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Steve Troughton-Smith

This proposal effectively states that Apple should provide private headers to internal frameworks on request, and developers should subsequently decide whether they need to submit an interoperability request to make the frameworks or APIs public

38 comments
Steve Troughton-Smith replied to Steve

(Apple can, however, require an NDA for any provided headers/reference docs)

Steve Troughton-Smith replied to Steve

lolol

"Where appropriate Apple may include other information, however Apple may not disclose any additional information about the developer’s request without explicit consent from the developer”

No more throwing developers under the bus publicly? I wonder why that provision had to be added /s 😛

Steve Troughton-Smith replied to Steve

In this proposal, Apple has to notify the European Commission of every interoperability request or internal headers request it rejects in part or in full, and provide all relevant material to the EC. Apple wants to nanny developers, so now Apple has the EC as a nanny.

jack :clippy: replied to Steve

@stroughtonsmith why tf are the EU doing this to be fair?
I get why they’re doing some of the stuff they’re doing, but all of these measures seem a bit far, imo.

Jorge Salvador Caffarena replied to jack

@jglypt @stroughtonsmith Apple has a proven record of not playing fair and not following EC guidelines , unsurprising they go full steam ahead. Deserved.

jack :clippy: replied to Jorge Salvador Caffarena

@jorgesalvador it’s not _just_ Apple though. The EU are going after a ton of tech companies where we’re now at the point where some are just not releasing products within the EU to begin with. that’s a shame for the company & the consumer, and imo things need to change.

Jorge Salvador Caffarena replied to jack

@jglypt yes we agree on that point, things need to change, companies must change and not be anti consumer

Steve Troughton-Smith replied to jack

@jglypt 1) because Apple refuses to follow the existing laws, and 2) because developers need all of this to fairly compete with the lock-in Apple has created.

It just so happens that it will make the platform better, too, but that's an aside.

jack :clippy: replied to Steve

@stroughtonsmith ohh ok i didn’t know the full context - that they weren’t following current rules

I feel like some of this stuff seems unnecessary though, and not dev-related, no?

Steve Troughton-Smith replied to jack

@jglypt none of it should be necessary, but Apple has demonstrated that it is

Naman replied to jack

@jglypt @stroughtonsmith Apple has shown a pattern of terrible behaviour that is forcing regulators to take drastic action. Thankfully the EC has done a pretty decent job so far, but governments will eventually make stupid decisions (e.g. spinning out Chrome from Google)

That’s fine. It’s punishment for being an anti-competitive monopolistic business. In the future they can avoid such a result by just not being anticompetitive in the first place.

overstrike replied to jack

@jglypt @stroughtonsmith This is misinformation. The current rules are ambiguous enough to be open to interpretation.

Andre Videla replied to jack

@jglypt @stroughtonsmith Apple has a history of throwing tantrums and subsequently disobeying daddy EC

Steve Troughton-Smith replied to Steve

Also, just to acknowledge the spin Apple is taking on this, which I have no interest in linking to: they just threw Meta under the bus for interoperability requests, something that is forbidden under the EC's proposal, triple-underlining why the EC needs to legislate all of this in writing in the first place

Jimmy Callin replied to Steve

@stroughtonsmith ”Meta can see everything we can see!!”

Yes, that is what we have GDPR for.

Americans are so used to dysfunctional governments they have to place trust in specific companies to guard their privacy, causing them to see interoperability as a threat model.

Jimmy Callin replied to Jimmy

@whereami @stroughtonsmith You're treating personal privacy rights as if it should be up to company values. You're not choosing airlines based on whether they have seatbelts or not.

whereami replied to Jimmy

@callin @stroughtonsmith $1.3B was 3% of their net profit from last year. That’s like fining me $500. Fining Facebook chump change after the fact doesn’t stop them from already having misused user data, or misuing other user data in the future. You know what does help? Apple not giving data to Meta in the first place. Meta can’t misuse data that they don’t have. Personal privacy rights should not be up to company values, but they currently are.

whereami replied to whereami

@callin @stroughtonsmith Any regulation that attempts to prevent misuse of data that a company *already has* is unlikely to work unless breaching it results in consequences approaching the severity of, say, liquidation of the company and the imprisonment of every employee and board member with knowledge of the breach who did not report it.

Jimmy Callin replied to whereami

@whereami @stroughtonsmith It's 3% this time. You're talking as if meta shareholders are ok with potentially being fined 20% of global revenue is business as usual.

meta physical deflationist replied to Jimmy

@callin @whereami @stroughtonsmith if its that or a theoretical 21% loss of revenues via WAVES HANDS then they will accept it

Mischa replied to Steve

@stroughtonsmith all these proposed changes sound great, but I don’t see Apple having the resources to implement this stuff by next year (or maybe rather: I don’t see them prioritizing this stuff as highly)

Almost feels like there will be an iOS EU version or no iOS update in the eu next year at all

… which I hope the EC would come down hard as well

Tom Klaver :prami: replied to Steve

@stroughtonsmith One of the dumbest things I can remember recently is the disabling of volume buttons inside the Sonos app. It's such terrible UX now. Thanks, Apple. Assholes.

multigreg replied to Steve

@stroughtonsmith why, these processes should be kept out of the public eye?! There should be maximum transparency about what tech companies are doing

Kenny Park replied to Steve

@stroughtonsmith Brilliant. (I used to live in the EU. 😭Thanks, Brexit!)

mcc replied to Steve

@stroughtonsmith It's great they're looking at interoperability hard but the question to me is whether the EU will allow Apple to keep the per-app-install fee to developers when apps are installed through a third-party store. As long as that stays the platform remains radioactive as far as I'm concerned

artemist replied to mcc

@mcc @stroughtonsmith The European Commission certainly doesn't like it, they opened proceedings about it in June. They have 5 open proceedings against Apple (and 3 against other companies under the DMA):

- DMA.100109 about restrictions on in-app purchases for apps distributed through the app store
- DMA.100185 about not being able to uninstall Safari
- DMA.100206 about the "core technology fee" charged to developers
- DMA.100203 about "features for connected physical devices"
- DMA.100204 about the horrible interoperability request process.

The only public things related to any of these are the recent public comments on DMA.10203 and DMA.100204, as seen in this thread, but hopefully they'll move forward on the other proceedings in 2025.

@mcc @stroughtonsmith The European Commission certainly doesn't like it, they opened proceedings about it in June. They have 5 open proceedings against Apple (and 3 against other companies under the DMA):

- DMA.100109 about restrictions on in-app purchases for apps distributed through the app store
- DMA.100185 about not being able to uninstall Safari
- DMA.100206 about the "core technology fee" charged to developers

akafester replied to Steve

@stroughtonsmith sorry if this sounds ignorant, but I’m really wondering. This all sounds like Apple is being forced open up to all, and effectively hollow out what make Apple products special in the first place.
Won’t all this just force Apples hands and have them look into other means of revenue (more aggressive ads, more iAPs, raise service pricing etc)? It seems like a slippery slope this.

I’m wondering as an end-user. Not a developer.

RAOF replied to akafester

@akafester @stroughtonsmith I have broadly two trains of thought here:

1 - Much like OpenAI, I have negative sympathy for the argument “You can't enforce the law! Our business model is illegal!”

2 - From a consumer perspective, I expect this to make Apple's products better. It's not a consumer benefit that you can only use an Apple watch with an iPhone, or that you can only get full functionality by paring an iPhone with a MacBook (or, for that matter, that you can only use an M3 processor with MacOS).

I fully expect that Apple products will continue to work most seamlessly when combined - after all, Apple has a great incentive to do the work required to make that happen. Apple will now have more of an incentive to continue that, rather than an incentive to half-arse it because they can prevent anyone else from doing better!

@akafester @stroughtonsmith I have broadly two trains of thought here:

1 - Much like OpenAI, I have negative sympathy for the argument “You can't enforce the law! Our business model is illegal!”

2 - From a consumer perspective, I expect this to make Apple's products better. It's not a consumer benefit that you can only use an Apple watch with an iPhone, or that you can only get full functionality by paring an iPhone with a MacBook (or, for that matter, that you can only use an M3 processor with MacOS).

Nicolás Alvarez replied to RAOF

@RAOF @akafester @stroughtonsmith How is it Apple's fault that other operating systems don't support M3? That's one of the few things Apple is doing right here, you can fully unlock your Mac to run any OS.

RAOF replied to Nicolás

@nicolas17 @akafester @stroughtonsmith They don't ship drivers, or the documentation to produce drivers, and while the Asahi project has done an excellent job of reverse-engineering drivers there's still a catch up required as firmware interfaces change with each MacOS release.

But more: Lenovo, Dell, Asus, etc would buy as many M3 chips as Apple could produce; they can't, because you can only by an M3 in a Mac. This is not a benefit to consumers!

Nicolás Alvarez replied to RAOF

@RAOF @akafester @stroughtonsmith How many laptop vendors provide Linux drivers or documentation? Isn't most of it reverse-engineered?

The suggestion that Apple sells its custom chips for third parties is just absurd. It's like requiring car manufacturers to sell their engines standalone for other companies to use in their cars.

RAOF replied to Nicolás

@nicolas17 @akafester @stroughtonsmith I don't think it's at all absurd; Apple is unique in not selling its CPUs.

But I don't particularly think that Apple should be required to sell M3 CPUs; I think that Apple Silicon should be a different company to Apple Computers, at which point it would obviously sell M3 CPUs.

RAOF replied to Nicolás

@nicolas17 @akafester @stroughtonsmith

How many laptop vendors provide Linux drivers or documentation? Isn't most of it reverse-engineered?

I think you may have missed the last decade or so of Linux development; I don't know of a laptop vendor that doesn't provide Linux drivers? And almost all of them are open-source (the notable holdout being NVIDIA).

Xeno the CaveSpider 🕷 replied to Nicolás

@nicolas17 @RAOF @akafester @stroughtonsmith I know at least from Dell that they did this for their developer series notebooks.

They offered an Ubuntu with all the drivers / kernel patches needed to get all peripherals running and it's already fine-tuned for battery saving.

There are others out there directly supporting linux as well, e.g. FrameWork, but I don't know if they supply drivers/patches themselves, mine just works as intended after installing current NixOS.

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