EU approves legislation to regulate Apple, Google, Meta, and other tech firms

There&#x27;s several very good provisions in this legislation (3rd party payment processors, non-preferential treatment for 1st party apps), there are several that have a mix of upsides and downsides (sideloading is one--I personally like knowing that Facebook can&#x27;t ask people to sideload some privacy destroying crap on iOS).<p>Then there&#x27;s:<p>- Allow developers to integrate their apps and digital services directly with those belonging to a gatekeeper. This includes making messaging, voice-calling, and video-calling services interoperable with third-party services upon request.<p>- Give developers access to any hardware feature, such as &quot;near-field communication technology, secure elements and processors, authentication mechanisms, and the software used to control those technologies.&quot;<p>Apps will use near-field communication technology and other mechanisms to track us (consider how many device related APIs have restrictions in web browsers for just this reason), and I think it&#x27;s credible that the interoperability requirements are going to be used to smash end-to-end encrypted messaging. You can have a decentralized end to end encrypted protocol. Can you retrofit every existing messaging service to use it in the short-term? Probably not.<p>As an end user, the things that give developers maximum freedom are not necessarily the things that let me use my device with maximum freedom. I support people who want a FOSS device that is in no way locked down. I just don&#x27;t want that, because I don&#x27;t want to play systems administrator for an always on tracker in my pocket.

This is huge. Forcing Apple to allow app side-loading, third-party payments, etc is going to wrest away control of the iOS ecosystem (and eat pretty heavily into their revenues [1]<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnbc.com&#x2F;2022&#x2F;01&#x2F;10&#x2F;apple-implies-it-generated-record-revenue-from-app-store-during-2021-.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnbc.com&#x2F;2022&#x2F;01&#x2F;10&#x2F;apple-implies-it-generated-r...</a><p>I hope some of these regulations spill over into the U.S. and the rest of the world.

Happy that I might be able to install something else than Safari. I want the Gecko engine on iOS. Sad that being in UK probably means we&#x27;ll ignore it because &quot;Brexit.&quot; I got a text the other day telling me that, since we&#x27;ve left the EU, roaming charges are back. Hurray!<p>Without making this about politics, this is a great step forward. Still unsure how Apple &amp; co. will make their proprietary video and messaging platforms &quot;interoperable&quot;. I doubt they&#x27;ll be writing an RFC any time soon.

I really hope Sony and Nintendo are classified as gatekeepers as well because this<p>&gt; Allow users to install apps from third-party app stores and sideload directly from the internet.<p>would be huge for Playstation and Switch owners.

Quite a few are commenting from their own perspective, as a consumer&#x2F;user of an Apple device, and whether you&#x27;re happy with it or not.<p>That&#x27;s not really the point. The emphasis of this legislation first and foremost is on developers. Whom need&#x2F;deserve a level playing field, instead of having the odds stacked up against them.<p>A return to more open computing should be celebrated, even if it remains to be seen what will happen.<p>And even if you&#x27;re a die hard fan of closed computing, nothing bad will happen. You&#x27;ll simply pick Safari, never sideload an app, and pay with Apple Pay. We can coexist.

This regulation is 5+ years overdue, but legislation always lags behind market conditions.<p>If the US&#x2F;other countries follow suit there will probably be a big unintended effect though: the diminishing of open web standards and Google getting final say about what will work on &quot;the web&quot; and what won&#x27;t.<p>With Firefox diminishing, Safari is the last bastion against a Chromium-only web.<p>There are lots of Chromium forks, but they own the project, and I doubt even Microsoft would take on any significant divergence from the upstream code base, considering the development velocity.<p>I would predict (native) Chrome graining a very sizeable market share on iOS within five years, driven in part by web app developers being happy to finally just focus on Chrom(ium) and add &quot;works best Chrome&quot; banners.

&gt; Make messaging, voice-calling, and video-calling services interoperable with third-party services upon request.<p>I hope this means WhatsApp will be somewhat interoperable with equivalent messaging platforms. But I suppose this is just designed to target iMessage. Or have I misunderstood?<p>&gt; Ensure that all apps are uninstallable.<p>Finally I will be able to uninstall Microsoft Edge.

It&#x27;s fun how Android users are so excited on behalf of Apple users in terms of letting Apple users install custom apps from outside the App Store. Being an Apple user for more than 15 years, I couldn&#x27;t be more happy with the fact that Apple has vetted the applications you find in App Store.<p>Also, naturally, App Developers are excited. Well, perhaps you should think about the users - we don&#x27;t care about you having to pay a cut. However, we really appreciate the experience from the App Store. Want to cancel a subscription? Just navigate to the one and only place where you can browse everything and cancel with a single tap.<p>I once purchased an Android device so see what it was all about. I found most of the apps were completely crap and the once that were good, were essentially just a copy of the iOS app. To be fair, this was many years ago.<p>I really hope that somehow someone interacts at a high level and gets the part about the App Store removed.<p>IF the consumers of Apple - for instance me - would like this part changed, perhaps we could instead put our money elsewhere, rather than rely on politicians to pro-actively deal with this.

It will be interesting to see what dark patterns Apple will come up with to resist this. I imagine every time you open Firefox you will get a popup window saying &quot;Do you want to use Safari instead?&quot;

This is excellent. As an app developer, I&#x27;m looking forward to side-loading, other browser engines and not being forced to use in-app-purchases.

This wouldn&#x27;t happen if Apple decided to cut their Apple tax to 15% or something. They already knew that this 30% is not sustainable. 15% would be still considerably higher than usual payment processors&#x27; but something justifiable given their massive investment into the platform.<p>But instead of taking this path, Apple decided to exploit this 30% tax for competition against other service providers. This is obviously unfair advantage, so sooner or later this kind of regulation was expected to come. I&#x27;m still not sure if Apple really believed that they could stop this kind of regulation, but they built their entire business structure based on a brittle assumption that they could retain full control on their ecosystem regardless of political landscape. Now they&#x27;re going to pay the price of making a wrong bet.

I&#x27;m personally very happy with Safari slowing down the over-arching progress of &quot;Web browsers are an application distribution platform&quot;, but I definitely see the value in this.<p>I am very excited about the prospect of having federation between communication platforms... imagine sending messages from iMessage to whatsapp?! great, just like in the mid-00&#x27;s!

I generally believe Apple, Google and others should be able to profit from creating some of the most useful, innovative and technically challenging products in human history (remember multi touch was not an affordable thing before Apple).<p>But, 15 years (since original iPhone) is about enough to reward the innovation. Beyond that point, it is the role of government to open up platforms to enable the next generation of competition and creation, otherwise things start to get stagnant.<p>That said, there aren’t a ton of things left that can’t be done without Apple approval (or rather, tons of things but not tons of value being blocked). Free speech seems like the big one and I do think it’s good for that to be officially supported (and require court orders to block rather than Apple&#x2F;Google orders).<p>I would be a bit worried about the the ability of the EU to regulate privacy as swiftly and effectively as Apple. If I go to a clinic, they ask me to side load an app while I’m sick, and that app has no real privacy protections…<p>Probably on balance, this will be good for free society, and come with the natural knock on effect of more freedom to harm yourself as well.

Like so often with new laws, I think a more general one would have been better.<p>Why is it about apps, app stores, developers, voice assistants and all that specific stuff?<p>In my opinion, it should just have been this: A company is not allowed to artificially restrict what users can do with the products they bought.<p>Then it would also not be allowed to restrict people from installing alternative operating systems on the hardware they bought.<p>Linux on an iPad! How nice would that be!

I love this just for these three rules:<p>&gt; Allow users to install apps from third-party app stores and sideload directly from the internet.<p>&gt; Allow developers to offer third-party payment systems in apps and promote offers outside the gatekeeper&#x27;s platforms.<p>&gt; Ensure that all apps are uninstallable and give users the ability to unsubscribe from core platform services under similar conditions to subscription.<p>and restriction on this behavior:<p>&gt; Require app developers to use certain services or frameworks, including browser engines, payment systems, and identity providers, to be listed in app stores.

I think California should add legislation to check the power of the European car makers. Make sure that the German cars interoperate with the Ford components and can be serviced by other independent car dealerships as well. BMW and Porsche should also share their advertising numbers.

Let’s start the list of UX that could be built if apple followed these rules starting tomorrow. What will be available to me that I don’t have now, and how will it benefit me, Joe P. Consumer? Keep in mind, I have no idea what a software developer does all day — I just want my email to work and these internet pop ups to be easier to close. What am I missing out on?

In case someone here knows but how is it even possible that EU can fine companies based on the whole world &quot;turnover&quot; (which I might incorrectly presume meaning profits) when their power is restricted to the EU space.<p>Re: this:<p>&gt; The DMA says that gatekeepers who ignore the rules will face fines of up to 10 percent of the company&#x27;s total worldwide annual turnover, or 20 percent in the event of repeated infringements, as well as periodic penalties of up to 5 percent of the company&#x27;s total worldwide annual turnover.

Oh wow, that&#x27;s quite a list. I wonder if any of it will end up having retroactive effects because<p>&gt; Ensure that all apps are uninstallable.<p>I REALLY want to remove some of this junk Samsung forced on my phone (while omitting screen record on this model.)

I love EU: &quot;Ensure that all apps are uninstallable and give users the ability to unsubscribe from core platform services under similar conditions to subscription.&quot;

I&#x27;m personally happy to stay inside Apple&#x27;s ecosystem, but believe that everyone should have the option to choose. This looks like good news, a step in the direction of being more in control of the devices we buy.

big tech does not want simple, but good enough to do the job, and stable in time protocols to interoperate with. Force the big to interoperate with the small, and not let the big crush the small, this is one of the whys of regulation.<p>For instance, in the case of the web: noscript&#x2F;basic (x)html. With basic (x)html forms, you can browse tiled maps, do shopping, interact with the online administration service, etc. With the &lt;video&gt; and &lt;audio&gt; element, the noscript&#x2F;basic (x)html browsers can pass an URL to an external media player, what seems missing is the type of streaming. I don&#x27;t know if you can specify the type of the href, HLS&#x2F;mpeg DASH&#x2F;etc, kind of a mime type for those. Then the ability to seek into a big video should be standardized, very probably an URL parameter to do this, at least per mime types if those exists, like t=xxhxxmxxsxxxms.<p>Those are extremely simple, do not require those horrible web engines and are enough to do the job.<p>The current javascript-ed web engines are insane and beyond sanity bloats (SDK included), locked-in by gogol&#x2F;apple&#x2F;mozilla via complexity and size.<p>The real hard work is into &quot;securing&quot; those &quot;simple&quot; sites against corpo(=state?) sponsored hackers to make those not work and promote corpo-locked software and protocols. That could be idiotic hackers pushing the web to use those corpo-locked software and protocols.

I see a lot of Apple Supporters are already calling for Apple to Pull out of the EU.<p>While this legislation applies to both Apple and Google. It was ultimately Tim Cook&#x27;s Apple that leads to all these changes. Not only did they refuse to actively engage with the EU ( or any government ), they threaten them by either limiting features, services or even outright pulling out of the country. Their standard PR responses were how many jobs they created via their App ecosystem. I would not be surprised if their next page in their PR playbook were to bring Steve Jobs out one way or another.<p>There are quite a few things I dont like in this legislation. But I also think Apple deserves it. Governments around the world have been waiting, but not until the EU, which represent 25% of Apple&#x27;s revenue made their move before they could follow. Now UK, Australia, Japan and South Korea could pick a subset of this legislation to use as their own.

I can&#x27;t make up my mind if this is good or bad. On one hand, FAANG has a huge advantage over anyone else on the market, but they did build that product and they did spend their own money to do it.<p>I&#x27;d be curious if there are any other occurrences in history of something so big ending up regulated by the government?

I’d love to see separating market making from participation, similar to finance. Ie. the same company must not operate and sell at the same time on that market.

Does anything about this legislation prevent Apple from simply offering a big switch to put your device in “unprotected” mode, giving apps and even full alternative OS’s unrestricted access to the hardware, <i>but without any Apple apps or services available</i>?

The items they listed in this article sound mostly good. (Some of them will also make it harder to protect users from malicious apps, but the restrictions are likely unfortunately necessary to protect them from malicious gatekeepers).<p>What I&#x27;m worried about is the stuff they didn&#x27;t list. Each previous iteration of this was full to the brim with surveillance and censorship provisions, mixed with the good ideas and changed so often that organized pushback from civil society was impossible.

in as much this bring native firefox i.e gecko engines to iOS it will also mean innovative native apps not just on iOS since you won&#x27;t be restricted to native apps that use apple technology ie Swift, UIKit etc you could totally write an app that renders using a game engine in Rust whatever and as long it compiles for the platform you&#x27;re good to go. One thing though, hopefully sandboxing is maintained

I think there are good intentions behind it, but it also misses the mark by targeting big tech specifically.<p>The good that could have come of it, is a sort of open sourcing of tech companies... but of course none of that is going to happen.<p>Yet we have standards; like USB-C which are a good thing. Question is who should enforce creating more standards (to address eg the interoperability of the messaging apps cited in the article).<p>The big issue I see here is it is completely unfair to Apple because Apple is really in a league of its own. It&#x27;s very essence, what makes Apple.. Apple.. is that they create BOTH the hardware and software. When I buy a Mac Mini, or an iPad I buy the whole package, that is the value of it...<p>It&#x27;s like the EU telling Apple they know better how to design products and that Apple should redefine themselves as a company.. yet.. by finetuning and crafting software for their platforms Apple offers a user experience that is simply the best.<p>What the EU should have done instead is try to force big tech to work together?<p>I don&#x27;t know how to feel about this but as a European I&#x27;m tired of being a peasant... and this is going to set us back even more. :&#x2F;

Music to my ears. Apple is a junkie that&#x27;s addicted to the App Store &amp; services revenue. By opening up their walled garden, it forces them to be more proactive to regain some of that lost revenue. I guarantee the car, the AR&#x2F;VR and their other underdeveloped products would&#x27;ve progressed so much faster if Apple depended on new product categories to grow their revenue. Right now, they&#x27;re feeling too cozy.

The only questionable part is end-to-end encryption. I don&#x27;t see how you can make your messaging apps interoperable and have E2E encryption.<p>Most of the other things: mostly good. Apple and Google need to be taken down a peg or 10.

I really hate having the government involved in regulating this sort of stuff but Apple has brought so much destruction in bad faith it&#x27;s hard to feel sympathy.<p>They have nearly single-handedly killed open source chat software (people forget that before the iPhone you could actually send messages from Goolge talk to AIM thanks to XMPP, this still exists but Apple has made it nearly impossible to use comfortably on the iPhone.) Fuck them, I hope they go out of business. As for the &quot;consumer tech industry&quot; that&#x27;s practically dead at this point anyway, no sense worrying about it.

&gt; Ensure that all apps are uninstallable and give users the ability to unsubscribe from core platform services under similar conditions to subscription.<p>Oh hell yeah. Hopefully this means the applications which Microsoft keep shovelling into Windows and disallowing removal of become a thing in the past.<p>eg &quot;Video Editor&quot; was an unfortunate discovery on a system here yesterday, introduced with some recent Win10 update. And which isn&#x27;t allowed to be un-installed.<p>A &quot;Video Editor&quot; shovelware program. Treated as critical to the system. Fuckers. :(

This is so good. At least one regulator seems to be doing its job.

Will this enable steam to come to xbox and&#x2F;or playstation?

&quot;Allow users to install apps from third-party app stores and sideload directly from the internet&quot;<p>Because security is an illusion anyway?<p>I don&#x27;t understand the hubris behind politicians dictating technical and&#x2F;or business decisions. If you want interop so badly, start your own platform. You&#x27;ll find maintaining its integrity&#x2F;security an absolute unwinnable nightmare.

Wow, this is huge. I wonder if it will motivate Apple and Google to finally reduce their fees to something reasonable like 5%.

I’m happy with this. Apple was begging for this with their narsistic and arrogant anti-consumer behavior.<p>Also app store these days is pretty much ruined. Almost all new apps are ”free” but in the end require a monthly membership or some other BS. Hopefully soon we can just pull apps directly from github releases.

This could be huge for open source on iOS

Edit: It is clear that I was an idiot with this comment and my facts are quite wrong. Removed.

&gt; Share data and metrics with developers and competitors,<p>I will quit Apple. Wait … Google is worse … :(

If app developers now will have access to the Secure Enclave, I sincerely hope Apple ships this as an EU-specific version of the hardware. I actually do like having hardware that can be (more) trusted, at least in some cases.

I hope this does not lead to corruption among EU policy makers. When regulators start adding regulations in a sector, big corps in that sector start spending more money for lobbing; hence more corruption among policy makers.

I love the EU. Thanks so much for taking consumer rights forward.

Instead of more regulation, I wish they&#x27;d just break them up. I&#x27;d prefer to have less regulation and no monopolies, then a bunch of regulation and monopolies.

&quot;other tech firms&quot; also your self hosted web server.<p>The title is an american view of the world, where the large companies need to be in the title.

Many comments here regarding Apple.<p>But what about the gaming consoles? M$, Sony, Nintendo going to allow sideloading and full hardware access too?

Does anyone know if Shopify will be considered a gatekeeper? What are the qualifications for being deemed a &quot;gatekeeper&quot;?

While most of the things here are desirable to a user I imagine the cost of compliance would be enormous for Apple, not to mention that it will take years.<p>Even if they do comply, I wouldn&#x27;t imagine them enabling these for NON-EU countries. They might do a fork and provide slow updates to EU customers or some other way of punishing the users.<p>On the side of the EU, the legislation is a bit too targeted causing a bit of concern to wheather they found the right balance between user rights and stifling private companies.<p>Some of EU legislation has had disastrous side effects like GDPR, this might as well bring unexpected consequences.

Massive announcement.<p>Basically &#x27;Separation of Platform and Apps&#x27;, cleaving a wedge between layers of the value chain.

Wonderful! This would certainly help with complying with Qt LGPLv3 and the strict App Store requirements.

Does this mean that we will be able to install Linux on iPhones?

A lot of talk about the Apple tax of 30%. But who is actually paying the vat of the purchase price? The developer or apple? If it is Apple, then with VAT rates of ~20% in the EU, a 30% cut all of a sudden does not sound so unreasonable.

Does that mean we can finaly use firefox with gecko and adons?

Was expecting big fall in share price for Apple but this new didn&#x27;t even registered anything in share price. Any idea why 10s of billions of dollars of pure competition free predictable profit is not a big thing?

The game is up for the tech monopolies, happy days.

This reads like absurd regulatory overreach.

I hope they’ll fight it off. I don’t want to lose all privacy and security I have now on iOS.

EU regulation just ruins tech in my opinion.<p>GDPR was great in principle but all we ended up with was annoying cookie pop ups.<p>Apple did a much better job with App Tracking Privacy.<p>And not, EU so regulating that to make it worse

Terrible news.

So much legislation in the EU. No wonder they never get any small firms there. What start-up is going to navigate all this bullshit while actually developing anything worthwhile?

And Chrome now owns the web.<p>Goodbye open web. It was a fun 30 years. Way to go EU.

While I would love many of those changes to happen, I won&#x27;t be holding my breath.<p>Seems to me the odds Apple will pull out of Europe based on this are pretty high. The compliance cost of these changes must be astoundingly high.<p>Fines based on worldwide revenue.. to fine them more if they make more sales in the USA... seems morally repugnant and abusive to me. So does this one: &quot;Share data and metrics with developers and competitors, including marketing and advertising performance data.&quot;

Sounds like a security nightmare. The reason I like my iPhone is because it’s a walled garden. Things just work. This regulation hampers this

Maybe fines like this could fund UBI?<p>Society could vote on a number of measures designed to create a sustainable economy. For example, instead of carbon tax credits, we could just set a ceiling on carbon emissions and let companies pay the fine, then send direct payments to everyone. Or set a living wage of $20&#x2F;hr and make companies directly responsible for paying the shortfall that the government makes up in welfare payments. Or even create a national debt tax, where any cost overruns would fall on the companies who lobbied most. Basically make all of the amoral sources of profit no longer profitable, to starve the beast of multinational corporations so that they can&#x27;t overtake world governments. Kind of a trickle-up approach to economics to immediately put cash in people&#x27;s pockets and incentivize automation instead of the daily grind.

If EU plays their hand too hard they may just end up with no Apple devices at all. Maybe that&#x27;s their goal anyway. I wonder how long until the US takes them to the WTO or starts creating retaliatory tariffs.

I hope Apple turns Xcode features into a tiered pricing model to counter balance and keep developers in check.<p>1. Want to use the swift compiler? Pay $5000 per year per user (pretty competitively priced if you compare it to the MATLAB Compiler) 2. Want to click any of the “Services” buttons to enable “Siri” etc in your app? $100 per user per year 3. Want to log and instrument your iOS app in production? $1000 per device 4. Want to… (you get my point)<p>Disclaimer: I work at Apple and use all their products. I worked at Mathworks many years ago and saw this thread about the Compiler license <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mathworks.com&#x2F;matlabcentral&#x2F;answers&#x2F;248667-how-much-does-a-matlab-compiler-cost#accepted_answer_195994" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mathworks.com&#x2F;matlabcentral&#x2F;answers&#x2F;248667-how-m...</a><p>Institutionalized 3p developers should be treated like adversaries; they are vile, nefarious tricksters. They’re just as “monstrous” as Apple or Google are purported to be. My 3p app experiences from the days before 2010s was riddled with shitty installer’s phantom installing “cnet downloader”; and, fearfully installing plethora of antivirus software (which always seemed to find viruses according to their scanning progress bar)

&gt; Allow users to install apps from third-party app stores and sideload directly from the internet.<p>While I love the idea of being able to finally install SNES emulators and the like, many malicious actors will now pray on unsuspecting iOS users to install spyware, malware, and other crap via third-party app stores. Not everyone is as sophisticated as the typical Hacker News reader; younger and more naive users will be taken in as victims of various types of fraud.<p>I think that a better path for the European Union would have been to force some regulation of the app store process. Leave in place the parts of Apple&#x27;s process that provide reasonable guarantees of security and privacy for users, but allow Apple to continue to be the gatekeeper, just with some oversight from regulators.<p>There are plenty of examples of governments regulating things that we might wish to be a little freer if only such additional freedom didn&#x27;t come with perilous consequences for consumers. I submit the example of cryptocurrencies. Lots of freedom; very little regulation; many vulnerable people have lost their savings.