I have no doubt that Gruber will find reasons why the EU is bad and regulation is bad. At this point it's rather amusing how Daring Fireball (and many other American media) rants against regulation, and in another post complains about how companies exploit users.
Regulation is unfortunately necessary: the market isn't as magical as we would like it to be and competition is not a magic wand that makes everything good for users. Companies either become dominant, or universally screw over their users. Users either have no choice, do not understand the choices, or simply don't care.
I am glad the EU tries to do something. They aren't always right, but they should be trying. As a reminder, one of the biggest success stories of EU regulation: cheap cellular roaming within the EU. It used to be horribly expensive (like it is in the US), but the EU (specifically, Margrethe Vestager) regulated this and miracle of miracles, we can now move across the EU and not worry about horrendous cell phone bills.
They also capped credit card fees at 0.3% in 2015. It also included a prohibition on discrimination against any merchant based on eg size or category of goods sold. And as far as I can see neither Mastercard nor Visa had problems staying in business.
So you cannot compare it apples to oranges. There is much more regulation in EU.
In EU there is also more consumer protection by default, so charge backs can be rejected by merchants but a consumer can easily take a merchant to court. So capping card fees is also more reasonable.
Also, when a merchant goes bankrupt and customers perform charge-backs it would involve the entire payment chain. First merchant reserves, then acquiring bank, then MasterCard/Visa, then issuing bank (customer), and lastly the customer. With lower card fees, this has impact on the merchant reserves and their risk profile. Furthermore, acquirers can add additional fees on top if needed.
You can also get lower card fees in US if you have a low risk business model.
Yes! I forgot about this. The EU Interchange Fee Regulation (IFR) effectively eliminated the high fixed minimum fees that previously made small-value card transactions unprofitable for merchants.
The net effect of this is that in Poland, for example, you can carry your phone and no wallet, because you can pay literally for everything using your phone. And I do mean everything, I've recently been to a club in Warsaw and the cloakroom had a terminal mounted on the wall, people just tapped their phones.
Yeah, all too often discussion devolves into a religious war between free markets and regulation. Like they're somehow opposing forces. Markets are super cool and useful tools. Some regulation is good, some is bad, which exactly is which depends on your values and what you want to optimize for. Framing markets like they automatically do good, or ideas like "we need more regulation" or "we need fewer regulations" are all thought-terminating.
So far the DMA seems like a partial-win for technology users. I wish it enshrined the right to run software on your own computer in less ambiguous language, because as-is there are carve-outs that may let Apple get away with their core technology fee and mandatory app signing.
Even the most maligned lids attached to bottles looks stupid for 5 minutes but have the nice side effect of not having to hold the lid while you drink, which makes things easier most of the time you're holding something else
Yesterday, I was trying to get a voice memo out of my Apple watch - on which the recording was made. I switched from Apple last year. My cousin had an iPhone. Apple would not let me transfer the voice memo out of their eco-system. It's not on my iCloud and the watch can no longer be paired with any other iOS device (even temorarily with authentication to transfer a file)...unless the iPhone is registered to me. This is malicious compliance in the name of security.
And mind you, I own 3 Apple devices - 2 Macs and 1 iPad and the watch can't connect to any of those. I must be forced to buy a $1000 device just because I made the mistake of recording something on their watch. We need more regulation because of things like this and I would absolutely hate to live in a society where this is the norm.
If you are not using iCloud, you could try activating it (you get 5 gigs for free IIRC) and switching off everything besides the Voice Memos app. Then you should see the recording on your Mac, and should be able to export it from there. Definitely a shitty workaround, but you might be able to make it work?
Recently bought an apple watch for my mom and got it set up with her iphone. Almost instantly she notices that she cant accept WhatsApp calls on her watch, and after looking into it I found out that it was another one of those apple things where they assume youre obviously using facetime so that functionality isnt available for any other app. For context, in europe Whatsapp is the dominating messaging app and alot of people use it for calling as well as messaging. The apple watch is, as far as I can tell, a simple Bluetooth wearable with a speaker and a microphone, so the only reason its like this is that apple has a concept of how the device is "supposed" to be used and only lets you use it that way. After that experience I fully support all the regulations the EU is putting on apple to open up.
I was genuinely sure it’s not a problem, as I personally know quite a few people who do that. But I think they use either FaceTime or regular cellular. That’s sure weird a simple call does work in iPhone 4S (imagine a price for it in 2026), but doesn’t on modern Apple Watch Ultra, which is quite expensive.
Three months ago a commenter here on HN claimed to me that this will be bad for Apple users:
> There is simply no good way to make the API public while maintaining the performance and quality expectations that Apple consumers have. If the third party device doesn’t work people will blame Apple even though it’s not their fault.
And, competition probably can’t build for it anyway:
> It’s impossible to build Apple Silicon level of quality in power to watt performance or realtime audio apps over public APIs.
And:
> […] Apple has to sabotage their own devices performance and security to let other people use it. The EU has no business in this.
Well, I look forward to next year when we’ll have the receipts and see!
It's bad because Apple now has to (OFFICIALLY) support a wider range of devices.
And then there is less incentive for Apple to further improve this interface because any improvements will benefit non-Apple devices (i.e. do the foundational work but everyone else gets the positive exposure)
You mean it will benefit Apple’s customers, who prefer headphones not made by Apple? If only the incentive for Apple to improve their interface was that its paying customers will have a better interface.
I really don't understand people who defend Apple on this. The only reason I can imagine is that they're shareholders who don't use any Apple products, or shareholders who use exclusively Apple products and can't understand what sort of poor scrub might want an accessory not made by them.
Government intervention like forbidding led-based paints or asbestos in homes? Or government intervention like doing something about the ozone depletion? Government intervention like forbidding roaming fees? Intervention like requiring 3-point seat belts? Like progressive taxation? Like forbidding discrimination based on skin colour? Like air travel safety? Like a max ceiling on credit card fees?
I don’t see it as a matter of defending Apple, it’s really a matter of technical understanding and competence.
There are many reasons to criticize Apple, but wanting to not only control the exceptional ecosystem where everything just works as seamlessly as possible, but also wanting to benefit from all the work and focus that went into creating it, is understandable to me.
What I don’t think dawns on people is that this is an example of an intersection between what some call capitalism and communism mindsets, or it may be far more accurately described as the ants and the grasshoppers, the freeloader problem.
People like the iPhone for its having worked extremely hard to make its devices work really well, but those same people don’t understand how and why that behavior they like actually came about, so they start trying to “improve” things they don’t have the foggiest understanding about.
It’s a typical narcissistic type behavior and mindset of self-importance, that now that the hard work has been accomplished they’re here to take over and improve things they don’t understand and weren’t involved in creating.
It seems to be a mindset that totally infected and is spreading all throughout the whole West for whatever reason. People simply have no idea how what they inherited was created, let alone even know how to keep it going, not to mention fix anything.
Just alone the fact that it’s EU bureaucrats imposing these things makes it extremely unlikely that it is a good idea, considering not a single consequential tech company has been produced as a function of the EU. It is that obnoxious EU technocratic know-it-all hubris that keeps them even understanding just how little they actually know, which is so dangerous and reeks of malicious jealousy.
At least in the USA, the idiots in Congress are accountable to a constituency that elected them, and they tend to be able to discern that they simply don’t know enough to interfere with how Apple (for example) is doing what it does to produce the world’s best devices and services.
Not the EU and its blob of unelected bureaucratic despots and unelected Commission of dictators, it is confident it knows more than Apple about how to do what all of Europe cannot seem to actually accomplish. Europe has not even been able to emulate what the Asians have done by forking Android, but here they are, wagging their fingers telling people how it is. Why do Europeans not get tired of that pathetic attitude?
Frankly, I wish Apple had the non-binary balls to simply just cut off all iPhones in Europe rather than bend to EU despot dictates.
At least I can hold onto the gleeful spite that Apple may just use this as an opportunity to push people into buying more Apple products by demonstrating that, e.g., “your use of non-Apple headphones has caused your phone battery to drain 10% faster and damaged the battery by 5%”. It’s perfect advertisement… brought to you by the idiots in the EU bureaucracy playing tic-tac-toe strategy against grand masters.
> I don’t see it as a matter of defending Apple, it’s really a matter of technical understanding and competence.
So do I. And my >20 years in the business gives me the experience and knowledge to see through Apple’s FUD.
> […] but also wanting to benefit from all the work and focus that went into creating it, is understandable to me.
It is my device. I paid for it. If Apple thinks they deserve more money for what they did they are free to ask me, the customer, for more money.
> […] unelected bureaucratic despots
Aha, the dog whistle of the AfD brand of conspiratorial bullshit ”unelected” nonsense! Career bureaucracy is supposed to be certified and educated, not elected, because that is the only way they can properly implement the laws of the electorate. Bureaucracy still answers to elected officials, but they are supposed to act without political interference and provide specialist knowledge. For the same reason you do not vote on every captain and colonel in the military hierarchy, or every tax collector/auditor in your IRS equivalent, you do not vote on every bureaucrat in the Commission tasked to execute and implement law.
non-apple headphones work just fine with Apple products. In fact, Apple's bluetooth stack seem to work best among all the portable devices I come across (no random droppings, connects on first try etc.)
My iPhone has plenty of trouble connecting to various devices at times. God forbid it has to manage connecting to my car and my headphones at once. It works OK most of the time, but at least once a week it proves to be a problem.
Let’s call them bureaucrats, but let’s not forget that their baseline is to be public servants, while that of product managers is to increase profits :-) . I think the system is working as intended though, because increasing profits can be a great driver for innovation and service to the consumer, until it’s not and the “immune system” (the bureaucracy) must be called on to fight the uncontrolled pathological growth…
Brussels primary interest is the process, not the people.
If you don't think there isn't any "uncontrolled pathological growth" anywhere in the EU, then you should look at ALL OF THE LEGALLY SANCTIONED GOVERNMENT MONOPOLIES HERE.
Currently, on the AirPods side and not iOS side like the article covers, Apple breaks Bluetooth feature parity with other devices by not sticking to the Bluetooth spec with AirPods themselves.
For example, you need to root and patch your Bluetooth stack on your phone if you want to use all of your AirPods features on Android, and not because Android is doing something wrong, it's because the Android Bluetooth stack actually sticks to the spec and AirPods don't.
And even when you do that, you can't do native AAC streaming like you can with iOS/macOS. Even if you're listening to AAC encoded audio, it'll be transcoded again as 256kbps AAC over Bluetooth.
Even no name earbuds on Amazon manage to not break Bluetooth and can offer cross platform high quality audio over Bluetooth.
On the other hand, there’s been a bug open to make a simple harmless change to fix this in Android for 9 months, with no response from Google other than asking for reproduction steps as far as I can tell.
They do this on purpose if you didn't get it. Google will never "fix" this issue because they follow the spec. They shouldn't have to add an exception for AirPods.
I can stop music on my phone and immediately listen to music from my laptop. I have non-apple headphones, a non-apple laptop and an iPhone. There is no apple magic dust that makes this happen.
So this tap to pair won’t work in the US? The side loading stuff I can understand to restrict to the EU, but this just seems like a nice feature for everyone
If it were, they wouldn’t be asking. And you haven’t answered it either. Your parent comment is asking why the grandparent commenter thinks it makes sense to restrict third-party stores to the EU instead of having them everywhere.
Depending on how you look at it, there may be two distinct parts to this:
a) API to not just read notifications but also perform the notification quick actions (if any), e.g snooze for a calendar event, mark complete for a reminder, and of course reply for a text (SMS or otherwise). This seems entirely reasonable and ludicrous that it doesn't exist.
b) API to access SMS / Messages. That one appears to be heavily guarded because security / E2E (for iMessage).
I mention b) because a lot of times people invoke the problem a being b) (and possibly a problem in its own right, forcing one to use Messages for SMS) but really for watches a) is sufficient and probably much more relevant.
There's also a.1) API access
to media (images) in notifications.
In any case, DMA could definitely help crack both.
I mean I’d settle for the status quo and Garmin itself not deleting big parts of my watch faces.
The last update from Garmin did this to my Epix. Funnily enough the complications can still be activated if you touch the screen, they’re just invisible.
Yeah this would be weird if it's only for EU based companies. I think apple strategy is overall 'divide and conquer' making all different stuff working different in EU, Japan, UK, US. To this already many variables also if the user has account in EU and also if is living in EU or for how long. Their whole compliance is not robust and reliable making this in fact dead on arrival. Any maker relying on this will have more complains from customers. Customers will think that all non-apple solution are buggy and reliable and will stick with apple stuff.
> I think apple strategy is overall 'divide and conquer'
I think Tim Cook’s strategy is rather “hoard and extract as much money as legally possible, no matter what it does to the experience”. Selling tech products is no different to him than selling car parts of frozen meat. What matters to him is the pile of money at the end.
Likely not. FTA: “The changes to proximity pairing and notifications are only available for device makers and iPhone and iPad users in the European Union.”
Wow, it's almost as if regulations were necessary to curtail the worst excesses of capitalism and steer it towards user interest instead of maximal exploitation...
Regulation is unfortunately necessary: the market isn't as magical as we would like it to be and competition is not a magic wand that makes everything good for users. Companies either become dominant, or universally screw over their users. Users either have no choice, do not understand the choices, or simply don't care.
I am glad the EU tries to do something. They aren't always right, but they should be trying. As a reminder, one of the biggest success stories of EU regulation: cheap cellular roaming within the EU. It used to be horribly expensive (like it is in the US), but the EU (specifically, Margrethe Vestager) regulated this and miracle of miracles, we can now move across the EU and not worry about horrendous cell phone bills.
So I don't think it's entirely black and white.
In EU there is also more consumer protection by default, so charge backs can be rejected by merchants but a consumer can easily take a merchant to court. So capping card fees is also more reasonable.
Also, when a merchant goes bankrupt and customers perform charge-backs it would involve the entire payment chain. First merchant reserves, then acquiring bank, then MasterCard/Visa, then issuing bank (customer), and lastly the customer. With lower card fees, this has impact on the merchant reserves and their risk profile. Furthermore, acquirers can add additional fees on top if needed.
You can also get lower card fees in US if you have a low risk business model.
The net effect of this is that in Poland, for example, you can carry your phone and no wallet, because you can pay literally for everything using your phone. And I do mean everything, I've recently been to a club in Warsaw and the cloakroom had a terminal mounted on the wall, people just tapped their phones.
So far the DMA seems like a partial-win for technology users. I wish it enshrined the right to run software on your own computer in less ambiguous language, because as-is there are carve-outs that may let Apple get away with their core technology fee and mandatory app signing.
And mind you, I own 3 Apple devices - 2 Macs and 1 iPad and the watch can't connect to any of those. I must be forced to buy a $1000 device just because I made the mistake of recording something on their watch. We need more regulation because of things like this and I would absolutely hate to live in a society where this is the norm.
> There is simply no good way to make the API public while maintaining the performance and quality expectations that Apple consumers have. If the third party device doesn’t work people will blame Apple even though it’s not their fault.
And, competition probably can’t build for it anyway:
> It’s impossible to build Apple Silicon level of quality in power to watt performance or realtime audio apps over public APIs.
And:
> […] Apple has to sabotage their own devices performance and security to let other people use it. The EU has no business in this.
Well, I look forward to next year when we’ll have the receipts and see!
And then there is less incentive for Apple to further improve this interface because any improvements will benefit non-Apple devices (i.e. do the foundational work but everyone else gets the positive exposure)
Government intervention like forbidding led-based paints or asbestos in homes? Or government intervention like doing something about the ozone depletion? Government intervention like forbidding roaming fees? Intervention like requiring 3-point seat belts? Like progressive taxation? Like forbidding discrimination based on skin colour? Like air travel safety? Like a max ceiling on credit card fees?
Always?
There are many reasons to criticize Apple, but wanting to not only control the exceptional ecosystem where everything just works as seamlessly as possible, but also wanting to benefit from all the work and focus that went into creating it, is understandable to me.
What I don’t think dawns on people is that this is an example of an intersection between what some call capitalism and communism mindsets, or it may be far more accurately described as the ants and the grasshoppers, the freeloader problem.
People like the iPhone for its having worked extremely hard to make its devices work really well, but those same people don’t understand how and why that behavior they like actually came about, so they start trying to “improve” things they don’t have the foggiest understanding about.
It’s a typical narcissistic type behavior and mindset of self-importance, that now that the hard work has been accomplished they’re here to take over and improve things they don’t understand and weren’t involved in creating.
It seems to be a mindset that totally infected and is spreading all throughout the whole West for whatever reason. People simply have no idea how what they inherited was created, let alone even know how to keep it going, not to mention fix anything.
Just alone the fact that it’s EU bureaucrats imposing these things makes it extremely unlikely that it is a good idea, considering not a single consequential tech company has been produced as a function of the EU. It is that obnoxious EU technocratic know-it-all hubris that keeps them even understanding just how little they actually know, which is so dangerous and reeks of malicious jealousy.
At least in the USA, the idiots in Congress are accountable to a constituency that elected them, and they tend to be able to discern that they simply don’t know enough to interfere with how Apple (for example) is doing what it does to produce the world’s best devices and services.
Not the EU and its blob of unelected bureaucratic despots and unelected Commission of dictators, it is confident it knows more than Apple about how to do what all of Europe cannot seem to actually accomplish. Europe has not even been able to emulate what the Asians have done by forking Android, but here they are, wagging their fingers telling people how it is. Why do Europeans not get tired of that pathetic attitude?
Frankly, I wish Apple had the non-binary balls to simply just cut off all iPhones in Europe rather than bend to EU despot dictates.
At least I can hold onto the gleeful spite that Apple may just use this as an opportunity to push people into buying more Apple products by demonstrating that, e.g., “your use of non-Apple headphones has caused your phone battery to drain 10% faster and damaged the battery by 5%”. It’s perfect advertisement… brought to you by the idiots in the EU bureaucracy playing tic-tac-toe strategy against grand masters.
So do I. And my >20 years in the business gives me the experience and knowledge to see through Apple’s FUD.
> […] but also wanting to benefit from all the work and focus that went into creating it, is understandable to me.
It is my device. I paid for it. If Apple thinks they deserve more money for what they did they are free to ask me, the customer, for more money.
> […] unelected bureaucratic despots
Aha, the dog whistle of the AfD brand of conspiratorial bullshit ”unelected” nonsense! Career bureaucracy is supposed to be certified and educated, not elected, because that is the only way they can properly implement the laws of the electorate. Bureaucracy still answers to elected officials, but they are supposed to act without political interference and provide specialist knowledge. For the same reason you do not vote on every captain and colonel in the military hierarchy, or every tax collector/auditor in your IRS equivalent, you do not vote on every bureaucrat in the Commission tasked to execute and implement law.
I exclusively use non Apple headphones and I have no issues. I had AirPods for a while and I don’t remember them being better.
Apple has stopped improving long ago, and it’s not regulation that’s at fault.
If you don't think there isn't any "uncontrolled pathological growth" anywhere in the EU, then you should look at ALL OF THE LEGALLY SANCTIONED GOVERNMENT MONOPOLIES HERE.
End of story.
I guess "the regulations will continue until product management improves".
For example, you need to root and patch your Bluetooth stack on your phone if you want to use all of your AirPods features on Android, and not because Android is doing something wrong, it's because the Android Bluetooth stack actually sticks to the spec and AirPods don't.
And even when you do that, you can't do native AAC streaming like you can with iOS/macOS. Even if you're listening to AAC encoded audio, it'll be transcoded again as 256kbps AAC over Bluetooth.
Even no name earbuds on Amazon manage to not break Bluetooth and can offer cross platform high quality audio over Bluetooth.
https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/371713238
Some comments on the bug accuse Google of intentionally not fixing it to make people buy Pixel Buds instead of AirPods.
I wouldn’t say that myself, but then again I also wouldn’t say that Apple intentionally violated the spec just to make AirPods not work on Android.
They do that? Mine can't even switch quickly between my corporate and my own iphone.
Just curious: why do you understand they restrict it to EU?
They do so with third-party app stores.
And if they wanted to have airpods-like pairing to third-parties in US, they would already have.
The only reason they might bring this to US is customers will be royally pissed.
If it were, they wouldn’t be asking. And you haven’t answered it either. Your parent comment is asking why the grandparent commenter thinks it makes sense to restrict third-party stores to the EU instead of having them everywhere.
Previously, this was available on Android but not iOS as Apple didn’t expose the APIs for watches other than their own.
a) API to not just read notifications but also perform the notification quick actions (if any), e.g snooze for a calendar event, mark complete for a reminder, and of course reply for a text (SMS or otherwise). This seems entirely reasonable and ludicrous that it doesn't exist.
b) API to access SMS / Messages. That one appears to be heavily guarded because security / E2E (for iMessage).
I mention b) because a lot of times people invoke the problem a being b) (and possibly a problem in its own right, forcing one to use Messages for SMS) but really for watches a) is sufficient and probably much more relevant.
There's also a.1) API access to media (images) in notifications.
In any case, DMA could definitely help crack both.
The last update from Garmin did this to my Epix. Funnily enough the complications can still be activated if you touch the screen, they’re just invisible.
Will that mean we’ll see some last step assembly move into the EU, or does it only require legal presence?
I think Tim Cook’s strategy is rather “hoard and extract as much money as legally possible, no matter what it does to the experience”. Selling tech products is no different to him than selling car parts of frozen meat. What matters to him is the pile of money at the end.
We miss you, British Friends <3
But I wouldn't let that be the sticking point, y'all are too important to us to get hung up on it.