"Failure to comply would carry penalties of up to tens of billions of dollars."
From Sam Schechner and Tim Higgins's "Apple’s Hold on App Store Set to Face Significant Challenge From New European Law" posted Thursday in the Wall Street Journal:
Apple is facing one of the biggest challenges yet to how it controls and profits from the App Store as Europe prepares to complete a new competition law in the coming weeks.
The new European Union legislation—which could be effectively completed as soon as this month—is set to direct Apple to allow software to be downloaded outside its cash-generating App Store and limit how companies impose their own payment systems on apps, according to people involved in the negotiations. Failure to comply would carry penalties of up to tens of billions of dollars.
For the past two years, the iPhone maker has battled lawmakers, regulators and rivals around the world to defend how it serves as the gate keeper to more than one billion users of its devices.
“Apple is playing 5D chess right now,” said Paul Gallant, a policy analyst for Cowen & Co. “It will struggle to explain why government changes will radically change the iPhone when Google already does it and it will struggle to explain why it can’t do it in the United States when it may soon do it in Europe.”...
The [so-called Digital Marketing Act]'s most existential threat to Apple comes with a provision that would allow software makers access to the iPhone—through so-called sideloading—outside of the rules and payment scheme of Apple’s App Store. One recent draft of the DMA, overwhelmingly approved in December by a 642-8 European Parliament vote, included sideloading.
My take: Have I ever mentioned that my mother danced with Albert Camus in Algiers? Long story.
Not seeing Hitler’s blitzkrieg in the making was unforgivable, thinking Putin was just going on manoeuvres incredulous, and believing the EU and other regulators don’t have it in for Apple unbelievable, as I’ve been yammering on about for ages.
Net net though is see no long term impact. Side loading will piss off long term Apple ecosystem supporters, but conversely attract diehard Android users who don’t want a walled garden and object, misguided or not, to being “forced” to use the App Store.
Give a little, gain a little. It’ll all come out in the wash.
Now a lot of game app developers might well move to cheaper (to them) 3rd party stores. Some of them might even pass savings onto consumers.
But for me, I have zero interest in anything from a 3rd party store. But then, I’m not the market for lots of apps, particularly phone games.
And regulators want to give sexual and financial predators free reign in the App Store.
I would rather buy safe and scam/malware/spyware free apps from the App Store than from some dodgy side loading business. I expect when push comes to shove, most security and privacy conscious iOS users will do the same, and those that don’t will do so at their own risk. You can give someone a driving licence but you can’t force them to wear a seat belt. If they go through the windscreen in an accident though, that’s on them.
Perhaps regulation is the best way to demonstrate the benefits of a curated App Store as horror stores of spyware ridden apps sold outside of it simply serve to strengthen its reputation.
Apple need to get ahead of this game and take these steps before regulators push this to the fore though, and regain control of the narrative. I still find TCs inability to articulate a coherent strategy to counter this baffling and concerning.
“I don’t know why everyone thinks it’s only the EU.”
It’s probably because “everyone” knows the EU leadership is literally green with envy, and this is their way of trying to throw a monkey wrench in the Apple works.
As Robert essentially points out, good luck with that….
I’m not sure what the EU (of which the U.K. hasn’t been a member since Brexit) being green with envy or otherwise has to do with my observation of over-regulation being a global phenomenon or not, so I don’t understand the point you’re making.
Frankly, over regulation is such a feature of our daily lives now that someone from the 1980s would be hard pushed to comprehend how the world allowed itself to be sucked into a dictatorial kleptocratic system of world governments sharing data and keeping us tracked, masked, and traced in a manner which even George Orwell in his dystopian novel 1984 would have been hard pushed to imagine.
In China they even trialled a scheme to test the public for covid using swabs from when “the sun don’t shine.” We may not be that far gone in the west but ever since 9/11 our liberties have been stripped away and over regulation has become a self serving uncontrollable avalanche culminating in draconian measures on freedom of movement and liberty of a kind unseen outside of even worst of wars.
Much of this stemmed from US led security initiatives which the world simply copied and pasted to comply. The result is groupthink led by paranoid megalomaniacs who have created a layer of security experts – in which I include regulators – sitting between democracy and elected governments and corrupting the covenant of trust which has enabled the west to reign supreme for so long.
These days, however despotic other regimes are, there is a sense of self loathing in the west making it unrecognisable from the mindset of our shared sense of liberty and democratic values from the past.
The App Store furore is just another sign of little Hitlers trying to exert their authority because it’s their job to, and they are empowered as never before to do so “for the protection and safety of the public good.”
So in summary, this problem was made in America, and gleefully grasped and gold plated by bureaucrats worldwide into the overzealous application of pithy and paternalistic rules and regulations. The EU certainly excels in this respect but no more so really than the pork barrel politics in the US.
We’re living in a weird and whacky mashup of Huxley’s Brave New World, and Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm.
The App Store will be fine. I wish I could say the same of our politicians.
The EU leadership hates the idea that they don’t have a dog in the smartphone hunt. A big part of their reaction is simply envy.
Pretty obvious to me….
Again, it’s not a. “EU” phenomenon but a global one…
I’ll bite… So tell us the Albert Camus story…
Since you asked, my mom’s obit:
Faflick, Simone Leboulanger Long-time resident of Lexington, Mass., died Feb. 18, 2019 at age 96 after a long decline. Her husband of 64 years, Carl Edward Faflick, had passed 10 months earlier. She is survived by three children — Annick Mansfield, Philip Elmer, and Simone Coble — seven grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.
Madame Faflick, as she was known at Boston University, where she taught French for 23 years, was born in Corbeny, France, the mayor’s daughter in a village destroyed in the First World War. She rode out the Second in Algiers, where her parents ran a school for French and Algerian children. “We watched from an open window the amazing spectacle of German bombers flying over the harbor and the streaks of light of the antiaircraft bullets trying to shoot them down,” she wrote in a self-published autobiography, “My Journey to America.” “One night a hissing object passed between us, hit a dozen eggs and splattered the walls of the living room.”
It was in Algiers, she liked to tell her students, where she mixed with French resistance fighters and danced with Albert Camus, one of the authors in their assigned reading. It was there, too, in 1943, a second lieutenant in the French Army translating for the British, American and French forces, that she met and married her first husband, Waldo Darwin Elmer, a radio engineer from Seattle who had landed in North Africa as part of the first U.S.-British expedition of the war.
Transported to America by Liberty Ship and widowed by age 29, with two small children and a half-built house, she was nearly ready to go back to France when her Lexington neighbors — many of them architects — pitched in to finish the house on Moon Hill Road where she would spend the next six decades.
In 1953 she married Carl Faflick, one of her first husband’s classmates at Harvard, who adopted her two children and gave her a third. The extended family — which included her mother, Eulalie, who had moved to America to help with the children — took regular pilgrimages to the Val Andre, the beach town in Brittany where Simone’s childhood friends still gathered every summer.
She was a voracious reader, an energetic sportswoman (tennis, skiing, sailing, trout fishing), a witty conversationalist and a warm hostess who never said no. Her home in Lexington — and a summer house on Vinalhaven Island in Maine — soon became popular stops for her husband’s business partners and for generations of French friends and relatives making their own journeys to America.
And we both loved your mother’s story! That’s what I call a full life!
“Where Apple is going isn’t where the puck (or ball) is…”
Well put! Both thumbs up!
I want closed more secure system. If I want side-loading I can buy ANY other phone in the world!
It must have been quite something, hearing her tell of activities past.
It was so very special to have lived through those times.
Were you lucky enough to learn French from her?
One other question is on my mind at the moment. Will someone be able to use a side loaded App to help infect other iPhones besides the ones that the side loaded App is on? I won’t use any side loaded App Store and I think that will make me safer but will I need protection from a side loaded App that someone decides to use? And if that happens on a large scale, will these “regulators” pony up the money to help us recover any damages from these intrusions into our privacy?