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'For too long, Apple has operated a walled garden around its products': The EU forces Apple to open its closed system to third parties

www.pcgamer.com 'For too long, Apple has operated a walled garden around its products': The EU forces Apple to open its closed system to third parties

iOS connectivity is going to need to get cool with a lot of things very quickly.

BoycottUnitedStates @europe.pub

www.pcgamer.com /hardware/for-too-long-apple-has-operated-a-walled-garden-around-its-products-the-eu-forces-apple-to-open-its-closed-system-to-third-parties/

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Europe @europe.pub

'For too long, Apple has operated a walled garden around its products': The EU forces Apple to open its closed system to third parties

www.pcgamer.com /hardware/for-too-long-apple-has-operated-a-walled-garden-around-its-products-the-eu-forces-apple-to-open-its-closed-system-to-third-parties/

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Not the biggest fan of this tbh. People who want open standards should just not buy iOS devices. It's not that hard.
- Oh no, not more freedom and rights, please no!
  
  I'm not affected by this in the slightest, and I do not think people that buy iOS devices will care about their newfound freedom
  
  Yeah, most Apple users won't care or even know, and will just keep using whatever it is that Apple gives them. I don't see how that's an issue.
  Meanwhile, people who are at least slightly more informed will benefit from the freedom. Things like this are needed because informed consumers too are getting shafted in about every product category. Voting with your wallet doesn't work in a market dominated by uninformed consumers.
  
  There are also those of us who like some Apple products but do not buy them because of the walled garden. The EU might improve choices for us too.
  
  Voting with your wallet doesn’t work in a market dominated by uninformed consumers.
  ... then maybe the people should just get more informed.
  I don't see how we need to regulate something that doesn't benefit anyone as everyone is uninformed anyways and probably doesn't even care?
  
  ... then maybe the people should just get more informed.
  I hear they also made crimes illegal. Problem fucking solved.
  doesn't benefit anyone
  But it does? Some Apple users will try something else, and even if you aren't one of them, these practices spread. When Apple gets away with something, others will follow. Android is also getting more locked down with each major release. Maybe you use a linux phone or none at all?
  everyone is uninformed anyways and probably doesn't even care?
  The fact that this issue is being discussed by us here and meps/commissioners/etc. at Brussels is proof that not everyone is uninformed and don't care.
  What's to gain by not regulating this? Do you want the world to collectively suffer from products that are artificially made worse? You can say that ignorant people deserve what they get, but do the others deserve to get dragged down to their level? Everyone should suffer because iphone users are dumb?
  
  Do you want the world to collectively suffer from products that are artificially made worse
  I want a world in which corporations are scared to release anti-consumer products because they know it'll tank their income.
  Android is also getting more locked down with each major release
  There's stuff like graphene or other open source OS's - installing graphene is literally connecting your phone to a PC and opening a website, something even a chimp can do.
  You can say that ignorant people deserve what they get, but do the others deserve to get dragged down to their level
  Nobody is affected by apple devices getting locked down except apple users, and they chose that.
  
  I want a world in which corporations are scared to release anti-consumer products because they know it'll tank their income.
  I wish. Celebrating customers getting shafted seems counterproductive though. In reality, companies aren't afraid of making anti-consumer products. Regulation can keep them in check and consumers sure as hell won't.
  There's stuff like graphene or other open source OS's - installing graphene is literally connecting your phone to a PC and opening a website, something even a chimp can do.
  I know, I run a custom rom too. I also know that custom roms are still Android, meaning they aren't safe. What do they do when Google makes some restrictive bullshit change again, for example to the android API? Fork it and become incompatible with apps meant for stock android?
  Nobody is affected ... except apple users
  Yes they are. All large companies are constantly looking for more things they can get away with and are ratcheting towards user hostility.
  When the non-hostile options are gone, or reduced to a few crappy ones, the educated consumer is fucked. Because what else are they gonna do, not buy a phone? How is a chimp gonna install Graphene when unlocked bootloaders are extinct?
  
  In reality, companies aren’t afraid of making anti-consumer products
  Because people will still eat the shit thrown in front of them. Why bother with good products when the doofus buys it anyways?
  What do they do when Google makes some restrictive bullshit change again, for example to the android API? Fork it and become incompatible with apps meant for stock android?
  Well, yes, that would most likely be the result. Even now, some apps aren't working - the commerzbank banking app, for example, didn't work on graphene (because of play protect tho, not incompatibility). I was emailing them, asking if they planned to change it, they said "nah fam sorry no time" so I was switching to revolut. Recently, revolut made some steps into that aswell and I'm more than ready to switch again, but it seems like they didn't pull through with their plans.
  Again - rejecting somethign for moral reasons is never easy or comfortable.
  When the non-hostile options are gone, or reduced to a few crappy ones, the educated consumer is fucked.
  Yes, but that never happens. If there is no good option left, there will be another company filling the gap. Just look at what happened with lego - nobody was bothering creating a competition for them, they were the defacto standard if you wanted ... well, lego. However, they because more expensive and worse and suddenly we have blue bricks and cobi, both much cheaper at a higher quality.
  I know people on lemmy don't want to hear it, but the free market works. It actually works extremely well. The only time when it does NOT work if there's too much government interference so building a competition is too hard or when there is no choice on the side of the consumer, which is only really the case for crucial things like housing, food, healthcare etc.
  I already wrote it somewhere, but people can't choose to "not eat". They can damn well choose to not buy a device from a company that is known to be anti-consumer.
  
  Oh they do. They love type-c.
- Companies that do anti-consumer practices shouldn't think it's the norm. The more we fuck Apple, the less other companies think that it's OK to fuck consumers.
  
  Companies that do anti-consumer practices shouldn't think it's the norm
  Yes, and they would know if people would start voting with their wallets.
  
  Voting with the wallet is mostly bullshit, it's a myth corpos are telling people so we regulate them less. They have so much power to inject themselves into human's lives, make themselves part of your existence. You can for example try to walletvote Microsoft out of your life whatever the fuck you want, while you were trying it, they bought a politician or twelve, and now they're part of your government, your education system, your military, and your finance sector.
  While democracy still exists, the only way to fight corpos is the governmental power or regulations.
  
  Exactly this! Capitalism without regulation leads to dictatorship of few cooperations that have the power to let you starve, if you not comply.
  How do people not see that?!
  
  Voting with the wallet is mostly bullshit
  Disagree completely. It's the most effective tool we have to control corpos that does not rely on another entity.
  they bought a politician or twelve ... the only way to fight corpos is the governmental power or regulations
  So, you yourself say they buy politicians, but in the same sentence, you want the people they are buying to fight their power with regulations?
  Do you see where you went wrong here?
  
  How do you leave when your friends, family and coworkers are all on iMessage and refuse to use anything cross platform? This literally affects people's professional relationships and close personal connections.
  No my friend, Apple has perfected lock-in and turned it into an art. Just because it doesn't affect you doesn't mean it's not an issue.
  
  You can see how much of an impact this has - in my (rich European) country only 30% use apple devices and everyone uses WhatsApp for communication (also not good but far better than imessage, and there's a slow shift towards signal happening)
  
  How do you leave when your friends, family and coworkers are all on iMessage and refuse to use anything cross platform
  "Hey, since I don't want to use apple devices anymore because the company sucks, I've decided to ditch it, therefore, I will not longer have access to iMessage. If you need to contact me, you can use XYZ (insert alternative here) or just call me/send a SMS."
  That's what I did when ditching whatsapp. Is it easy? No, ofc not. Ditching something for moral reasons is never easy. Do you think it was easy for me to ditch microsoft for linux when I started out? Hell no. But it gets other people to think about it. Some will laugh about it and say: "haha my funny nephew who wants to save the world himself (insert laugh emoji here)" while other will be genuinely interested in why you made this decision and might follow it. That's how you get people to think by the way.
  Pretending like you need a specific messenger like iMessage for communication is dishonest at best and straightup stupid and manipulative at worst.
  
  "Hey, since I don't want to use apple devices anymore because the company sucks, I've decided to ditch it, therefore, I will not longer have access to iMessage. If you need to contact me, you can use XYZ (insert alternative here) or just call me/send a SMS."
  that only works when a majority of them relies on you. That's rarely the situation in reality
  Pretending like you need a specific messenger like iMessage for communication is dishonest at best and straightup stupid and manipulative at worst.
  thinking like this is ignorant at best and intentionally manipulative at worst
  
  a majority of them relies on you
  Imagine friends and family only want to stay in touch because they "rely" on you. Bro that's outright sad.
  
  yeah imagine. oh wait I think I remembered something.. coworkers! or is it just my wild imagination? I'm not so sure anymore..
  
  I can't talk to my coworkers anymore during my free time? Oh no.
  Anyways.
  
  That's the whole point, when you do useless shit like buying from one corpo instead of another, they only need to buy couple of politicians to succeed. The only way for you to combat it is to elect politicians they can't buy and apply political pressure to the rest of them, so they can't buy them all. If instead of that you play their game and try to outbuy a corpo that owns half of your country already, not only you will lose every time, you are actually what doing exactly they want you to do.
  "No ethical consumption under capitalism" is about this, not anything else.
  
  The whole point of a walled garden is to stop people (their wallets, really) leaving.
  
  Not only that, it's also to prevent outside entitys from "hunting" on your playground.
  That doesn't really change anything - you can switch from iOS at any time if you so desire. Most people just find it too inconvenient.
  
  I literally don’t understand the people downvoting you. There’s a whole reason IT exists because people are fucking stupid and do stupid shit with their freedoms. This, in turn, can really hurt others (viruses, worms, botnets, etc) and opening things up really just means larger attack spaces with many more vectors for entry.
  I understand the wallet holding aspect, but we should be expecting informed decisions from consumers. Doesn’t the whole of Lemmy bitch about what we’ve done here in America because of being uninformed? Same principles apply to even lesser things like tech.
  
  I literally don’t understand the people downvoting you
  That's just the lemmy hivemind. Nothing to really worry about. When leaving reddit for lemmy, I was 100% expecting that one thing to stay, and I was correct.
  I understand the wallet holding aspect, but we should be expecting informed decisions from consumers
  Absolutely, I totally agree with that - I'm very sure that many problem we currently have wouldn't even be a thing if consumers made informed decisions and not ordered everything off amazon because "it's easy lol".
- This is such a lazy argument, it doesn't add any kind of value and it shows you don't care about how other people are treated. Please stop doing this.
  
  you don’t care about how other people are treated
  True, I do not care about how apple users are treated. They have - voluntarily - decided to buy a device that is known to be anti-consumer.
  If we talk about restricting stuff like rent, food prices etc, so essentials, I'm on board. But Apple? Nah. Nobody forces you to shell out that much money for a smartphone.
  
  a device that is known to be anti-consumer.
  Anti-competitive and monopolistic, sure. Anti-consumer? Eh.
  Don’t get me wrong, Apple is just as evil as the next guy. Their practices reinforce their market position in an insidious way. But in many respects Apple performs better on the consumer front than, say, their primary competitor Google. Not in every way, but I wouldn’t call their devices “anti-consumer.”
  If one of your primary concerns as a consumer is an open platform then yeah, I can see you rejecting outright Apple devices. This could in turn lead to being dismissive of the concerns of those whose priorities differ from yours, though I would strongly advise against such a lack of empathy over something as insignificant as a platform choice. Regardless, curtailing their practices is still important.
  If we don’t stop bad behavior because it doesn’t affect us directly, we set bad precedents. Regulatory actions are an important tool.
  If we talk about restricting stuff like rent, food prices etc, so essentials, I'm on board. But Apple? Nah.
  Fallacy of relative privation. “X is worse than Y, so Y doesn’t matter.” Rent and food prices are important, too, but regulatory bodies don’t operate on a zero sum system. Multiple things can be addressed with multiple efforts. It’s not like the EU is saying “we can ignore starvation and homelessness because at least we cracked down on Apple.”
  
  Anti-consumer?
  Inventing your own "standard" and forcing everyone to use it (lightning and webkit) and preventing consumers from having their device repaired from anyone else than a "certified technician" at 4x the markup is definitely anti-consumer.
  But in many respects Apple performs better on the consumer front than, say, their primary competitor Google.
  Google pixels are not OEM-locked and I can easiely install graphene or any other operating system on them. In the smartphone category, google is the only good vendor, ironically. I bought a used pixel 6 2 years ago, flashed it with graphene and it's the best phone I ever had.
  Regulatory actions are an important tool
  Yes, but they're the last resort. And it should be treated as such. If apple had like 90% of the market share, okay, we can talk about regulations, but right now, apple only has 1/3 of the market, so people can still easiely choose any android device.
  It’s not like the EU is saying “we can ignore starvation and homelessness because at least we cracked down on Apple.”
  I never said that. I said that these are cases where I would support drastic regulatory actions because this is no longer within the rules of supply and demand - people can't choose to "not eat". People can damn well choose to not buy an apple device.
  
  Inventing your own "standard" and forcing everyone to use it (lightning and webkit)
  It’s like people don’t remember history anymore. WebKit was a joint venture between many groups. It wasn’t “inventing your own standard” any more than any web browser engine. The restriction to WebKit on iOS devices can be frustrating, but this practice is anti-competitive.
  And Lightning replaced another proprietary port, the iPod 30-pin connector. That 30-pin connector was born in a time when standards for device-side connections were not very often utilized. Many devices used proprietary connectors. When Apple transitioned away from the 30-pin, the industry at large was operating with both Mini-USB and Micro-USB, which were both straight-up inferior to Lightning.
  The problem with Apple and Lightning is that they didn’t drop it when they should’ve. When USB-C became the clear de facto standard, and they began transitioning all of their other devices to it, they should’ve moved the iPhone over and bit the bullet then. Not doing so, and continuing to charge for MFi certification was, again, anti-competitive. But the existence of Lightning wasn’t anti-consumer.
  preventing consumers from having their device repaired from anyone else than a "certified technician" at 4x the markup
  Right-to-repair is an important issue and Apple are really shitty about it. I agree. They are not unique, and this also needs to be addressed.
  Google pixels are not OEM-locked and I can easiely install graphene or any other operating system on them. In the smartphone category, google is the only good vendor, ironically.
  Like I said, “in many respects.” For your use-case, one that you must admit is infrequently utilized, statistically speaking, Google makes a better product that fits your needs. The vast, vast majority of smartphone users are not flashing alternate ROMs to their devices. Most people aren’t power-users, and even most power-users don’t bother. That’s not to say your use-case isn’t meaningful; I’m glad there are still solid options available for a world I used to be a part of!
  People can damn well choose to not buy an apple device.
  Sure, but does that mean Apple should be allowed to get away with anti-competitive behavior? With practices that seek to force others to use their systems, or to keep users they have from exploring other options? I don’t think so. Bad business practices need to be addressed regardless of whether users have an option to look elsewhere. Especially when the company has a sufficiently large percentage of the smartphone market to force developers to work within their walled garden to hit target audiences.
  
  They have - voluntarily - decided to buy a device that is known to be anti-consumer.
  Many Apple users bought their devices before they were aware of Apple's user look in tactics, let alone how they could be problematic. Most people are not into tech, so they wouldn't know. Data on tech illiteracy.
  
  I knew about Apple's tactics and still went all in.
  For me at the time it was a choice between sticking with Android (my first smartphone was the OG Moto Droid), trying to de-Google the Android phone I had at the time, or switching to Apple.
  Android hardware may be better now than it ever has been, but that wasn't always the case. Samsung especially pissed me off when they had an Android phone out that after an update to Android the phone would randomly go into Airplane mode without indicating it. They refused to release a fix. That was the last straw for me after trying to use a ton of different ROMS on the phone to get around the issue. Also, back then if you didn't have Google Play installed that meant you missed out on a lot of apps or had to use Amazon's App Store.
  I got fed up with having to constantly fix things after ROM updates and didn't have the time due to working so many hours at my job. I didn't want to stick with Google because I saw where it was headed. I switched to Apple and never looked back. Part of that switch was also influenced because I wanted to get out of the Microsoft Windows ecosystem and gaming on Linux wasn't great back then so I had to dual boot. Gaming on Mac's weren't that great either, but at least I had the "feeling" that things were more private with Apple than Google and MS.
  I'm so tied into the Apple ecosystem right now that I'm just not sure I want to go back to hacking Android phones and al that even if things are 100% better than they were a decade ago. I "trust" that Apple handles my privacy concerns better than an ad-supported Google and Windows. I'm going to recommend Apple to non tech-savvy friends and family 100% of the time. Until there's a phone OS competitor that is both easy to use and on decent hardware out of the box, it's just a hassle.
  That said, I'm thinking about looking at picking up a cheap pre-paid Android phone and checking out the ROM scene again because of the happenings in the US the last few months. I don't know if I can trust Apple to not cave to the government and destroy the only good thing it had going for the ecosystem for me.
  
  The problem is they have critical mass so developers are forced to target iPhone. Its a natural monopoly.
  The US won't care as well since they benefit.
  
  Dunno about that critical mass, iOS only has 1/3 of the market in europe while android has the remaining 2/3.
- Except it is that hard because companies collude and work to drive the competition out of business.
- You say that until Google realises that there is no other viable alternative and so they can do the same thing since it's not like there is another option.
  I know you ca try and install other OSes, but that isn't an option for many, as many manufacturers make acquiring root access impossible.
  You answer is basically a big "go fuck yourself" to everyone who bought an iphone before they knew about the things Apple did to keep users looked in. Same goes for the acquiring root access on an android phone.
  People are not born with knowledge.
  
  You say that until Google realises that there is no other viable alternative and so they can do the same thing since it’s not like there is another option.
  Not entirely. I'm fairly sure that, if google decides to lock down pixel devices, the graphene team would evaluate other devices that are more open. The reason they recommend pixels is because they are open, not because they are big google fans. Graphene DOES run on other devices aswell, it's just not officially tested or supported. And there are other devices with unlockable bootloaders, most noteably older oneplus devices and fairphones.
  You answer is basically a big “go fuck yourself” to everyone who bought an iphone before they knew about the things Apple did to keep users looked in
  No, my answer is a big "go fuck yourself" to everyone who voluntarily decides to stick with apple devices despite knowing of their practices. Let's be honest for just one second: Barely any consumer is so tied into an operating system that it would prevent them from switching. What do most people do with their phones? Listen to music, have a messenger, maybe check emails, browsing - that's it. And you can do that on any other phone. The amount of people that are apple power users that use applications that only exist in the apple ecosystem is abysmal and largely irrelevant in this discussion.
  Same goes for the acquiring root access on an android phone. People are not born with knowledge.
  True. Neither was I. But in 2025, we have the internet and you can read up on almost anything imagineable. If I wanted to learn about astrophysics, I could find plenty of videos or resources about it. If I want to learn about japanese history during the sengoku period, there are a lot of resources about that. And if I want to learn how to unlock the bootloader of a phone and install a custom rom, not surprisingly, there are resources for that.
  This "People are not born with knowledge" argument is so stupid - nobody is born with it, the problem is just that most people are too lazy to learn about their possibilites to break free from oppressing corporate conglomerates. And THAT'S something I have an issue with.
  
  Graphene works on the OnePlus, I'm not a developer so I haven't tried anything in changing the Os. And pixels problem is with the obsession with Gemini AI and the exonys chip they are using that drains the battery
  
  It's not officially tested anymore tho - they've recently updated their supported devices section. Stuff like the fairphone, which was supported once, also are no longer in the list.
- I completely agree with you. So many phones are business tools. Forcing your employer to use the App Store is good. Side loading fly by night bullshit is a risk and lack of oversight the world just doesn’t need. If you want that stuff get an android.

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