrong and is actually bad for consumer choice.
Except when Apple ensures that it always comes out ahead when competing. It's not a level playing field.
Look at Apple Music vs Spotify - ignoring the self-preferencing iOS does to Appke Music, the App Store ensures that Spotify will always make less money than Apple Music. Spotify either has to hand over 30% to its competitor, raise its prices (and lose customers, while still paying its competitor), or just not offer in-app signups. Do you reckon Apple Music has to give away 30% of it's subscriptions?
It seems bonkers that the only option to have a competitive music streaming service is to make your own operating system or mobile phone. That's unhealthy.
The 30% fee also drops to 15% after one year, and there are companies that negotiated lower fees. Also, 'doing it yourself' won't be free, you still need some party to do payment processing, customer service and returns which also can come close to that 15%.
The argument you need to make your own phone seems a bit far-fetched. There are multiple music apps making money on iOS.
Or they can leave, if they think that makes more sense for their business.
On the contrary, Apple does pay the money... to the artists. Which is something that Spotify doesn't do as much.
https://virpp.com/hello/music-streaming-payouts-comparison-a...
Strangely, despite this rather obvious market power (monopsony) that Spotify has in negotiating below-market rates with their suppliers, the EC has not seen fit to label them as a "gatekeeper".
I'm sure it has nothing whatever to do with having their headquarters in Sweden.
However, instead of defining the market rules, the process has been more about competitors and companies (who’re not happy with Apple’s success) trying to take a chunk of their business.
An iPhone is not a general computation device, it’s not an open ecosystem. Neither PlayStation, but there’s enough competition in the gaming console sector so nobody comes up with complains about not being able to install any app they want.
Edit: spelling and clarity.
And yet it's many people's primary computing device. That's exactly the problem.
As a historical example, consider telecommunications. Phone networks were "natural monopolies" for many decades, and people must have found it hard to imagine any other way back then. Without regulatory intervention enforcing competition, we'd probably still be paying double-digit cent amounts for long-distance calls.
Apple entered the smartphone market as an almost bankrupt company and replaced the giants of its day like Nokia and Blackberry. And some other company will replace them someday. The DMA discussions started really good, I had really high hopes of it, but it got almost hijacked with various companies to publicly negotiate contracts with Apple and not for the public good as a market regulation.
Nice bad faith strawman, where'd you buy it ?
Apple is trying to have its cake and eat it too, selling off their devices as general computing devices and opening it partly to external developers, taking away a massive portion of profits and threatening them when it's not advantageous to them. The entire point is that you _cannot_ build a better service because Apple is blocking you.
Sony isn't getting this treatment for the PS5, despite qualifying well for being a gatekeeper, because there's no pretenses of being an open market.
If Apple wants out of this, then let them close down the App Store.
Regardless, I wanted to point out the obvious: each new broad regulation increases the cost of operating in the market where said regulation applies. The gatekeepers of today might not leave, but every new potential newcomer will calculate is it even worth it to operate in a market like that? Maybe it pays off to invest hundred of millions into lawyers and lobbying instead of technologies? Or maybe we'll skip EU market altogether (for reference, according to a courtroom statement Apple gets 7% of their revenue from Europe)
The solution is pretty simple: Apple is no longer allowed to run an "App Store" or distribute a pre-installed web browser. This part can be split apart as a separate company if they prefer that to shutting it down. When you look at Apple's taxable income, most of it goes to Ireland. It's very bizarre to call a company that makes everything in China and holds all of its IP in the EU a US company. It isn't.
Apple does what the Chinese government tells it to (see Apple in China by Patrick McGee.) If they pulled the EU stuff over there, Apple would cease to have new hardware to sell.
I’m curious: if Apple and Google are using workshops as delay tactics, what’s the EC’s real enforcement power here? Are small fines enough leverage or do we need tougher mechanisms, like mandatory timelines or public transparency on third-party integrations?
Why am I being so absolutist? Well, because we know this to be the case thanks to the Epic injunction compliance brouhaha. Employee slack chats show quite clearly that the "scare screens" were deliberately worded in a way that would deter any users from pursuing the linkout payment option, while we now know that it was all a ruse to prevent that option from ever being competitive with Apple's 30% IAP, only for economic (monopolistic) reasons.
We now have court-affirmed precedent of Apple intentionally using privacy and security as a veneer for darker, anticompetitive motives. After that, there's not much more to honestly debate.
Policies with protectionist side effects (even if they're not marketed as such) have historically led to local businesses being less capable and less competitive over time. Whereby there is no need to compete or innovate as the business is insulated from genuine competition.
My assumption is that the EU believes this will lead to local businesses having the breathing space to grow to a critical mass where they could compete more robustly.
Looking back to historical examples we saw that businesses that benefitted from artificial protections were less competitive than ones that did not receive a benefit. We also saw that favoured businesses tended to be trapped inside the market where they receive those protections, i.e. they were optimised for those conditions. We see this more contemporarily with protected Russian and Chinese firms.
I am also curious if state-sponsored competitors will engineer a way around being labelled a gatekeeper. Such as by having a range of products with shared intellectual property spread across a number of legally discrete entities, effectively using a distributed form of anti-competitive practices.
But even if policies make companies less "capable" and less "competitive": that completely ignores what effect they have on society. I bet that a company that was given a free pass to use slavery would be very capable and very competitive -- but is that what we want for our society?
The EU rules also require a fair deal of transparency about these matters, so sticking one's fingers in their ears is not an option. Here for example you can view Spotify's very active schedule with the EU parliament:
https://www.lobbyfacts.eu/datacard/spotify?rid=365747616583-... (which includes various click-throughs to the official EU publishings.) That's an outsized representation for a business of their revenue and service model. It's on par with significantly larger businesses such as pharmaceutical companies and banks.
In matters concerning the app store, the EU met with Spotify not less than 65 times, prior to fining Apple for app store practices. In that same window of time Spotify has increased their prices when competitors did not, all while introducing no features (not even those which were promised), while all major competitors introduced a steady stream of innovation and near-unanimously froze prices.
With this you are directly observing the aforementioned symptoms of protected businesses: prices go up and the product doesn't improve. Meanwhile competitors not receiving those benefits are offering a more competitive product.
All of that being said, the EU rules can be good (ie: usb-c); the problem is that often they get co-mingled with bad protectionist policies.
EU looks set to be the only big enough institution with any spine or willingness to take this on. Will probably take years if it ever happens due to all this legal dance bullshit, but I really hope they win eventually, even if it’s just for the benefit of EU citizens (of which I am, sadly, not).
A lot of things nowadays rely on apps so not having a phone with either Android or iOS means it's increasingly hard to do stuff. For example, with 2FA regulation in the EU for banks, they effectively made their mobile apps indispensable for being able to make some payments. I shouldn't have to use either iOS or Android to bank but here we are. It's even worse when you can't even use a custom ROM because the apps refuse to work on one.
By playing it the way they did, with their public statement against the regulator, and half implementation clearly done to be non cooperative on purpose and all, they put themselves in a very different fight, now the question has nothing to do with this or that regulation, it becomes does Apple need to respect EU law to sell product in the EU. That's all there is to it anymore, by making it about compliance and who has a stronger grip, they forced themselves there; and it's obviously a fight the EU is not going to back down from (nor is it going to lose it).
I compare that to many moves from Meta, Google, Microsoft, ... Who played the same but knew when to back down and either do it or argue in a more court and legalese oriented manner.
I'm not sure why Apple leadership played it that way, maybe they have a stronger belief in the US administration ability to strongarm the EU into accepting a loss there, but at the point it's at, it has very little to do with the content of the regulation.
The only animating objective for Apple is money. Everything else is opportunistic
Apple is playing it that way because they are rallying their USERS against the EU. They want to create pressure from EU citizens against these EU regulations, and amplify their narrative also to US Apple users in political positions.
Unfortunately this strategy seems to work, there are already a few voices on how the EU taking offense with Apple's sole purpose of doing the best for its users, and that lawmakers try to force Apple away from this path...
Towards the users the narrative is never about revenue/profit of Apple, and never acknowledge their leading market position.
But the end user narrative also works for US government members with influential position but low subject-matter knowledge.
From the conclusion:
> Normally when the EU regulates a given sector, it does so with ample lead time and works with industry to make sure that they understand their obligations.
> Apple instead thought that the regulatory contact from the EU during the lead time to the DMA was an opportunity for it to lecture the EU on its right to exist. Then its executives made up some fiction in their own minds as to what the regulation meant, announced their changes, only to discover later that they were full of bullshit.
> This was entirely Apple’s own fault. For months, we’ve been hearing leaks about Apple’s talks with the EU about the Digital Market Act. Those talks were not negotiations even though Apple seems to have thought they were. Talks like those are to help companies implement incoming regulations, with some leeway for interpretation on the EU’s side to accommodate business interests.
> Remember what I wrote about electrical plugs? The EU is pro-business – often criticised for being essentially a pro-business entity – and not in favour of regulation for regulation’s sake.
> If Apple had faced reality and tried to understand the facts as they are, they would have used the talks to clarify all of these issues and more well in advance of the DMA taking effect.
> But they didn’t because they have caught the tech industry management disease of demanding that reality bend to their ideas and wishes.
When the EU attempts to legislate crypto backdoors, do you plan to say "If Signal had faced reality and tried to understand the facts as they are"?
Companies and individuals should fight against bad laws. And a press campaign is a legitimate, and sometimes effective, tactic for doing so. Different people may disagree about which laws are good or bad; I fully expect, for instance, that more people support the DMA than would support crypto backdoors. But it seems shortsighted to suggest that those who think a law is wrong should simply accept it anyway, rather than fight tooth and nail against it.
https://9to5mac.com/2022/11/09/everyone-option-airdrop-10-mi...
Then I suggest you rework your "good-faith" discussion methods.
You're answering a poster who explained how companies are onboarded to new regulation with a gotcha question about a law that isn't voted yet.
Once the law has been voted, you can still complain about it, but it is not wise to use the talks given to you by the regulator in order to help you adapt to new regulation as a soapbox for your complaints. That will burn goodwill with the regulator and make them discard any legitimate feedback you might have.
Or, in short, lobbying parliament is fine, trying to strong-arm regulatory bodies is not.
It's not just fighting a bad law. It's fighting the very foundation the EU is built on and that has guaranteed peace in Western Europe since the end of WW2.
Apple might not get this, because they don't have an understanding of European history. But that lack of understanding is exactly why they keep getting their nose bloodied in Europe.
I hope that it can and does, rather than allowing their product to be compromised by for-profit companies who enjoy local regulatory capture.
No one has to buy Apple products. There are myriad options. Those who push this regulation necessarily need to imply the opposite, as we see here.
It's false that consumer companies are widely compelled to grant third party access to their operating systems. This regulation is selectively applied.
If Apple plays hardball to the point that they are about to leave the market, we'll see if the histrionics were sincere or if it was dishonest manipulation toward encroaching on Apple's assets.
If Apple leaves then its regulation focused critics will have to buy other products themselves, continuously justify to the populace that having no Apple is better than a walled garden Apple, and continuously deal with the political fallout when that convincing largely fails.
That isn't practical. My guess is that this is bullying and bluster, and this looks to be Apple's guess as well.
Tim Sweeney is the only billionaire and computer scientist who's actually fighting against inequality. The big difference between him and folks like Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Larry Page, and Marc Benioff, is that while those billionaires talk about universal basic income to make up for the mass layoffs their tech is going to cause, Tim's out there fighting monopolies, hiring people, building tools for developers, and making games. That's why his HQ isn't in San Francisco. He's the only one who hasn't been brainwashed by VCs or sold out to greed.
He speaks for millions of computer scientists who don't live in the Valley and are using their knowledge of maths and physics to build things that help people, not hurt them. Because let's be honest, a future where billionaires keep getting richer and computer scientists are out of work, scraping by on UBI, begging billionaires for $10 more bucks a month, is a feature no one wants. And when I say "we" I mean myself, my colleagues, and all my students.
Tim, thank you. You inspired a whole generation. Keep fighting against Apple, Google and corporate greed!
Inequality matters.
- He sued Apple and Google for monopolistic behaviour. He's been fighting for fair access and better deals for all developers, not just Epic Games Store.
- His fight's not about open source or open platforms, it's about fair access, lower fees, and giving developers more control.
- He speaks for millions of independent computer scientists who build games.
- He purchased 7,000-acre Box Creek Wilderness (about US$15 million), fought off a power company's attempt to run lines through it, and donated a conservation easement in 2016 so the land stays wild.
- He's actually walking the talk. While other billionaires post about saving the planet, he's out there buying forests to protect them.
Meanwhile he doesn't substantially support the one option for computing that doesn't result in vertical control. He uses the tools that enable that control, rather than criticize their existence.
> He speaks for millions of independent computer scientists who build games.
Epic's apparent support for indie developers is marketing to grow his business. This isn't intrinsically a bad thing, but he isn't some golden saint. It also comes at the cost of catering to consumers, which is in large part why EGS has failed to gain traction beyond throwing free games at people in order to try to entice customers to their store. Key word: try. It hasn't worked.
> He purchased 7,000-acre Box Creek Wilderness (about US$15 million), fought off a power company's attempt to run lines through it, and donated a conservation easement in 2016 so the land stays wild.
Whatever. This is just billionaire philanthropy and $15m is a drop in the bucket to these people.
And yet he did not sue Sony, Nintendo or Microsoft. Each of whom represent a much larger share Epic's revenue than Apple or Google.
And he admitted in court that he was willing to throw all other developers under the bus if Apple had given him the discount he wanted for Epic.
This is the same person who told OpenAI he'd invest between 1 and 10 billion of his company's money if they focused on ChatGPT and speeding up the development of autonomous AI workers.
Not just computer scientists right ?
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-07-22/ubi-study...
Governments are supposed to protect workers, regulate industries, and make sure technology benefits everyone. Looks like billionaires and VCs who love monopolies are building the future on their terms.
That's why billionaires are talking about basic income before politicians do. They know the window for their survival is closing fast.
Because they don't expect that UBI money to come from their profits, but from the taxes paid by the working class.
They're just cosplaying socialists to score brownie points like they did with rainbow flags in the past, knowing it will be on other people's money, and it's all performative.
Edit: @pyman
>My biggest fear is that UBI can turn into a tool for control,
CAN?! It WILL be. The same way state pensions in Europe are used by the government for control of the population. "Vote for me and I increase your pensions. Step out of line and I cut off your pension and make you homeless like we did to that German woman protesting against the government."
EU isn't regulating AI for the good of the people, it's regulating it for control since they don't want to leave the freedom of speech and the freedom of opinion to entities they can't control that can tell people opinions that are not state approved.
It seems the other way around that governments need to bend backwards to the will of pensioners to get elected.
Written with sarcasm.
I am sorry but the argument that an app store and browser are comparable in terms of amount of spam is a deluded take. The core argument seems to be that since app store allows installing anything, so should browsers. The kind of changes that would benefit a smaller % of smart population, to the detriment of anyone else who can be convinced by a text to download any kind of content on their phone. The ones who push it would want it, but these are the kind of "features" on android that prevents me from giving my parents an android phone.
Let's stick with earbuds or watches, where the argument (e.g. Garmin) is that they can't create functionally equal devices to AirPod / Apple Watch, because not all APIs are open. I understand this point, since yes, Apple has a lot of internal implementation that only Apple can use for their devices. What I don't understand is the EU's standpoint of "just opening it up(!)". Let's say Apple would allow everyone to use all APIs to communicate with their AirPods/Apple Watches. Assume everything is open now - wouldn't that create chaos?
Another vendor could implement everything Apple does and release similar AirPods or Watch with whatever hardware quality - but what happens when Apple changes their internal implementation? Changes the implementation every week, because they optimize for THEIR devices. There is no official ISO standard, Bluetooth standard or whatever standard they are adhering to, they would just open up their implementation. I assume the EU would then say "this is against the spirit of the DMA, do not change your implementation so often", but this would seem like a very long cat and mouse game (it already is a very long process).
Why doesn't the EU define some interoperability requirements that gatekeepers need to adhere to in the EU market? This would make it easier for everyone. I don't get why it always is just the talk about "open it up" - that would be a start in terms of interoperability, no doubt, but that isn't the solution is it?
Yeah, but equal chaos to all. In the end the achievable experience for Samsung and Apple earbuds need to be the same. It does not need to be the best one.
If Apple wants to have the best experience, they should create for each improvement a new API version and tell it in reasonable advance to their competitors to allow them to equal the playing field.
And Apple is responding by not shipping features into the EU that it believes it will be forced to “standardize” and document for others’ use, like iPhone mirroring to Mac.