We should read the 1.8bn lump sum (roughly 0.5% of Apple's revenue) as partially being about music streaming and app stores, but mainly a warning to all large firms which are currently jockeying for a dominant position in emerging tech like generative AI and visual computing.

The warning: play fair and compete on the merits, or see you in court.

[1] "the Commission decided to add to the basic amount of the fine an additional lump sum of €1.8 billion to ensure that the overall fine imposed on Apple is sufficiently deterrent" https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_24_... [2] See paras 30 and 31. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/ALL/?uri=CELEX%3A...

I thought the function of fines WAS the deterrent effect? or is some aspect of this restitution? I thought this was payable to the EU itself, not spotify.

Maybe it's something akin to punative damages (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punitive_damages), where the "fine" component is assessed according to the actual harm measured and the "deterrent" amount is meant to make it sting as a punishment.

The law always needs a little something extra to deal with people like the guy who parks in handicap spaces because he can afford the fines.

In most cases, the Commission sets a fine which is based on the harm caused by some anti-competitive conduct, with relatively small adjustments for extenuating or attenuating circumstances. In this instance it's the opposite; the economic harm was small but the adjustment was huge.

You're right that the logic - deterrence - is the same in both cases. But what's different (at least in my view), is the object of the deterrence.

Ordinary fines are designed to make anti-competitive behaviour unattractive in terms of the costs and benefits. Maybe some underhanded conduct generates €40m extra profit, but the risk of a €40m fine plus legal costs and adjustments makes it not worth it.

The trouble is that these fines might are essentially just rounding errors for large firms. In this case, a €40m fine would be tiny in relation to Apple's revenue stream (~€350bn euros a year), thus not an effective deterrent. That's for two reasons. First, the 40m figure is too low since a "significant part of the harm caused by the infringement consists of non-monetary harm, which cannot be properly accounted for under the revenue-based methodology as set out in the [Commission's guidelines]"[1]. Second, the fine is trying to to "deter [Apple and] other companies of a similar size and with similar resources from committing the same or a similar infringement"[1] even when they could absorb the ordinary (small) fine as essentially a rounding error on their cost of doing business. In that case, large conglomerates could basically just ignore competition law.

So here, the Commission is deterring all firms which have a "particularly large turnover" [2] (e.g. Big Tech firms) from using their power in one market to gain an advantage in another market, as in this case where Apple used its control over its App Store to gain an advantage in the music streaming market. The fining guidelines allow for fines to be much larger (~50x in this case) for tech giants, even if the actual infringement didn't cause that much quantifiable harm.

You're right, there's no restitution here. As you say, the fine is payable to the EU and would be paid into the EU budget.

[1] https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_24_... [2] Para 30 https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/ALL/?uri=CELEX%3A...

Morally, if we fine violations to the speed limit in proportion to the context of the transgression only it will not adapt to the income of the transgressor. That makes it practically legal for rich people to drive as fast as they wish.

To function as a deterrent, it needs to represent a cost that a company is unwilling to tolerate.

Another way to think about it, is to say that we care about safeguarding the process of competition itself. That could include ensuring that competition is fair, ensuring that firms can enter markets, ensuring consumers get to choose which firms to consume from, etc. There's lots of precedent for that in EU competition law [1]. Taking that view, Apple was using its dominant position to restrict the economic freedom of Spotify (and others) and thereby harming the process of competition. Specifically, it limited rival firms from "fully informing iOS users about alternative and cheaper music subscription services" (as per the press release), thus harming competition.

All that to say, if we take the objective of EU competition law as being to prevent large firms from exercising power over smaller firms and to protect the process of competition in a general sense, then these big fines are easier to justify.

[1] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3166005

I'd prefer if they could just jail the executives instead, but since sadly companies are an effective shield against justice this will have to do.

For an ageing but interesting case, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysine_price-fixing_conspiracy

How is that "insane"?

It's pretty clear that Apple Music hadn't gone rogue.

Uff. Spotify can ask for damage compensation on top of those 1.8 B€, huh?! Apart from music streaming services, I don't see why the situation isn't fundamentally the same with video streaming and Apple TV, and maybe even things like VPN, or cloud services, where Apple has its own competing products now.

So... this ultimately may get really, really nasty and expensive for Apple. I am so here for it :)

Well they don't give iPhones and App Store away for free.

Cheapest iPhones in Germany cost ~$530 for a 64GB model which Apple will nag you to subscribe to their iCloud to offload data.

Meanwhile developers need a $1k macbook (with measly 8GB RAM and 256GB storage btw) and $100/year.

And you get no choice to install from other app stores. So generous!

That's what their customers payed for when they bought very expensive iDevices. Honestly, what a weird take, considering Apple really invented this argument. iOS app devs and service providers are just as much a necessity for Apple's popularity and success. You know, the default iOS calculator app used to be a meme not that long ago...

> Appstore

Yeah really, unhappy devs should totally roll their own distribution like on every other platform since the beginning of software development. Oh, wait...

> But you know, everyone wants a piece of the cake Apple thought they baked under their own terms.

Or maybe, Apple wanting a piece of the second largest consumer market should play by its rules, considering all the commerce infrastructure they are using... Not to mention the education system they are free-riding for their engineers, courts protecting their brand and IP, police enforcing property rights, ...

Do you pay taxes in Jonestown?

GDPR rules follow the same structure and are a pretty good deterrent.

I was not in tech in that time, but I was cognizant about the fact that entire segments of media and policy makers just dunked on Microsoft due to anti-competitive practices back then, and I recall congressmen and congresswomen, members of DoJ and so on openly talking about break Microsoft in pieces and I wonder why we do not have those conversations today in the biggest markets (China, US and EU)?

Personally I'd avoid comparisons since you're looking at one of the worst situations imaginable, so anything else is bound to seem less harmful.

Microsoft would make competition harder by bundling "good enough" versions of competing software into Windows, with business deals restricting pre-installs of competing operating systems (if you pre-install Windows on 100% of machines, you'll get a massively better deal than when installing on it on 95%), and (arguably) by making interoperability harder by not having stable documented interfaces and having the interfaces change with new releases every few years.

That was bad. But Apple... Apple hasn't been just making competing harder, but outright impossible. It's one thing to compete against a free pre-installed product. It's another thing to try to compete when the platform owner straight out forbids you from shipping a product that competes with them, or applies draconian business terms to the competition that their own business units get to ignore. They weren't just making interoperability harder by not documenting interfaces, but (in the case of iMessage) by actively breaking any attempt to interoperate.

Their monopoly case wasn’t about draconian terms. They were savagely destroying competition as a company culture.

Edit to add: bad terms on a vertically integrated platform is cute compared to Microsoft dictating what the entire PC industry was allowed to sell. It’s not that Windows was the best game in town, it was that vendors couldn’t sell Windows pre-installed if they sold anything else.

example https://birdhouse.org/beos/byte/30-bootloader/

msft forced PC makers to ship bootloaders that would lockup on sight of Be's boot chain

Other motives, same behavior.

Like, Steve Jobs making vague threats isn't really in the same league as what MS was getting up to in the 90s.

Apple sued for patent infringement and that was about the extent of it.

Suggesting that their behavior is at Microsoft’s level is naive.

You're massively understating the scope and scale of Apple's war on Android. Apple transfered patents to a NPE that sued Android vendors - possibly Google itself. Apple also spent billions on this war - Apple et al spent over $4B to outbid Google on Nortel patents, Google spent even more billions to buy Motorola and its patents, prior to that, Google had virtually no defensive parents.

> that was about the extent of it

Apple didn't only sue over patents they already owned: they went out of their way and bought billions worth of more patents to sue with, partnered with patent-trolls who also sued OEMs on their behalf. So we agree, but the breadth and depth of Apple's actions was remarkable - they didn't just sue, they went to great lengths to do so.

If you are absolutely committed to doing zero further analysis, then sure I can see why you would think that.

For real it's scary how much developer experience is controlled by Microsoft.

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGz7Ou0Nwo8

Both Apple and Microsoft were/are abusive of their market position.

The only argument than can come close to that is Apple has a large share of phone app revenue because people using Android don’t pay as much.

I think Peter Thiel's logic is flawed. Apple does not conglomerate, does not have a monopoly in any sense, and has actively avoided those situations. In order to please shareholders it does need to innovate and attempt new markets (Project Titan is a good example).

Microsoft in the 90s was completely different - they wanted domination.

That is a sensible definition in some cases because their terms for developers, app store charges etc. apply to that whole market. There is also a lot of lock-in and control: Spotify (much less any smaller business) cannot realistically get people to switch to Android to use their app - and with a duopoly that would not be an effective tactic long term anyway.

I think the answer would be no, and for good reasons.

And that's on the tech side of things, business wise they would do even less ethical things. If Apple bought Briar specifically to kill it because it ran on Android then you might get a taste of what MS was getting up to.

0 - http://groklawstatic.ibiblio.org/staticpages/index.php%3fpag...

You can, today, for example, install other OSes on Apple hardware, and they themselves have helped significantly to enable such until relatively recent architecture changes.

I, for example, run Fedora on a modern Macbook Air and it's super useful.

It's possible this reality deflects some of the antitrust attention.

That's a level of stability many mobile and web developers dream of today ;)

That's hilariously wrong.

In the 1990s, there were only two computing platforms to speak of: Windows and the Mac. Windows had *90%* of the marketplace. Microsoft had deals with PC makers that required them to include (and charge for) a Windows license on ever machine they sold. When Netscape happened, Microsoft leveraged their immensely dominant desktop position to squeeze the upstart browser company out -- Gates famously said "I'll cut off your oxygen supply," which is more or less an overt confession to monopolistic behavior.

Nobody has anything close to the kind of market power and predatory behavior that MSFT had in 1996. To suggest otherwise is to either display profound ignorance of that period of time, or to show you have a weird axe to grind about Apple that causes you to overlook actual facts.

When Microsoft chose to neglect the web after IE6, it didn't take that long for competition to work around it. When Apple chose to neglect Safari in exactly the same way (and probably for the same reasons as Microsoft did with IE6), that was it. There was no workaround, nor any way for anyone to compete with a better browser.

PC games are a >$50 billion market, with Microsoft only getting a small slice of that. That's because Microsoft wasn't just able to outlaw direct installs nor competing digital games stores. Games for Windows Live had to compete against e.g. Steam, with the predictable outcome. The size of the iOS gaming market is comparable. Apple collects a 30% cut of it, and will do so indefinitely. Competing with them is literally impossible; nobody else can make a different app store offering better terms or a better user experience.

Apple is at around 60% market share in the US. The difference between 60% and 90% is a minor difference in scale. The difference between Apple's absolute control of iOS vs. the limited control that Microsoft had over Windows is a difference in kind. Apple got to choose whether competing software was even allowed on the platform. They could opening up special capabilities to only their own software, and actually enforce that (unlike Microsoft, whose undocumented APIs could still be reverse engineered). They can charge their competitors a 30% cut of revenue, while obviously ignoring it in their internal accounting for their own competing businesses.

If Google got complacent and decided to reallocate nearly the entire Chrome and Blink teams to other projects leaving only tiny skeleton crews on them, allowing both Firefox/Gecko and Safari/WebKit to leave it in the dust in terms of features that would be almost a 1:1 analogue for the situation with Microsoft and IE back in the day.

When I told her I’m using Safari from my desktop she was confused. Her helpdesk script literally didn’t have a path in the reply tree for someone using a desktop and not using a chromium based browser. That should tell you how uncommon it must be. I guess everyone’s just using the App now and doesn’t notice.

Either way it gives the impression to non-technical users that non-Chromium browsers are subpar even if site devs are to blame (especially when “upgrade your browser” messaging is misused to equate your up-to-date Safari/Firefox with some derelict version that hasn’t been updated for years) and will only serve to strengthen Chrome’s hold. The only recourse Mozilla and Apple have are to perfectly emulate Chrome’s behavior and in the case of UA sniffing even pretend to be Chrome, which sounds an awful lot like the bad old days of Gecko needing to emulate IE to make sites work in Firefox.

The late 90s early 2000s were a dark period, software-wise. Nothing compares to that, thankfully. People either forget, weren't there or were just oblivious Windows users.

Chrome starts a proposal, implements it and “intends to ship” it before anyone really has time to discuss it. Recently (2 months ago?) they introduced a new WebExtension API that nobody cared about nor really understood the need for, but it’s still there, making it look like it’s a “standard”

Even today, this doesn't mean much if Apple decides to ignore web standards that are harmful to their business model. Web Notifications were implemented by Safari Desktop, Chrome Desktop and Firefox Desktop[0] in 2012 - and Safari Mobile in 2023. That's 9 years that a pretty useful and important API couldn't be relied on by PWAs. And this is just one of many examples.

This has a real effect on what technologies developers can actually use, which is fairly similar to the effect IE6 had on newer APIs during its time.

[0]: Chrome & Firefox desktop because I can't find a way to see historical dates for mobile on caniuse - but it was around that time, or a bit later, for mobile as well

As mentioned elsewhere, they didn’t get to 90% by selling to a free market. They demanded exclusivity across the entire PC market. They didn’t just let IE stagnate. They told Mosaic they would license their renderer for a percentage of sales and then gave IE away for free.

It would be like Apple saying if you wrote an iOS app you couldn’t write an app for any other platform.

They didn’t chase Google to implement features that solely benefit ChromeOS, but iPhones have completely dominated Android and any other browser engine for mobile rendering performance since the iPhone 4. A miserably slow browser that can receive push notifications is pointless.

Maybe not allowing a website to store GBs of data, run in the background or show notifications is a feature for some users.

My only major complaint is that they replaced the old dev tools by this current atrocity which forces me use Chrome for development.

We have different definitions of long, and perhaps very different memories of the web from the years 2001-2012[0]

almost a decade for any real traction for competing web browsers to put a dent in Microsoft, and that is after the anti-trust trial and the EU browser ballot mandate.

Don't forget, it was so entrenched that even by 2015 IE had over 1/3 of browser share, really only defeated by Google Chrome (which had the infamous "kill IE" initiative[1]) in 2013 or there about.

To put it simply, a decade of dominance is a long time.

[0]: Data supports that Internet Explorer had majority market-share up through the first half of 2012 (globally), per https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/all/worldwid... and in North America, it held on to majority position through at least 2013.

[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/4/18529381/google-youtube-in...

IE6 was released in 2001, after the consent decree. So the reason other browsers were able to compete was because MS couldn't kneecap them.

30% is a huge difference.

What does MS charge game owners on Xbox? Sounds like the exact same thing. Xbox dominates the US console market [1] far more than iPhone does.

[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/console/north-ame...

This isn’t even remotely true. The entire front-end web development ecosystem came to an absolute standstill in terms of browser support for five entire years because Microsoft decided that, since they had killed off the competition, they didn’t need to work on Internet Explorer any more. That’s five whole years without a single new release of Internet Explorer, which had >90% market share.

And then after they restarted development, the next version mainly focused on adding tabs and a few CSS selectors. It wasn’t until Internet Explorer 8 was released that it actually started to properly move forward again. But web developers still had to wait years before enough people had upgraded because Internet Explorer wasn’t evergreen and people didn’t upgrade very often.

Supporting Internet Explorer 6 was still a battle developers were fighting in 2010, nine years after it was released.

Apple releases new major versions of Safari with improved support for web standards every year like clockwork. And people upgrade promptly. And Apple take part in interop efforts with other browser vendors. The two situations are absolutely nothing alike.

I don’t know if you remember how it was back then, but huge chunks of the Internet simply did not work if you weren’t using Internet Explorer.

They would also sink your PC OEM business if you dared to ship a computer with an operating system alternative. They used their 90% marketshare to force companies like Dell to only sell computers with Windows installed. If someone like Dell wanted to provide an alternative like BeOS, Microsoft could terminate their contract or raise their royalty rate to unsustainable levels.

Hell you don’t even need to buy a smartphone, That’s how little it has to do with the modern day. If you wanted the internet you had to go to Microsoft.

That's why Android marketshare is much larger than iOS marketshare and why Windows marketshare is much larger than MacOS marketshare.

After reading maybe 8000 posts complaining about Apple "monopoly" I just can't get my head around how hackers can earnestly believe such a thing.

I am with a friend in a place with no Internet access. They have an iPhone. I have an Android phone. We don't have any cables. My friend took a video and I would like them to send me the video right now over Wifi.

I think there are some ways I could solve it, but I don't think there are any ways I could solve it that would be reliable for nontechnical users (and even for me it's hard.) This isn't an accident, Apple is abusing their control over iOS to make this sort of thing impossible. And it's worse than anything Microsoft ever did. Apple is actively standing in my way, even though I don't own any iOS devices.

Of course it is about marketshare. The more you have, the more you can make things hard for your competitors. The less you have, the more you're the weird one with the odd platform.

> I am with a friend in a place with no Internet access

That's a vanishingly rare situation not worthy of legislation, IMO.

In 2003 I bought a PowerBook. It was the only commercially available laptop that could be bought without buying a Windows license. Microsoft had put any competitors out of business by that point and OEMs weren’t ready to sell Linux laptops. Apple only existed because Microsoft injected them with cash to show they had a competitor.

Get a USB drive.

Feem, but I'm interested to learn more about this contrived example where phones don't have internet access and so can't use SHAREit, Send Anywhere, or any number of other solutions.

If I’m allowed to pre-download software before encountering your scenario, running a web server or an app that serves FTP or other server types hosting files is trivial on either OS. iOS may require shuffling the video file into an app sandbox first.

I think a lot of people were less affected by Microsoft’s actions than by Apple’s. After all, Microsoft didn’t stop people from making money off their platform or modifying their computers.

And Microsoft was three decades ago.

Apple is causing people far more harm now than they remember Microsoft doing in the past. (Assuming they were around for it in the first place.)

Edit:

I should have said "a lot of the people talking" instead of just "a lot of people".

I was around for Microsoft and would classify them as evil. The worst you can say about Apple is they are greedy. For all of Apple's flaws, they are competing in the consumer market on merit.

All apps being required to use a single payment system is a great example: it sucks for the app developers but only for the app developers. From the consumer perspective, Apple's app store is the only place in the internet economy where they're not subject to pervasive dark patterns trying to get them to not cancel a subscription, not back out of a free trial, or otherwise separate them from their money. People pay good money for Apple phones in part because Apple successfully protects them from predatory anti-consumer behavior.

Contrast that with 90s Microsoft, where people bought Windows because that's mostly all that was available (because Microsoft made sure of that). Today there are more non-Apple phone choices than Apple choices, and yet a substantial number of people consistently choose Apple.

As a user I love the ability to easily turn a subscription on and off, without having to call someone/chat with someone. Also, did you know that a requirement of the app store is you can delete your data from within the app? It's a great way to reduce your digital fingerprint.

As a developer, we rolled out in app subscriptions and our revenue essentially tripled. They handle refunds. That saves me a LOT of time.

Perfect? No, but I do as most pragmatists do: compromise and make the best of it.

That is literally what they did.

Be built a business, lined up customers, and had every one of them fail because of exclusivity agreements with Microsoft. Unless you were a vertically integrated software/hardware business you couldn’t get your OS on PCs because of Microsoft.

It might seem quaint now, but there was a market for web browsers! They weren’t free until Microsoft duped Mosaic into giving them a license for a percentage of sales and then gave it away for free as Internet Explorer, instantly destroying any market for selling web browsers. That’s not only preventing others from making money on their platform, but anyone from making money in that entire segment.

Literally the entire world was affected by Microsoft’s business practices as the PC industry was booming.

This is incredible whitewashing of Microsoft. Microsoft didn’t stop people from modifying their computers? Part of the anti trust case was Microsoft ending licenses with OEMs if they dared to sell a PC with Linux installed.

Granted, drivers were a massive issue.

And if anything, this only furthers the point that Apple isn't anything close to what Microsoft was doing.

There is a large class of technology users that is uninterested in installing whatever they want on their device. They want their device to be predictable, they want their app store to be curated, and they don't want to deal with dark patterns on a company by company basis. These customers choose Apple because it provides a tightly integrated experience.

Forcing Apple to alter enough of their rules will eventually cause that user experience to no longer be an option, which is bad for consumer choice.

The alternatives that most here on HN are pushing for would ultimately lead to a walled garden no longer being an option for consumers at all. I think the status quo is preferable: consumers who don't want to participate in the walled garden can choose to not buy devices that are explicitly sold as being part of said garden.

Why do apple fans always come up with bizarre fantasies like this? This isn't a problem for Android today, and it won't be a problem for mainstream apps when apple is finally forced to open up thanks to the EU.

More than 99% of the users will never install anything other than from the official Play store. But they are allowed to without Big Daddy Apple telling them "No". And that's what matters.

Not really. They are pretty strict, actually.

> The difference between Android and iOS is that Apple actually has rules that are strict enough to motivate the likes of Facebook to actively encourage people to side load if given the chance

I doubt it. Especially after Apple will have submitted to the rest of the DMA.

And Apple is known for being just so diligent with their App Store reviews, huh? https://www.pcmag.com/news/beware-theres-a-fake-lastpass-app...

I can use WhatsApp, Signal, Google Chat for messaging instead of iMessage. I can use Spotify, YouTube Music, Sirius instead of Apple Music for streaming music. What do you mean by zero consumer choice for interoperability? I see plenty of choices.

> Everyone is limited to what Apple allows in their walled garden whether they choose it or not

What software is Apple not allowing? I see competitors’ software available on their platform. The only issue is that these competitors want to avoid paying fees to Apple and argue under the guise of protecting consumer freedom.

Porn apps and hate speech mostly.

They supposedly also bar a lot of outright scams and malware, but a lot also sneaks through.

And those limitations are?

iMessage? The world outside the US doesn't use iMessage that much. It's Whatsapp, and Facebook Messenger, and Telegram, and Viber, and...

Apple Photos? I have Google Photos on my iPhone, and they work better and faster than Apple's own

Actually, I struggle to think what Apple-exclusive things I use apart from Safari (and I've been using it on macs since 2007 or so).

You can't see the things that aren't allowed, because they don't exist. The Briar team hasn't even built an iOS app because they know it would be rejected.

- https://code.briarproject.org/briar/briar/-/issues/445

- https://sourceforge.net/p/briar/mailman/message/36415432/

I’m glad someone in this thread gets it. If anything, my main criticism of Apple’s App Store curation is that they have too light of a hand on cracking down on scammers and other abusive business practices. Indie developers making honest mistakes get jerked around but the professional skeezeballs keep gaming their way through.

But the tone of a lot of the regulation seems to be trying to push Apple to make the thing I value about its ecosystem worse while adding me nothing I actually care for. With the phone, in particular, I am almost always using it while I’m half distracted with something else. I’m much more open to tinkering on my PC or even my tablet, but as far as I’m concerned having my phone being as locked down as can be and imposing as little additional cognitive burden on me as possible is a huge feature.

The problem is that same leverage can just as easily be used to enforce rules that benefit Apple at the expense of their customers. In theory competition from other platforms limits the extent Apple can abuse their position in that manner. But there's only one other major platform in the mobile space. That's not a lot of options for the market to optimise around.

Further, Apple is a large, vertically integrated company which does a lot to try to lock consumers into their ecosystem. If I'd like to chose a more open mobile phone operating system but feel like I can't because Android isn't allowed to interoperate with iMessage or AirPlay or AirDrop or AirTags or Apple Watch or iCloud and I like those products and want to continue using them... well, that's a problem.

There's also the software freedom issue. As a consumer, once Apple sells me a piece of physical hardware it should no longer be their place to dictate what software I'm allowed to run on that device. If I want to install an app that's not on Apple's App Store but Apple doesn't want me to, there's no question in my mind as to whose rights should win out in that scenario.

Overall, my take is that Apple should be allowed to offer a closed ecosystem to users who want that, but they shouldn't be allowed use technical measures or anti-competitive bundling to force or coerce consumers into remaining inside that ecosystem. If consumers want to buy their apps exclusively from Apple's app store because they see a benefit from that, then they should be allowed to. But if they don't, Apple shouldn't be able to hold their entire ecosystem hostage from the consumer as leverage to prevent them from leaving.

I realize this gives Apple a bit less leverage in their ability to advocate on behalf of their customers when dictating the terms under which companies can sell products within their walled garden, since those companies will now have the option of going over Apple's head and selling their product directly to consumers, sans Apple's rules. But that's how free markets work, in contrast to the monopoly-like situation we're currently in. If enough consumers see the value in Apple's rules to avoid other app stores with less restrictive policies, companies will still have to comply with them to access those consumers. (I'll note this is basically how things already work on Android. Google still operates the most popular app store on Android despite competition being allowed, and they're still able to dictate the terms under which apps are allowed in that store.) But if those terms are so egregious that consumers start to prefer alternative app stores instead, that's a good thing too.

It's not to say they don't have a financial incentive to disallow app installs outside of their App Store, but there is a predictable cost in terms of support man hours and device troubleshooting they will incur in addition to lost revenue. So long as it is legal for them to continue business as usual, they have no incetive to allow it and the large majority of the userbase don't care.

These average users shouldn't come near a MacBook then.

I got him to buy a Mac and for a few years things went well. But then he started complaining about it behaving weirdly or running slowly. I'd take a look and find he'd installed some free utility or some other odd bit of software that was screwing up his machine. I kept explaining why this happened and he never changed his behaviour.

I keep telling him to get an iPad, as at least then everything would be sandboxed and iOS would kill background tasks. But he says, no, he needs a real computer.

PS. Now that you can dock an iPad with an external screen and keyboard and trackpad, try that for him, tell him it's the new Macpad Pro.

ROTFL, someone made this and posted to HN four hours ago:

https://www.macstories.net/stories/macpad-how-i-created-the-...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39592288

That's the real problem. People just refuse to learn. They refuse to put in any effort at all. They don't want to have to think about what they are doing.

It's making me become ever more elitist over the years. I no longer believe computers should be for everyone. Computers are world changing technology and they are wasted on people who don't give a shit.

My sister does everything on a phone or tablet and doesn't see the point of a "proper" computer, the guy at the bank plugs an iPad into a monitor.

A MacBook is a work tool, like an angle grinder or a JCB. Most people don't know how to get the most out of them if they were given one.

There is also the cost of externalities of more systems being infected that the rest of the connected world has to deal with.

This isn't because of Apple, or at least it isn't in my case.

Even as an iPhone app developer with the means to do so whenever I want, and even though I find Apple's content restrictions derisory and "big brother"-y, I actively don't want a system that can install "whatever".

This is due to all the malware everywhere on the internet, and owing to this unfortunate reality, also means I think it is unwise even to have 3rd party libraries as project dependencies. I have an entire spare computer dedicated to learning scientific python because I don't feel I can rely on the absence of vulnerabilities in the stuff.

This makes me sad. I miss the old days of 2002 where I didn't feel any reason to worry about random apps from random websites. But part of my carefree youth was that I had a Performa 5200 running OS 8, which wasn't a popular targets for malware authors, and another big part was that my bank didn't have an app.

But before someone replies to point out that malware gets past the App Store tests: yes, of course it does, I see all this as a "defence in depth" strategy, not a silver bullet.

If the bad actors were all shady fly-by-night looking companies it’d be one thing. But once the gates are opened, if it’s easy enough, you’ll see people being pressured to open the gates by all sorts of companies that they will have no choice but to comply with. Imagine, for example, if your insurance company, in order to pay your bill, starts making you install the app through some alternate pathway that brings a side-dish of keylogging to adjust your rates based on your browser behavior.

> my bank didn't have an app

Exactly my reasoning last week when I read about one more dependency attack on GitHub.

Do you have a mac? What's your setup? I need CoreML so VMs are not an option, and I'm a freelancer so I use my own MacBook for work. I have a different session for each client, but at this point I don't even know if it's useful at all. Of course I also have a personal session with banking stuff... which is what made me realise I was probably doing something dumb.

Yes, two.

(Well, three, but the third is in a box waiting to go to recycling or someone who wants it "for parts", as that's from 2013…)

> What's your setup?

It's literally an entire second mac. I bought an MBAir/M1 second hand, then was given an MBPro/M1 Pro; the Pro became my main machine, the Air became my "mess around" box.

That’d be quite an ignorant POV to take on IMO

We've created a very nasty internet - one that isn't safe for the old or the young - and without the law enforcement or age boundaries that we use in the physical world to keep our public spaces suitable for the broader population.

Everybody always jumps to Apple’s defense by explaining how iPhones are built for inept users that just want a phone that works with no BS. Therefore, they claim, it’s a good thing that Apple has a highly locked down environment. But what good is this locked down environment if Apple will happily allow scam apps to charge their customers for features the phone already does for free? What’s the difference between a user downloading a scam app from an untrusted source and downloading it directly from the App Store? If Apple is going to have a locked down environment, at the very least, they should make it effective.

Hardware companies pre-installed any and all sorts of software from vendors. Spyware, adware, gambling games, toolbars, "free" trials to internet services. Computers used to be up to their neck in absolute garbage.

I guess the biggest difference is that the OS manufacturer now gets a cut on those.

And my point still stands anyways, the line between some of those top appstore casino-apps and malware is very blurry.

Talk to your lawmakers to make these sort of apps illegal. Apple is not the government.

An app store (any app store, not just Apple's) can be the former without being the latter.

It took him years to realise Google search results had a scroll bar, and it wasn't just the 3 items that fitted on the screen.

He wrote simulation software for the radio propagation of military IFF transponders before he retired, and his idea of "computer safety" was therefore somewhere between "do not connect them to the internet" and "put them in a faraday cage".

Do you also want to take away everyone's cars because of traffic deaths? That's far more serious than someone's parent installing malware on their shiny digital toys.

What about taking away kitchen knifes? Those things sure are dangerous!

This isn't the same thing. The equivalent in your anecdote is that Car A comes with a three point seatbelt that you don't want to use, and you want Car A to be sold without it so you can use your preferred safety device, despite multiple current owners of Car A telling you that they _want_ the three point seatbelt. And you can always buy Car B if you want to install a lap belt instead.

That this isn't "infantilizing".

> Do you also want to take away everyone's cars because of traffic deaths? That's far more serious than someone's parent installing malware on their shiny digital toys.

My mum did that for my gran when my gran got Alzheimer's and my mum realised she'd been driving for 6 months without paying road tax.

And then the same happened to my mum.

Also, you're giving the exact argument in favour of self-driving cars as soon as the tech is actually ready, and also the reason that crumple zones and seatbelts are mandatory.

And also the reason we have (revokable) driving tests to be allowed to use the vehicles in the first place.

> What about taking away kitchen knifes? Those things sure are dangerous!

https://www.gov.uk/buying-carrying-knives has a high degree of popular support, and has done since I was a kid myself.

No, that's dangerous! Everyone should crawl everywhere while wearing an iHelmet if we were to apply apple's modus operandi to transportation.

> And also the reason we have (revokable) driving tests to be allowed to use the vehicles in the first place.

Hmm, so you think that maybe qualified people should be allowed to use dangerous devices? I'm fine with you taking devices away from your parents. That's up to you and your parent.

> https://www.gov.uk/buying-carrying-knives has a high degree of popular support, and has done since I was a kid myself.

Is your argument that your iphone should not be allowed outside where it might scare other people? Odd take. Even in the UK an adult is allowed to buy & posses a kitchen knife.

I wrote "Back when he was still alive", so… no.

> Is your argument that your iphone should not be allowed outside where it might scare other people? Odd take.

No, and I don't know why you'd think that. In fact, that's such a weird take, I think you wrote that in bad faith.

> Even in the UK an adult is allowed to buy & posses a kitchen knife.

Buy, yes. Possess in public without "good reason" as defined by the police and prosecution, no.

I wonder if this is because today's interfaces are actually so much worse for scrollbar UX (usability and discoverability) than anything we had since they were invented 43 years ago.

Just look at it... https://scrollbars.matoseb.com/

By the time I was in college, he was on his way towards retiring, and knowing that I was into software, decided that I would be his IT support person. He went through various laptops and desktops (PCs, Macs, he even gave Linux a real try but gave up when he couldn't get his financial planning software to run on it), Android phones, etc. The one platform he liked using in his later years was iOS/iPadOS specifically because, in his words, "there's not a bunch of other s--- here, and I don't need to manage it".

It's ease-of-use dovetailing with computer safety, and that's a _hard_ problem.

Almost everybody has to use a computer for work and other stuff, and they are willing to pay for a safe and sound system. They are not interested in becoming full time Arch Linux root administrators just to conduct their daily business on their device. Just like almost none of the people who drive a car are full time mechanics and welders.

Be real.

Sort of like how you keep bringing up guns, knives, and car safety in a conversation about phone apps, to illustrate your point.

They don't need to if they don't want to.

I'd be one of the users who are not inclined to transform my iPhone back into my days using Linux on desktop and suffering the pains of doing it. I do have the option to turn my computer into that if I want, I do not have that option for my phone even though it's just a computer.

No one would be forcing users into doing that, it's about allowing the users who want that control over their own devices.

You are attacking a strawman.

Any effort to disenfranchise me from those rights is, in my opinion, unethical. If a company were to try to do so under the guise of a semantic argument, I would find it even more distasteful.

The "point" at which such things should apply is when they are large enough that anti-trust laws and pro competition laws apply to them. IE: when they are very very large and are worth hundreds of billions of dollars.

The moment this is a thing is when the social engineering attacks to get people to root their own phones, to set up untrusted app stores that firehose shitware down onto phones, etc. starts to happen. "I'm from Microsoft, you need to add the Microsoft Store to your iPhone, here's how." I get your concern, and in a world less built on open grift I would share it, but our esteemed tech brainlords have built a tech ecosystem that exists to enable scams. (Hell, I almost got popped a few months ago by a scam, and I tend to be pretty cautious about things.)

Unless the opt-in mechanism is something like "open the phone and turn a jumper" or "buy a different model of the same phone" I genuinely think it's way too dangerous for the average target of a social-engineering attack. People buy iPhones to not deal with this shit as much as is possible; taking that away hurts a lot more people than it helps.

Well, actually, it seems that spotify won the lawsuit.

So, it is instead that Apple will have to pay a fine, and if they don't like it then they can pull out of the EU entirely.

> people buy and use Apple devices of their own free will

And Apple participates in the EU market of its own free will, and can shutdown if they don't like the law.

And users who buy from Apple will be free to install or not install whatever they want on their devices soon.

If those users don't like it, then they can simply not install apps that they don't like and are free to only install apps from Apple.

I invested money in the ecosystem and now there's vendor lock-in, I'm bound to it unless the usage becomes so unbearable that the pain to change vendors is less than continuing the one I have, the pain threshold only grows for each passing year I'm invested in the ecosystem. Do you comprehend that?

Opening a phone for others to develop apps on top does not encroach anywhere into Apple's sale of phones, it just creates a massive wall to guard against other competitors selling apps to their platform. They charge for the phone, and now they extract rent from something they sold through the App Store. Please, think deeper about this, you are missing the point entirely.

> Like I said in another comment, if Spotify is not happy with Apple they can manufacture their own device and sell to consumers.

No, they can't. That's not their business, they don't have the capital to develop and foster a whole 3rd platform of devices + OS just to move away from Apple's ecosystem, that's the whole point of developing a platform: creating a massive lever against competition because of network effects. Network effects are very hard to break from, hence why most major tech companies try to leverage that (look at Meta/Facebook, they are shit but still it's very hard to compete against due to their size).

> People buy and use Apple devices of their own free will, and developers develop for their devices of their own free will as well. And there is plenty of competition in the market.

There's only 1 competitor in the market: Android, manufacturers using Android are not 1 competitor each since none of them are providing a full platform, the platform is Android on top of some devices.

Free will is a massive naïvete to throw here. Is there free will when there are no other options to reach a market? Is there free will for online sellers in the USA to not put their products on Amazon since you'll be living on the outskirts of the market without any meaningful way to penetrate into it if other competitors have an advantage simply by paying the Amazon tax and selling their products through Amazon?

I think you are too naïve and ideological, that blinds you from understanding market forces and markets in general.

I know you're being sarcastic, but it is extremely trivial and simple to buy another phone. Because you can also keep the phone you have!

There is a hang-up among hackers that think it is impossible to use different phones, different computers and different browsers. You can have one phone for this and another for that. You can use both vim and emacs to edit a document and you can have several computers with different systems. Hell, you can even have different sets of cutlery at your home.

> No, they can't.

They sure can. Being incompetent or lacking in capabilities is an acceptable excuse for a person, not for a billion dollar company like Spotify. I have here on my desk a pocket music player of excellent quality that was manufactured in 2023. It is not Android nor iOS and the company making it is much smaller than Spotify. So why can't they? "Not our business"? If they're that incompetent, the CEO and the leadership should apologise for being failures, step down, pay back to shareholders all salary they have received and go hide away.

Yes there is free will for sellers to not put their products on Amazon. That's called retail, and it's a tough market. If your product is good enough you can sell it without putting it on a third-party marketplace. Just like with hotel aggregator websites and food delivery apps. Companies are doing fine without being there.

> There's only 1 competitor in the market: Android

There's thousands of different Android phones in the market, that's the competition. And it's not that difficult for a tech company to develop their own mobile OS if they'd like. Microsoft made Windows Phone which many people liked, Nokia made the excellent and ahead of its time Meego OS, BlackBerry 10 OS was excellent as well. And there is absolutely no blame on Apple for these tech giants discontinuing their OSes. They were discontinued because they weren't profitable enough for the owners taste. So now Apple should be forced to make sure that their competitors can make a profit from their customers? Because that's the core of the matter. Other companies do not want to do the work and investments that Apple did to get a loyal customer base willing to spend money, so they're using EU regulators to freeload.

No sympathy to any of them. Make better ecosystems if you want to compete, you have the money and the means. Try giving a fuck about your customers and your business. That's something that the general public and consumers also would benefit from.

It was a lot easier to see how Microsoft was being mean-spirited for consumers versus Apple. I'd argue that Apple's policies are consumer agnostic, and the only people really up in arms about Apple are developers and some of its partners.

Also the US is no longer in a position to be punching it's own companies, given the onslaught of Chinese companies that are seeking to undercut in even auto manufacturing now.

Couldn't be more wrong. It's not even remotely comparable.

Yes Microsoft had a 90% OS market share but it was an open OS running on open HW platform wich had many players, so users had the freedom to install whatever non-Microsoft SW and HW they wanted on it and SW developers could develop software for it without needing Microsoft's permission for sales or distribution on their OS, or giving them a 30% cut of their profits (other than buying a MS Visual C++ license maybe).

While Apple might have an "only" 60% market share now (though it's currently 87% amongst US teens today[1] so it's only a matter of time till it reaches 90s' Microsoft levels of monopoly amongst US gen-pop) but it's a closed OS running on closed HW with attestation, so costumers and SW developers have absolutely no choice but to run only Apple approved content on them. Vastly more restrictive than what Microsoft of the 90's could even dream of.

>It was a lot easier to see how Microsoft was being mean-spirited for consumers versus Apple.

How? Just like Apple, Microsoft was only being mean spirited to SW and HW vendors and competitors, not to consumers.

[1] https://www.barrons.com/articles/apple-stock-teens-iphone-e5...

Also, you could have developed whatever you wanted, but made an active choice to try to extinguish those applications with OEMs, ISPs, and content providers to squeeze out Netscape. It's truly lost on people today how Bill Gates was an absolute killer back in the day.

    > How? Just like Apple, Microsoft was only being mean spirited to SW and HW vendors and competitors, not to consumers.

Didn't stop you from selling your SW for the Windows platform without paying Microsoft a dime or Microsoft having any way to stop you. Look at WinRar or the thousands of other small companies who made a living selling SW for Windows without paying Microsoft a cent.

>The consumer experience for iPhone users is much better than that of Windows users back in the day.

UX is subjective and debatable. And there's a difference between one having poor UX, and one being "mean spirited towards users".

    > Didn't stop you from selling your SW for the Windows platform without paying Microsoft a dime or Microsoft having any way to stop you. 

But did Microsoft take their money like Apple does today?

The internet and shareware distributions was also a thing back then, where you get the SW for free from anywhere, and send a payment to the developer and received an activation key over the phone/post.

Something that is a surefire success in one platform is not necessarily a surefire success in another. Which is why saying in hindsight "this is monopolistic behavior!" is such a silly thing to do.

If I'm not mistaken you also had to pay to redistribute or link to system libraries so yeah, you had to pay a pretty penny to play.

Microsoft would charge you up-front for things like dev tools (Visual Studio), documentation (MSDN), server software (MS SQL, Windows Server), etc. Yeah, you could get alternatives, but it wasn't until the very end of the 90s that you started to see FOSS really take off in a way that would be appropriate for an enterprise-style environment.

App stores take a cut of revenue, while Microsoft would get its revenue before your project shipped.

The actual thing that Microsoft got in trouble for was technical and legal restrictions Microsoft put in place, especially on OEM/hardware manufacturers, to prevent prebundling of the paid Netscape product.

This is very similar to how Google lost against Epic on it's "open" Android, while Apple (mostly) won https://www.theverge.com/24003500/epic-v-google-loss-apple-w...

Interestingly enough - the one point Apple lost on in the Epic case is exactly what they're being fined for by the EU.

And this article is about the EU where iOS is less than 40% and Apple Music is less than 10%