iPadOS Identified as Digital 'Gatekeeper' Under New EU Tech Rules
EU antitrust officials on Monday identified iPadOS, Apple's operating system for iPads, as a significant digital gatekeeper under the EU's...
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while its end user numbers were close to the threshold
Why have a threshold if you literally ignore it?
its importance for certain use cases, such as gaming apps.
Sure, Jan. The iPad definitely has that gaming apps market gatekept!
At this point it's obvious these aren't consumer protection mechanisms as much as they're anti-tech measures meant to try to put the breaks on a highly competitive market that the EU is not a part of in hopes that home-grown alternatives can catch up.
But since the EU is so tech-hostile, why would anyone want to startup tech there?
Did you.. Just... Uh... Skip over the part where the number of business users were 11x the set threshold because you found it irrelevant to your argument or so you could remain angry and hopefully get others angry without them having the relevant information as well?
Not at all...
But why bother bringing up a way in which Apple DOES NOT meet requirements in your PR?
That's what I was pointing out, ffs. Not some grand argument you are putting on me.
For the record, unlike almost all the android folks who post constant hate and negativity on the apple enthusiast community, I like my Apple products and am annoyed that the EU is working to make them shittier for me so that they can applaud.
There's like 4 or 5 versions of this article posted to this community at once. People couldn't wait to rub it in the faces of the few of us who are here to be enthusiastic about Apple products.
It would be nice to have one community where I could enjoy the things I like without a flood of nonsense.
I think you may want to rebase and regulate your feed more selectively, especially if you're getting multiple reposts. The reason they bring it up in the article though is because it's a direct quote from the published investigation. As far as the other stuff, in my (Apple agnostic, I have many of their devices but no loyalty) opinion I and the userbase have only benefited from EU influence. sent from my iPhone currently charging over usb c
Yes, I understood it was a quote from the investigation and was pointing out that it is phrased in a way to make it sound like the investigation was saying "guilty even though you don't meet the criteria."
And, like all EU regulations, I am happy they think they're helping but angry at the fallout of all of their actions.
My boyfriend has a different phone model than I do, and we now have to carry multiple cables to do anything. My car has carplay over usb, so we have two cables in there, etc.
And when I update his phone we will be producing a ton of e-waste.
No I don't want you to track me with cookies, but I also don't want to go through three layers of pop ups to tell you that. Everything is shittier that the EU touches-tech-wise, and they're fisting everything hard lately.
I think your blame is misplaced. The EU is trying to protect you from that. The tech companies prefer life much harder. iPhones for example were a holdout for over 10 years while every single other phone manufacturer agreed to a common charging standard that was open and even interchangeable with everyday rechargeable embedded devices. The cookies prompt doesn't have to exist either. It's fully within the rights of the website to forgo it, but then they'd have to forgo siphoning your profitable data from you and the prompt is merely the regulatory body requiring that they offer you a choice. They could default it to off and even prompt you once to enable it, but the design is specifically meant to be frustrating so you get upset at the regulation protecting you instead of the product using you.
Thank you for the respectful responses, even though I started off with a little bit of attitude in the conversation. It has been a pleasant surprise today.
I agree that that's what they're trying to do, but I think that what we are experiencing is exactly what was obviously going to happen with the measures they put into place. So I place the blame on the EU, because they put laws in place that have made everything worse for everyone in predictable ways.
I also blame all the sites that make it hard for me to just visit them, but less so, since every individual site creator that uses cookies needs to do that, even if they are benign, and they have to deal with other regional laws such as California's weak as all hell version intending to do the same thing.
The USB-C argument is a great example of how most of these things have happened.
Apple is basically responsible for USB being the industry-wide standard to begin with. It was developed by Intel, and not widely used before Apple put it as its only option on the iMac, effectively forcing the tech into the industry.
It also provided a large portion of the engineers who developed the USB-C specification for the standards board. They effectively invented the standard alongside Intel. It was also the first to announce a laptop using the standard.
It seems like they were building the the Lightning cable at the same time in-house, possibly to hedge bets, and it was objectively better by far than what the original USB-C spec was doing at proposal time. And since USB-C wasn't adopted as a standard by the standards board yet, they chose the better product path.
By the time USB-C was formally adopted, 4 years after Apple launched its first Lightning cable-based phone, there was already tons of e-waste to contend with and it didn't have obvious benefits for the customer to make the switch, so why would they go choose that expensive, wasteful, option, that harms their users?
The same is true about the blue vs green circles. If you read the history of RCS it's like a circus show act.
It is not some open standard alternative to iMessages, like people seem to love to claim. You cannot host your own RCS server.
It doesn't support the features iMessages does, such as E2E encryption. That is a proprietary add-on from Google's chat app, not part of the "standard."
Google had to buy Jibe mobile and push hard to get this "standard" to be something serious, and it now profits off it by being basically the only one who runs the proprietary infrastructure. That purchase was 4 years after iMessages was launched.
Major telecom companies tried to band together to create their own RCS infrastructure and official app, and they bumbled the whole thing in 2019. As a result they're all centralizing on Google's Jibe platform.
All that for a product that isn't as good as what Apple put out in 2011.
I know I have biases towards the products I enjoy more, but it gets frustrating to not be allowed to enjoy them and also be on platforms like this where it's constantly twisted, revised history, in favor of much more evil companies because Apple Bad seems to be the mantra here.
I think maybe you're still missing the field for the trees. USB C oddly as it's named has for almost all of it's life been a connector standard, of which open connector standards (that arguably weren't as good) existed back then in the form of micro and mini usb which for charging would be more than adequate vs rolling your own connector. I think the thing apple pursued here by rolling there own wasn't even the royalties on it, but direct control of the 3rd party peripheral market (music docks, etc, etc). They've always made safe choices to ensure their market dominance through secondary market forces vs primary ones. Fwiw I'd have had no criticism for Apple regarding lightning if they opened the standard and shared it.
Now. As far as RCS goes. That's just the fault of the people. It takes legitimately 5 minutes at most to download and sign up for signal, or another secure message provider, and the average user has chosen to completely ignore this and use whatever standard their carrier sold them with the phone. Yes carriers, Google, and everyone else should shoulder a ton of blame for settling on such a paltry default, but it's as easy and seamless as it can possibly be to switch off that default and rather than migrate to another (like most other countries) the US population has decided to firmly stick their heads in the sand and use only the default, going as far to forgo "difficult and complex mfa security keys" (not even that difficult. Just scan a qr code and cloud sync for your mfa app) in favor of expensive, insecure, and quite frankly stupid mfa through sms. Its just not a tech issue at this point, but a user issue because people get too attached to defaults or too insistent on not changing. Just look at internet Explorer. Msft had it at end of life status for nearly a decade and people still insisted upon using it, right up until they ripped it from the os, and having worked in the industry I can assure you the users with the firmest grip on IE didn't want it for compatibility reasons. They wanted it because the disliked change.
this is such a bad misinformed take
