Technology
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
Who would’ve thought? This isn’t going to fly with the EU.
Article 5.3 of the Digital Markets Act (DMA): “The gatekeeper shall not prevent business users from offering the same products or services to end users through third-party online intermediation services or through their own direct online sales channel at prices or conditions that are different from those offered through the online intermediation services of the gatekeeper.”
Apple has an annual legal budget of approximately infinity dollars. I assure you they are aware of this and they believe they are in compliance, even if just barely.
If challenged, they will have no problem fighting it — they have nearly as much cash on hand as the entire EU budget.
I hope the EU challenges this, and I hope the EU wins, but Apple isn’t going to be surprised by whatever happens.
The fine would be approximately 10% of Apple's total revenue and the fine increases by 10% every violoation so I doubt that Apple can not accept the regulations.
Unfortunately, Apple has the resources, both legal and financial, to tie that up in the EU courts for decades.
We'll see what happens
What if I told you one of those two can make new laws?
In one afternoon the Commission+Parliament can change the basis of whatever case Apple wants to fight. And they are up against Vestager - she makes multinational software companies bend the knee twice before lunch.
You're underestimating what EU can get gone when they're motivated to get it done.
Apple has also been known to ignore laws and pay fines for breaking them. The store is a major revenue stream so they might just do that.
Yup. If the only penalty is a fine, and that fine doesn’t scale to the business’ profits? A profitable enough business could simply factor in the fines as a cost of doing business.
Imagine you could make $1000 and only get fined $200 after the fact. No extra penalties. Just a flat $200 fine for every time you violate it. So as long as you expect to be able to top that $200 fine, a business will elect to just pay the fine and continue doing the illegal thing.
There's the letter and there's the spirit of the law. Even if Apple has found a brilliant loophole the courts can just say well it's technically true but you're still breaking the law nonetheless, lawyer budget be damned.
I‘d be really surprised if Apple tried that.
They have to know that it violates the DMA. And the penalty for violating it can be up to 10% of their yearly worldwide revenue (not earnings!) for the first violation and up to 20% for repeated violations. I don‘t think they‘d risk that, especially as the EU really isn’t known for its leniency when someone intentionally breaks their rules.
Velociraptors testing the fence. It may be illegal but they may get away with it if they can argue "no actually'
On the positive side, those fines could fix the finances of a few smaller EU countries in a single sweep.
I'm not too sure that these actions violate the letter of the law here, even though I agree that they're 100% in violation of the spirit of the law.
It's been some years since I've put the mobile development world behind me, in no small part because of Apple's shenanigans, but the way I understand how this might work - Apple may be required to allow "iOS software" to be installed from third party stores, but software that runs on iOS must either be signed using a certificate that only allows installation in a developer or enterprise context (which require explicit and obvious user consent to that specific use case, and come with other restrictions such as the installation only lasting for a limited period of time), or through an "appstore" certificate that allows installation on any device, but the actual application package will need to go through Apple's pipeline (where I believe it gets re-signed before final distribution on the App Store). All certificates, not just the appstore ones, are centrally managed by Apple and they do have the power to revoke, or refuse to renew, any of those certificates at-will.
If my understanding is correct (I'd appreciate if any up-to-date iOS devs could fact-check me), then Apple could introduce or maintain any restrictions they please on handling this final signing step, even if at the end of the day the resulting software is being handed back to developers to self-distribute, they can just refuse to sign the package at all, preventing installation on most consumer iOS devices, and to refuse to re-issue certificates to specific Apple developer accounts they deem in violation of their expected behavior. I haven't read the implementation of the DMA in detail, nor am I a lawyer, so I'm not sure if there are provisions in place that would block either of these actions from Apple, but I do expect that there will be a long game of cat and mouse here as Apple and the EU continue to try and one-up the other's actions.
But the article of the DMA says that the gatekeeper shall not prevent the business user to serve their product using other conditions than those of the gatekeeper's platform. I think that would include Apple's publishing guidelines.
Those who buy apple products deserve each other.
Exactly my thoughts. "Let's jailbreak this, bypass that, circumvent that one thing..." Why do you subject yourself to this with a device you paid hundreds of dollars for?
As much as I'd like to have an iPhone, I'd rather not.
As an aside, it's the same thing with game consoles. Is the whole "you must be connected to the internet" thing still happening? That's what has been preventing me from getting a new xbox, for example.
Steam Deck is pretty awesome in the offline gaming regard, if that's what you might be looking for.
I'd argue that there are a lot of offline mode frustrations with Steam but none of them are Steam's fault, they are all due to individual games online requirements or DRM implementations.
IOS is the worst operating system i have ever used
Why do people buy it?
Because it's familiar, easy, pretty and does a lot of thinking for you.
Familiar only if you worked with it before.
Easy... fair enough.
Pretty... debatable.
Apple established itself as a luxury brand. So it gives customers this "prestige feeling". That's at least my take.
I refuse to ever use a single Apple product.
So… frontloading?
Apple is doing this thing where legislation applies to them and they just try not following it anyway. Trump is truly influential.
I can't say I am surprised. Apples view is that since they made the device and provided the software they are entitled to a cut of anything that happens on it, because that software makes use of something Apple created.
I don't agree and think it is a crazy view. But that sort of corporate mindset is one of the reasons I have never been big on Apple products.
Friendly reminder that you can sideload apps without jailbreaking or paying for a dev account using TrollStore, which utilises core trust bugs to bypass/spoof some app validation keys, on a iPhone XR or newer on iOS 14.0 up to 16.6.1. (ANY version for iPhone X and older)
Install guide: Trollstore
Another alternative is SideStore which allows to refresh apps from your phone without a computer. Just a WiFi connection. It has the benefit of working with any ios versions including the latest ones that TrollStore doesn’t support.
of course Apple plans to charge fees for sideloading, a bunch of scumbags, but fear not, Apple fan boys cult members will regurgitate Apple's propaganda as gospel
As someone who uses both Android and iOS, I appreciate my Pixel 8 Pro running GrapheneOS (a custom version of Android) more and more.
Crapple
Because of course they are! There goes my plan to try an iPhone when side loading becomes available.
I’m not sure how this would work in practice. Developers distributing apps independently to be sideloaded wouldn’t be submitting them to Apple to review, and sideloaded code may not even have an identifiable developer to charge.
I suppose Apple could implement some sort of rigid signing system, but I think the EU would see that as just another abuse of power.
Sorry, can't be bothered with whatever issue this is.
I'm busy shopping for a North Face tent so I'll have it to camp in the next time a new ear pod case gets released.
It's hard to imagine people who buy iPhones care about sideloading. Their priority is the convenience of iMessage and the Apple ecosystem.
EU, I belive in you!