The iPad App Store is perhaps an even more dysfunctional place than the iPhone in how much it holds hardware and use cases hostage to the manufacturer's vision. Just imagine how much more versatile the iPad Pro would be if only you could run Linux VMs on it in the moments you want to do anything remotely tinkery on an iPad.
Apple's hardware since the 2021 iPad Pro (with M1) has had the ability to do this. The iPads have the RAM (16gb on higher storage models), appropriate keyboard and trackpads, the works. Great hardware being held back by Apple's vision people weren't allowed to deviate from.
A straightforward reading of the DMA suggests that Apple is not allowed to restrict apps from using hardware features. Let's hope that means Parallels/VMware style VMs are possible without too much of a fight.
totally agree - the iPad Pro could be a great second coding/programming tool - I'd love to justify buying myself one, but.. I just don't see a use-case if I can't work on it. I don't design stuff, don't really feel like I need a separate browsing device either
I switched from an iPad to a Surface Go 3 running Fedora a while ago and it really transformed my tablet use. I mostly just watched Youtube videos and did some light browsing on my iPad, but never really any serious work. Occcasionally I would ssh into other machines using apps like Blink, but even with the external keyboard the UX just feels ... off. Same for other apps that have IDE-like environments. They work, but they're never really great to use.
I was skeptical about getting a Linux tablet because of the worse battery life and less polished overall experience, but having a desktop Firefox with all add-ons, my text editor of choice, and the ability to open a terminal and run whatever I want really more than makes up for it (Plus GNOME is a pretty good tablet experience out of the box these days as long as you broadly stick to their 'official' apps).
Yep, I've got one and don't use too much. Too big for scrolling, too limited (software) for work. But Apple knows iPad might cannibalize mac and limit it's uses on purpose
> But Apple knows iPad might cannibalize mac and limit it's uses on purpose
Felt the goal was to overtake Mac during the 2015-2019 era, all the real engineering focus was on iPad, the Macs were underpowered and not really fit for purpose.
Why would Apple choose a platform where they don't get 30% of every Creative Cloud sub when they could have had that.
Only reason they backtracked was because Mac sales didn't fall off and the iPad just isn't that good to do real work on.
I believe it's simply more lucrative to keep selling both devices to the same target group, than try to solve the users' problem with a single device.
Everything in Apple is designed to silo off the two product groups.
An "iPad with MacOS" would just shift revenue from the MacOS division to the iPad division, losing a MacOS customer and probably NOT gaining a iPad customer (as he would have purchased an iPad anyway).
Just as much as developing an MacBook convertible is not an issue of user experience but an issue of unnecessary cannibalization of iPad sales...
By that logic, the iPhone wouldn’t have been able to play music as soon as it launched. Yet that was part of the whole pitch: “an iPod, a phone, and an internet communicator”.
> I was never tempted to buy an iPod, but combine the phone and iPod and give me internet access to boot... sold.
Before the iPhone there were already phones which could play music and access the web. I even remember some Motorolas which interacted directly with iTunes. The iPhone didn’t succeed just by smooshing those together.
Either way, that’s neither here nor there, the point is precisely that Apple didn’t shy away from cannibalising their own product.
I don't know how it is relevant what Apple did on other products, especially "pre-iPhone".
The point is that TODAY the PC line and the iPad line of Apple are quite notable silo'ed to very specific usage-patterns.
There is no technical reason for that, but the distinct commercial reason that there is nothing to gain in terms of revenue or profit by combining the two products into one.
They both sell fine and at great margin separately, there is little to gain by building an iPad Pro that is 2000 USD and supports the use-cases of both a 600 USD iPad and a 1600 USD MacBook respectively.
Quite bluntly: You want the iPad to be convenient in a workflow as far as possible, and then SUCK really bad in a way only a fully synchronized Macbook can fix.
This is the same reason behind the Apple Pencil not working on the iPhone. Despite the iPhone approaching sizes of an iPad mini, I can't use the incredibly expensive pencil on an iPhone because according to Apple only the iPad should be used for tablet stuff.
What? The Apple Pencil works because there’s a special digitizer layer on the screen for pencil compatible devices that allows it to work. This isn’t included on the iPhone. Same reason a Samsung S-Pen doesn’t work on devices that don’t support it.
I think the technical reason why the Pencil doesn't work is beside the point here.
Apple is building the hardware, and they decide that the Pencil use-case a iPhone user may have shall not be covered by buying an Apple Pencil, but by buying an iPad (and a Apple Pencil)
The technical reason is important, though. If it was totally free I suspect they’d allow it to function, but it doesn’t… so burdening the 200M iPhones with the additional cost of the pencil hardware is a trade off not worth taking. Just like Samsung not “allowing” S-pen to work on most of the phones since adding the digitizer element would be a silly cost adder, especially for their super cheap phones.
It's a decision of product proposition, and Apple decided that the Pencil use-case shall support iPad sales and not be cannibalized by the iPhone.
They also decided for a while that all their premium iPhones shall have "Force Touch", an entirely unique display technology only for iPhones to sense pressure without the potential of additional accessory sales.
These are all valid decisions. They are not a charity, they operate to maximize the profit they can gain from each customer.
The iPad has the big "issue" of barely needing to be replaced with new models, as most use-cases are consumption-oriented and there are no real disrupting sales-driving requirements for iPad media consumption.
So the Pencil was created to drive the proposition towards Media CREATION, because people would buy a new, more-expensive iPad then and requirements for that segment are constantly increasing (better pencils, lower latency, more-demanding apps).
Also in the past year: iPhone increases focus on Media recording with more-complex video features, iPad is tagging along with demanding Media processing use-cases
Wasn’t that the period when Apple were positioning themselves to get the Macs away from Intel? I’m not sure the goal was to let the iPad overtake as much as it was to get its processors ready to take over from Intel.
> But Apple knows iPad might cannibalize mac and limit it's uses on purpose
Apple isn’t afraid to cannibalise its own products. They did exactly that with the iPhone in regard to the iPod. If someone is going to displace one of your most successful products, it better be yourself with something even more outstanding.
It would have been in Apple’s best (financial) interest to have the iPad cannibalise the Mac because they’d have more control and earn more money from app sales.
For certain groups of people (the majority?) that is reality, as long as you don’t need compilers, IDEs, or virtualization you can do pretty much anything on an iPad.
iPad (any model) with keyboard-cover can be used as a great portable ssh/mosh
terminal (eg with Termius app). I work in Emacs--most functionality is available via terminal.
I've never owned a keyboard cover, but one could bring a TKL or 60% mechanical keyboard for the full typing experience without a laptop - might be a good compromise for some.
Because they don’t run iPadOS? People love all the things the OS can do. They just wish it wouldn’t stop them from doing that one thing in particular that they it to do.
Tantalizingly close to perfection with one glaring flaw is extremely frustrating!
It's the UI. It is designed from the ground up for touch. People who like iPadOS do not like Windows Surface tablets for that exact reason. A desktop UI that's been shoehorned into a tablet is not as good as a purpose-built touch UI.
The two tablet genders: iPad, and Windows Surface. It's a shame no other giant tech company ever created one that has exactly the combination of attributes you asked for.
> Just imagine how much more versatile the iPad Pro would be if only you could run Linux VMs on it
After installing https://ish.app for Alpine Linux emulation on iPad, one immediately comes up with use cases, even though it's excruciatingly slow.
Hopefully Apple opens up the imminent M3 iPad Pros to allow macOS and Linux VMs, even if the feature is initially price segmented to devices with extra RAM. The iPad 4:3 high-resolution screen offers unmatched vertical real estate for text editing.
As long as the majority of the target group keeps buying MacBooks AND iPads, I doubt that Apple has an incentive to cannibalize its own product line.
They are well-aware of this, visible from the fact that they never bothered to add a touch panel or Pen-support to any MacBook, or make the Watch a standalone device: Customers wanting this either buy the devices individually anyway, or wouldn't be willing to hand over the sum of all combined devices for a single "superset" device.
Just imagine that Apple's view of the "iPad Pro with MacOS" demographic are customers who purchased a 1600 USD MacBook and a 1000 USD iPad. Is the "iPad with MacOS" able to replace either of those? Would they be able to charge 2600 USD for that device and sell comparable volumes?
> Just imagine that Apple's view of the "iPad Pro with MacOS" demographic are customers who purchased a 1600 USD MacBook and a 1000 USD iPad. Is the "iPad with MacOS" able to replace either of those? Would they be able to charge 2600 USD for that device and sell comparable volumes?
"iPad with MacOS VM" is technically adjacent to "iPad with Linux VM", since both make use of hardware nested virtualization support that is present on Apple M* processors. Good performance/watt Linux on Arm will launch in a month on Microsoft/HP/Dell/Lenovo/etc laptops and tablets with Qualcomm-Nuvia (ex-Apple) Snapdragon Elite X.
If Apple opens up Linux VMs on iPad (as a side effect of opening MacOS VMs), they can keep some users entirely within the Apple walled garden, similar to Microsoft's introduction of WSL on Windows. If they allow defections to Nuvia hardware, it can expand to Macbooks Pros, given the Qualcomm roadmap for AI silicon on laptops, co-funded by billions of automotive pipeline.
Those who already purchased two Apple devices have already given their money to Apple. They won't do it again, since iPads are already overpowered for the artificially constrained use cases. If new iPads with extra memory/storage allow VMs, that's net new revenue above the $1500 price point. We'll find out next week.
I bought some Apple Watches (because of reasons). I am wearing one right now. Model 3 (Nike edition or something). I've switched everything off (WiFi, Bluetooth, analytics, the whole thing). It only shows the date and time. The battery lasts 4-5 days.
It's amazing when you shut down the telemetry-battery-draining functionality of devices. And to add some more insult, I am using an Android phone, which ofc don't even try to connect to my watch :)
I believe -and Gemini just confirmed- that they don't work together.
> it depends on a larger device for configuration
yes, the architecture was purposfully made, so that the Watch only collects your bio-metrics, with limited own/independent functionality. They (Apple) does want everyone in the 'garden', so why open it up?
> I see the Watch the same as a late 90s Palm device.
Yes, but the LTE-variant is more along the lines of a Palm Treo.
Apple could probably make it link to a MacBook with very little effort, and to all other platforms with just a little more.
It's just a direction not worth for Apple to explore, because in their view those are just customers who have "not yet bought an iPhone", so why try to win them with the Watch if it just prolongs their journey to the iPhone
I have the large Apple Watch. It has cell capabilities. I wish it was a standalone device. I don’t need a phone. The cellular watch could replace my phone if Apple allowed standalone devices. I doubt they will ever allow people to have a cellular watch without being tied to a phone.
I also have a cellular Watch. Combined with some AirPods it works great if all you need is phonecalls which is a good use case if you want to be available without a time sucking little monster in your pocket.
I think their point was that you have to pair Apple Watch with an iPhone in order to use cellular, and they wish you could use cellular Apple Watch without having to own an iPhone.
Yeah you're right, that's fair. I think any up to date iPhone will do though, so if you want to go this route you could buy the cheapest one you can find (hell, the screen could be smashed, who cares?), do the configuration and then toss your phone into a drawer.
Oh gosh if I could use a series of iPad apps to run a Linux system on an iPad I’d be so happy. I mean I could get an android tablet but I don’t really like android. I’m fine with iOS and I love Linux, so sticking those two together would be really nice.
Actually I’d love to run a Linux VM on my iPhone too!
What’s the benefit to you of a VM on your iPhone when you can simply ssh to a vm somewhere else? Not saying there isn’t a benefit, but curious about what you want to do. Other than people who are in the middle of nowhere, which at that point I’d recommend a raspberry pi and a battery bank or a laptop or something.
I use the pi and battery for running various ham radio stuff while out in a park or whatever and connect from an iPad, and that works very well in my use case.
>iPhone when you can simply ssh to a vm somewhere else?
Like not having reliable internet access everywhere. In a lot of areas mobile internet is spotty. Or you're in roaming so it's insanely expensive.
Plus we already have these powerful devices in out pocket, more powerful than PC's were 10 years ago, sitting idly doing nothing most of the time, why not put them to use when in need instead of paying for some extra remote cloud compute on top of that.
Also, VMs don't just mean Linux for web development, it could be a VM for retro gaming or running things in VM for security sandboxing etc. That would be really neat to always have with me instead of having to ssh all the time.
While I agree with your use case, doing nothing most of the time is how those devices last day long on a battery and can run without a fan. My MBA get toasty when I OCR a pdf, I cannot imagine a phone on a sustained load.
>doing nothing most of the time is how those devices last day long on a battery
But It will run down the battery only for me, not for you. Why do you care about how I want use my battery life? You don't have to do what I do, with your own phone. You can just keep using like a regular phone if that's all you want. Me having more freedom with my own device, does not reduce your freedoms you have with your own device.
I paid for the device and I own it so why shouldn't I be allowed to use it how I like even if it runs the battery in 2 hours? That's why I have portable power banks and GAN chargers. They can even throw in a disclaimer about waving your rights to warranty for devices used like that.
Otherwise what's the point of all that technological progress of M* chips if all that we're allowed to wo with them is browse Instagram but now even faster, and play Candy Crush but now with ray tracing.
> You can just keep using like a regular phone if that's all you want. Me having more freedom with my own device, does not reduce your freedoms you have with your own device.
I was just pointing at an aspect of how these devices are engineered. In fact, I jailbroke my first iPhone and spent years running with a rooted and modded Android device. So, be my guest...
> Otherwise what's the point of all that technological progress of M* chips
Showing that ARM is a viable computation platform? I'm not particularly enamored of the Apple ecosystem. It's great for what I use them for and awful for anything else. Reverse-engineering is an option, but I prefer focusing my efforts on more hackable platforms for my tinkering. Unless the law mandates openness, I'm not seeing Apple's stance changing.
>I was just pointing at an aspect of how these devices are engineered.
And you pointed at the wrong thing. Apple isn't preventing you from running VMs on their M* iPhones to stop you from draining your battery too fast. Come on, don't act this naive.
>Showing that ARM is a viable computation platform?
If their motives were that charitable, and cared so much about the ARM platform, they would open up their M* platform to others to run whatever OS they want on it and provide OSS drivers, no keep it as locked as possible.
First, in the major European city where I live mobile internet is not super reliable and flat data packs are relatively expensive - I have one because I develop a lot on trains, but most of my friends don't.
Second: it's a waste of hardware and money. If I can already run the thing on my device, renting twice as much hardware for the same result is hard to justify.
And finally, it keeps my data under my power. Some of the work I do has strict requirements on what I can do with the data, and "upload it to a cheap cloud provider" is not on that list.
Not just VMs, you could technically also run things like PC emulators, with real PC operating systems, especially older ones, with acceptable performance. Just imagine using Windows 98 on an iPad!
Reminds me of running Windows 95 under Bochs on the Sony PSP. The the CPU turned up to max (333MHz) it was just barely fast enough to impress your friends. ;)
Well it will probably never, since all apps are always within the sandbox. The idea is to ssh out to some other system. Besides the actual iOS shell is not so interesting or useful anyway. (Jailbroken devices have had them for a while, you won't be running your nvim and git stuff locally anytime soon.)
While this is doable, it is far from an enjoyable experience -- many packages are not available on iSH or have issues, for example. Most people are not going to replace their laptop with these two apps.
At some point i had multiple older iPads with perfectly great screens, and i wanted to use them as "hubs" for a home setup to control various things, another option was using them as secondary screens, or maybe just give them to a kid.
You couldn't, they were simply to old for the new IOS update, and almost all apps including browsers requires the newer IOS and update automatically without asking - essentially bricking them on purpose.
Anyway i ended up giving them to a "safe e-waste center" but i'm sceptical they'll actually be recycled.
I think locking down a device should be illegal especially e-waste considered, and if there's some reason not to, then it should at least be opened the day official support ends so the device can be used to watch videos/games for kids/whatever.
As a counterexample, the other day I found my old Nexus 5, from 2013, running Android 6. While it was not completely straightforward, I was able to reset the phone and link it to a new Google account, and after several cycles of updates the entire Google suite seems to work, including Maps, and not slowly at that. I was, and still am, genuinely impressed.
A story going in completely different direction --
I have a Sony Xperia phone from 2017. It has stopped receiving OS updates after Android 8, and I don't use it any more other than occasionally as a backup phone. A while ago, I discovered that people on xda are putting LineageOS (a custom ROM based on AOSP) with Android 14 on it, tried that myself, and it works! As slow as the phone is, it can run apps without any problem. This is truly amazing.
Same, I wish once device stops being supported it should give easy option to be jailbroken and unlock bootloader. Such devices could be retrofitted for many other roles e.g robotics toy with arduino/raspberrypi, smart home, smart router etc.
Well, in my country there's been multiple scandals about waste handling where it was found very little ended up being recycled, the sorting people did in some cases created more pollution because it had to be transported and huge amounts ended up in big dumps of toxic assorted garbage either here or in some third world country where kids then make a few cents a day scavenging in the toxic piles.
So yeah, i'm sceptical. There's a reason it's called reduce, re-use, recycle as a very distant third as far as i've seen.
I don’t think versatile devices are possible. I love iPad Pro for what it is. I tried Surface Pro and it was a much inferior tablet experience, even though the device is more “versatile”. I just doing think that you can get an excellent tablet by trying to be a laptop at the same time.
It’s a screen. Add a regular Bluetooth keyboard mouse and you have a PC. There’s no compromise here from hardware perspective, it’s just software that’s in the way.
Remember the size of the original iPhone? I have long wondered why nobody makes a universal compute brick in such a form factor without a screen. Then sell 5" or 7" or 10" or 27" screens with and without touch that connect to the little brick.
I can buy a 15" screen right now for under $75. It's the ultimate super-thin laptop if you remove the compute and keep the brick in your purse/backpack/holster.
For extra points, connect two compute bricks for more muscle.
I mean, Samsung has DeX. It’s exactly what you describe. I don’t like it, I don’t need it. I’d rather have a focused device than one that tries to be two things at once.
I have a Surface Pro and really like it. But for sure it is 100% a compromise experience, especially on the tablet side.
But part of it was reconditioning myself; the “proper tablet experience” largely comes from limitations of what they let you do with it. And with more features comes some complexity. For me it’s worth the tradeoff.
Is it right to say that currently the cost of the hardware is being partly subsidized by the profits Apple makes from the software? If some of the profit from the software gets taken away will we see the price of the hardware rise?
>Is it right to say that currently the cost of the hardware is being partly subsidized by the profits Apple makes from the software?
No, it wouldn't be. You're probably thinking about gaming consoles who's HW is sold at a loss or at very thin profit margins and subsidized by the more expensive game purchases, but Apple hardware already has the highest profit margins of any HW manufacturer out there, and at their 200 USD per 8GB of commodity RAM and NAND chips, you better believe it.
So no, they don't need the walled garden SW money to fund HW. Their HW alone brings in plenty of cash.
The cost of custom chips is massive, but then manufacturing is cheap - after selling N units to pay off the initial investment, it's almost free (unit cost) when done at scale.
I don’t think manufacturing would end up almost free for any of the newest chips since there are such tight tolerances and high failure rates. At least not for quite a few more years when (if?) there are competing fabs.
In the current situation Apple has to consider that a marginal price rise in hardware will lose marginal revenue in software, thereby shifting the equilibrium price of hardware lower.
That's really not true. The optimal (in the sense of where the supply and demand curves intersect) price for maximum profit rises as costs rise. It's true that the revenue-optimal price remains the same, but I think Apple's shareholders care more about profit than revenue.
To build intuition on this, it helps to think about the extreme cases: If the marginal cost of production is zero, you can sell the product for close to zero to pick up pennies from almost every human on earth. So the revenue-maximizing and profit-maximizing prices depend on demand elasticity, but are both low.
If the marginal cost of production is a million dollars, selling for anything less than that will result in negative unit economics. You can still maximize revenue with low prices, but that incurs negative per-unit profit. In fact, the price must be more than one million dollars per unit to make any profit. That might imply that the profit-maximizing condition is one unit sold for $1m+1.
For certain demand curves, that might even imply the profit-maximizing condition is to tell zero units! A real-world example of this is Rivian. They have negative unit economics, and would be more profitable if they simply stopped production.
I think what confuses some people is that all these things can be (and are) true at once:
1. The price where Apple achieves maximum profit under the new rules is higher than before.
2. After raising prices, that profit will be less than what they earned before.
3. Units sold will be less than before.
4. Apple won't reduce prices in response to the lower profit because the new higher prices, lower quantity and lower profit are profit-maximal under the new market conditions.
What we will observe in practice is not higher MSRPs in Europe, but fewer discounts (it is an open secret that you should never buy an Apple product without at least a 10% discount).
I see a lot of people claiming (I believe disingenuously) that the changes forced by the EU will convince them to consider buying Apple's products in the future. If you believe those people, that's yet another reason to think Apple hardware prices will rise in Europe: Both the supply and demand curves are moving in directions that imply higher prices.
You are right. My earlier claim is incorrect. It is not a certainty that the optimal price doesn't change when costs rise. It really depends on demand elasticity.
My reasoning was this: If Apple can get away with a higher price without demand dropping off, why would they not charge this higher price in the first place?
But the idea is flawed. Apple could ultimately make more money selling fewer more expensive devices at higher margins than selling more devices at lower margins. So you're absolutely right.
Of course they could also make less profit by protecting their margins. We don't know.
Do I think side-loading and alt app stores would make iPads and iPhones more versatile devices? Yes.
Do I believe indie devs will be worse off? Unfortunately, also yes.
If you are a solo app developer, you will now have to keep presence on all app stores out there, since if you don’t publish on one then a copycat will. Every store would have its own review processes, fee structures, billing and tax procedures. Since you would need to follow a dozen of those, as an indie operation realistically you will either go under or pay middleman companies a chunk for this—so, in the end, you’ll lose the same cut or more and we’re back to the starting point.
Furthermore, I believe you will have much less protection against plain piracy, which was a big thing in the days of yore until it was spectacularly dealt with by Apple within its mobile ecosystem.
This is why I suspect the primary interests side-loading and alt app stores on Apple devices would satisfy is large enterprises and a few opportunistic middlemen. Entities like Epic, Netflix, who will be able to generate more profit; governments, perhaps; a few publishing companies (think CDBaby for apps) will win small time; some users who don’t want to pay and want to get things for free might be able to get their way; indie devs will be worse off.
1) Users win. The first alt app store didn't even launch and it pressured Apple to change it's review policies TWICE. Once to allow game streaming services, and then to allow game emulators. Hell, even developers won here.
2) How did this play out on every other platform. Sure - piracy exists, but most don't and it's pretty non-impactful AFAICT.
I ported my lucrative iPhone games to Android back in the early days, 2010-11. They were immediately copied and re-uploaded to Google Play (I think it was still called Android Store back then). I mean literally duplicated, not a single thing changed. Just using my binary under someone else’s name. And then it was freely downloadable all over the web. Just wide open theft and piracy with no help or enforcement from Google.
Took all summer to port those games and I made maybe five bucks for the effort. Never again.
Piracy is not-impactful is not true. The disappearance of indie software that do not depend on a remote server (or that's not software on a remote server) is basically due to the inability to monetize with sales native, stand-alone, software. And that's for the piracy.
In some way, the success of the App Store towards indie/solo developers is because there was a way to sell things without the piracy easily steal your sales.
Yes, I know that "it's not stealing", "it's not theft", etc. Beside the ethical/moral conundrum of piracy, the fact is that it destroys the market for small developers.
So depending on product category it might be a large drop (EU study finds -38% displacement rate for books) but it might also be a boost (EU study finds +24% for video games), and it is hard to say in general, since even a 90% piracy rate might only mean a maximum of 5%-10% lost sales (from the wolfire blog post). Either way it isn't at the level of "impossible to succeed".
If we are talking about app stores specifically, I bet a much bigger factor in (lack of) success is discoverability, both because your app is literally hard to find and because app store owners allow a flow of cheap clones to compete with your genuine app.
Remember that we are talking about small developers.
Yes, Adobe, Microsoft or makers of viral AAA games absolutely benefit from piracy (that’s why they have actually tolerated it for decades): it helps their software penetrate the market and get more users hooked up on their ecosystem. However, to John Doe’s lifestyle business of a couple small niche or utility apps each lost sale is bread off the table.
In addition, piracy on iOS is great for major providers who do subscription services (a device where you can pirate means a device with more users, and more users means more monthly revenue).
Again, the people hit the most are the above-mentioned small time John Does.
Well, the point I was trying to make, said in another way is that the initial success of App Store (iOS, in particular) was driven that the fact that , suddenly, users thought that was OK to pay for the software. I think that the (relative) lack of piracy and difficulty for ordinary users to install pirated software has been a key factor in the success of it: "there's an app for that, and I can't easily find it for free".
The other point I was trying to make is that the disappearance of "stand-alone" apps, not tied to a web service, is primarily driven by the fact that, this way, you can avoid piracy. You can offer a free-tier (that would be eaten by the piracy anyway) and sell (say) a synchronize, or additional features tied to a web service (so not printable).
May be it's not the only thing, but that's what (anecdotically) I hear from solo-indie-very small developers.
I fully agree with you on both the current discoverability problem and also with games piracy having a different, may be even not negative effect.
> suddenly, users thought that was OK to pay for the software
I would argue almost the opposite way. Users are now conditioned to expect the software to be free with ads of 99 cents. Both greatly lowering the cap on what people can charge for software due to expectations. Instead we've seen the rise of subscription services apps that have no business needing one.
Not sure in which world you’re living. Remember shareware and cracked versions of it? Remember having to jump through hoops to get paid for software (or indeed to pay, if you were a user)? Especially if user and developer lived in different countries.
Apple created a new reality where you pay 99 cents and buy to own. It made so very compelling, through general ease of payment flow that just works worldwide and through a large ecosystem of compelling hardware.
Then, subscription behemoths like Epic started crying how it’s all unfair. Of course, it is to them, but there is no way kowtowing to them is beneficial to small app developers.
The only evidence is that developers think they need to do these things because of piracy, which is not the same as actually needing to. A moral panic about a thing does not prove the thing is actually a problem, and the effects of the panic itself shouldn't be blamed on the thing, either.
This would be true if the only alternative to piracy is not using said content or software. If paying is a valid alternative to a nonzero fraction of pirate users if piracy was not an option, then the piracy does affect the creators economically.
> If it weren't, you wouldn't be experiencing this cascade of downvotes, so get with the program.
Disregarding this statement's general silliness, it is also downvoted. Now we're in a paradox. Downvotes mean you're wrong, so the statement that downvotes mean you're wrong..is wrong?
I disagree. First of all I expect competing stores to ask a smaller cut than what currently Apple asks (and Apple itself may lower it), so it may very well be the case even with a middleman the amount "lost" by the developer will be lower. Not a given though, I guess we will see.
Secondly, the Android ecosystem seems to be doing well even with the situation you describe. There are not that many competing stores (mostly from sellers of devices, like huawei, samsung, amazon, which is something will not happen with Apple devices), and piracy, while present is not as commons as with desktops.
> Secondly, the Android ecosystem seems to be doing well
Android apps are notoriously pirated through and through.
For a smaller company in developed market anything Android is a second thought because monetization is much harder
I agree with you on most counts save for the piracy. It's highly dependent on market segment, with less affluent sectors especially with youth you'll find very high privacy rates.
I look forward to the day an fdroid like platform is available on Apple phones and tablets.
Are you making much money from less affluent sectors anyway? Existance of piracy doesn't mean loss of sales. I would guess that most pirated software was never going to be purchased anyway.
I'd contend that profiteering off of youth is more questionably moral than piracy among youth.
I pirated virtually everything I consumed as a kid/teen and now that I have money I pay for it. The companies I pirated off of lost nothing because I had no means to purchase it anyways.
You raise some valid points, but I believe your comparison isn't quite complete/holistic.
> If you are a solo app developer, you will now have to keep presence on all app stores out there, since if you don’t publish on one then a copycat will.
This doesn't make much sense. The App Store will still be where 90%+ apps are installed from, and I'm willing to bet money on that. Where are all the Google Play devs pushing their apps on the Amazon store or on 3rd party app stores?
> Furthermore, I believe you will have much less protection against plain piracy, which was a big thing in the days of yore until it was spectacularly dealt with by Apple within its mobile ecosystem.
Depending on your familiarity you already had lots of such websites (I'm not going to mention any names but it's easily googleable if anyone wants to verify). Yes keeping the app for >7 days was a pain as they expire but a 3rd party altserver helps with that.
> This is why I suspect the primary interests side-loading and alt app stores on Apple devices would satisfy is large enterprises and a few opportunistic middlemen.
Have you taken a look at any of the privacy forums/subreddits? Places where they use say GrapheneOS? Do you know what's their favorite app store? It's this thing called F-droid. And it only contains open source apps. Such a move would be amazing for open source devs. Hell, it would be great for beginner/hobbyist devs too. I (ages ago) had tried my hand at android dev. And unlike iOS, you don't need to pay $99 to appease the Apple gods for that. Free publishing is great for indie and small devs who may never hit $99/yr revenue.
Btw, afaik you already needed to pay a higher price for youtube premium if subscribing through the app. And apple's draconian/benevolent-and-super-nice policies (/s) meant that you couldn't even tell your users to get it for cheaper from elsewhere. Would you like paying 30% of your income regardless of choice?
I've not done much app development as a solo dev, but hasn't it been the case for many years now that Android has supported multiple app stores? Is this a problem for developers of Android apps?
Not really a common approach with the people I know.
People can make educated guesses ahead of facts. That's pretty standard.
But having strong "beliefs" without evidence just means there's no real basis for the "belief". And that makes it just an irrational feeling or wish-for-it-to-be-true for whatever reason.
If a copycat is using your brand, you’ll have zero issue removing them from any App Store. If a copycat is just copying your app, well, that’s called a competitor.
You forgot an immense portion of companies who will benefit from this : B2B companies which have lower client pools but want to have a direct contractual relationship with their clients.
Do you think sideloading hurts indie developers on Android? I believe that over time the situation on iOS will become identical to the one on Android - Google Play/the App Store will be the primary way to install apps for 99% of users since it's the default and has the biggest catalogue; some companies that are unhappy with Google Play/App Store fees will have an alternative store just for their apps (see Epic games), and advanced users will have an "advanced user" appstore with apps that either Apple/Google don't want to support or developed by people who don't want to pay a Google/Apple developer fees (i.e. mostly open-source hobbyist apps), along the lines of F-Droid. It appears the iOS equivalent of that will be AltStore.
If that's what happens then I see no way for this to be bad for indie devs - the ones who want to write a paid app and can afford the upfront capital to publish can still do so on the store with 99% of users, while those who don't have the capital or don't want to publish paid apps now have the option of going with AltStore.
This is what I hope happens at least, as I am a big fan of Apple hardware but absolutely despise how its software treats me like a baby. If Android can allow for more freedom without compromising security by hiding advanced features behind several scary menus and parental controls then I don't see why Apple can't have the same.
> you will now have to keep presence on all app stores out there, since if you don’t publish on one then a copycat will
Nobody has to do anything. If you don't want the trouble of publishing on an alt-store to serve your customers, what's the problem of letting others do so?
> This is why I suspect the primary interests side-loading and alt app stores on Apple devices would satisfy is large enterprises and a few opportunistic middlemen.
Sideload as Apple implemented, yes. Sideload as what sideload always meant, no.
Apple is trying to distract and mislead the public by redefining what "sideload" means. If I can't install whatever open source shit I build myself on NON-APPLE HARDWARE to an iPhone then it's not sideload. I hope EU figure this out soon and retroactively fine Apple for this dishonest move.
> Do I believe indie devs will be worse off? Unfortunately, also yes.
There's a high number of indie devs which just gave up with the cumbersome appstore process. The ones you see on the appstore are the ones who made past this filter already.
I personally advise single devs against making an app unless you are really sure to have the motivation to go through all all of this.
The mobile stores are particularly bad and unsuited for hobbyists or single devs at the moment.
Just compare that to a website where you deploy and you are done.
> If you are a solo app developer, you will now have to keep presence on all app stores out there, since if you don’t publish on one then a copycat will
I really wouldn't worry about it. Those of us who care about this kind of thing are the small minority. I'm incredibly happy to have this in the EU, but am under no illusions that it means the average Joe is going to care enough to jump through the hoops necessary to install (yes, install!) an alternative app store.
i can't speak for app stores, but my band, based out of Anchorage, Alaska, makes good money from streams. we are completely independent. we don't use cdbaby, but distrokid who charges a flat fee to upload, and publishes to all available platforms. that flat fee also covers publishing to new platforms as they become available to distrokid.
i underdstand your worries but at least in my main line of work, i've seen a lot of innovation over the 20 years i've been doing this. fret not. i guess that's a guitar pun.
Come on, the pc has allowed "sideloading" since its inception maybe 40 years ago.
On the pc, you could create applications entirely out of the control of microsoft (formerly ibm) and the world was better for it.
When ios came out with the app store, apple immediately prevented large swaths of useful applications from seeing the light of day. The debacle with privacy would be of less consequence if Little Snitch had been ported from macos to ios.
I'm still waiting for a toggle that lets me turn off mandatory notarization checking. And a way to tap on a .ipa file in the file browser and just being able to install it.
oh and a way to do all this without paying rent money to apple...
Been there, done that, gave up because it’s not a justifiable expense for individual use. Wrote a couple of Android apps instead but can't really use them daily.
Apple (and other tech companies) offer free versions of products to students, but they don't require you be a full time student. I take a class once a year in a topic that I am interested in, which qualifies me for these free programs. Classes can be as cheap as $25 if you're in WA.
Tried that. And other alternatives I don’t remember right now. Still a hassle I don’t want to get into (and I have something like seven Proxmox nodes in the house). I just have other priorities and wish that this was as easy to do as in Android.
The EU adjust doesn’t get that, and probably never will, because the bureaucrats are more worried about impact to their industry lobbyists than to their citizens.
False equivalence - a manual gearstick complicates the design of the car, making each unit cost more, while allowing sideloading is a one-time development cost with marginal maintenance costs. Also my car manufacturer doesn't get a 30% cut every time I fuel up because I use an automatic transmission. If it were like that I can assure you there would be a much bigger uproar than in this sideloading debate.
It's hard to imagine how a working developer can believe that maintaining a platform where anyone can do anything has only upfront fixed costs. Apple spent about 4 years trying to change the contract of the pasteboard API to resolve unwanted data access concerns.
The Play Store has similar fees for IAP and sales as Apple. When people complain about Apple charging developers, it’s not about the $100 annual cost of the developer program.
They aren't complaining about the 30% either; they simply want a way to compete with what the App Store charges for. Android provides that, iOS does not.
There are people who complain about the 30% as well. As soon as the Microsoft Store was fully dead, Microsoft started saying that 30% for a store was too high.
Please tell me you have at least 10+ people who plussed this remark!? The fact that some reactions don't get what you're saying worries me. Or maybe I don't understand, but explaining your jest is not my style.
I think it's because dystopian situations force people to name things oddly.
And yes, I think not being able to put an app on a device that I paid for is dystopian. I also think not being allowed to repair my own devices is dystopian, too.
If no device had ever prevented a user from installing their own home-made apps, "side-loading" would never have become a thing.
For gaming consoles, I was vaguely uneased by it at first, but quickly got over it because it had always been that way. I never had a chance to put my own game on a game console.
But with general-use computers, including mobile phones, the whole idea really bothers me. I PDAs and brick phones had never allowed people to write their own apps, I might be less bothered by it. But (thankfully!) they did. That cat's out of the bag, and long ago.
Even Google's attempts to prevent "sideloading" bother me at this point. Any warning that applies to side-loaded apps should also apply to store-installed apps because they have shown they aren't foolproof.
I would argue the same reason "quiet quitting" has become more of a norm. Corporate interests that are pushed to various media that becomes 'standard'.
Almost a decade ago, I bought an iPad Air to try and replace my MacBook Pro. It didn't work and had to resort to laggy online editors with paid subscriptions. And even then, when I was doing Ruby on Rails, it didn't even work out. Ok, so, the technology was new, sure.
Last year I got myself an M series iPad "Pro" thinking things would have changed. Well, VS Code was the only product that allowed me to run a tiny VM to edit and deploy my apps online. It worked really well to its credit despite a little bit of hacks (have to save it as a Safari shortcut) but still, a far cry from replacing my MacBook Pro.
I have the same M series Mac mini back home that I do insane multi-tasking on and something I would claim is easily the best god damn computer ever made for IT devs like myself. That's when I realized, the limitation is in the OS and not the hardware. The iPad "Pro" is really powerful for a lot of other stuff. Photo editing, music creation and what not.
Ironically, I saw someone on YouTube get annoyed with the same problem and use a Raspberry Pi attached with the iPad as a MacBook Pro replacement (it draws power from the iPad itself, so it's a single cable solution). I was amazed and sad at the same time that Apple had to push their neglected audience so far to the point of even bundling our own DIY hardware to make it usable to call it a "Pro". The iPad's "Pro" is such a misnomer.
I am still waiting for the day when I can throw away my MacBook Pro and work from a small factor without carrying a brick to charge a 14", almost 3Kg device in my office bag every day.
I like the flexibility of the iPad. I use it a lot for note taking during meetings. I use it to draw architectural diagrams without having to deal with drag and drop interfaces. Plus, not always I find the need for a keyboard. In fact, my favorite setup was an Apple keyboard plus iPad Pro. It almost solved my use case with VS Codespaces. Almost. I think I may re-visit the Raspberry pi solution for now.
These days, my work is almost mostly AI related, so I am on Google Colab most of the time too. So, the use case for a proper laptop without a touchscreen is diminishing with each day (for me).
That's understandable. Having a separate device just for notes works better for me (e-ink preferably). But I certainly get the appeal of having everything all in one device.
I would also love to run a Linux VM on my iPad Pro, but if we could get third-party app sideloading to work without alternative app stores and other idiocy UTM would fix that for me.
Wow, that looks really good. I have never heard of this company personally. I also like the app ecosystem of Apple iPad. But this looks really good if I was going to buy a new tablet. I am at the moment looking for solutions with my existing iPad unfortunately. Thanks for sharing.
The biggest problem rn is Apple's blocking of JIT for everything but browsers. This means neither UTM nor the more modern emulators can run at close to full speed.
I'd like to see this changed. This seems like the real "Gatekeeper".
JIT (Just-In-Time) compilation is a technique that allows certain programs to run significantly faster by compiling code at runtime, rather than ahead of time.
Apple enabled this for iOS 14+, but killed it again with iOS 17. It's basically the reason why we currently don't have full speed VM's on iOS / iPadOS devices.
While Sideloading / Altstore / Sidestore allows you to install any IPA, this still doesn't enable JIT for these apps. There are currently some workarounds that involve running certain software on your local network (search SideJITServer on Github).
They didn't along with iOS? Oh come on! Apple... sigh
I think this might honestly make iPad more appealing, and serve Apple more than they might think. The room for improvement on iPadOS seems greater than iOS due to iPadOS underutilizing the device.
I am happy to see Apple's arm twisted, but disappointed the demand is to allow alternative app stores and not user-facing side-loading. In my view, having only the official Apple App Store is just fine as long as Apple also adds the ability to install an app off an unsigned IPA file for free. With that, users would be free to install apps that Apple don't deem fit for the app store, giving them the freedom to use their device as they see fit.
> ability to install an app off an unsigned IPA file for free
I feel like the thinking is that there must be an entity — somebody running an app store — who could be held legally responsible for any damage caused by malware distributed via their channels. Regular non-tech-savvy users cannot be trusted with such delicate software as apps running on their personal phones.
The thing is though, as you said, it's my personal iPhone. If I want to be able to install an unsigned app I should be able to. There should be ways to dissuade the non-technical people but my feeling is it is my iPhone so I should be able to do as I wish.
Nothing against you personally, but since you get the same iPhone as the non-technical folks, some compromises have to be made, and they ain’t gonna be in your favour.
This is the myth that everyone is going to be screwed by. Nobody is going to be legally responsible for malware that ends up on your device.
The only difference is Apple has the $$ and incentives to remove it as soon as it's brought to their attention (assuming it's actual malware that may cause large financial loss not just copyright infringement).
Alt-stores will be ridden with malware and nobody is going to be legally responsible for it. We can just hope the alt-stores that end up existing have incentives to keep them "clean".
Correct, which is why allowing no-store app delivery would unleash an even greater chaos. In a world where any random website can trick a user into downloading an app via sideloading, there's no hope to protect people from 'unclean' software.
I wonder if, as a thought experiment, someone could create an App store with a completely transparent self-signing mechanism that allowed you to install apps yourself (but only to your device).
If so, one would think that unless Apple gets to dictate terms strongly to the App stores, that this would only be a matter of time.
It would need to be signed so there would be a way to disable it if needed.
This is essentially the same on MacOS now if you distribute, things built without signature at all only open on the machine they were built, you need to provide even a self signature to get it to open with a warning on another machine.
It is mostly just an iOS under the hood. Apple separated the iOS and iPadOS, saying that this way they can develop for it separate exclusive features. While we have things like multitasking and stage manager, mostly it’s been an excuse to bring iOS features to the iPadOS with a delay for a year.
> mostly it’s been an excuse to bring iOS features to the iPadOS with a delay for a year
On the contrary, mostly the iPad and iPad OS was the testbed for VisionOS UI management for years, ensuring that iPad apps (and app devs) had to implement support for arbitrary window shapes and layering, using the same affordances (more or less) as VisionOS, unlike iPhone apps that are stuck in portrait or landscape.
There's a lot of truth to AVP is an iPad strapped to your face, and if you have worked on iPad as professional daily driver for 5+ years and now own an AVP, you can remember aspects of VisionPro getting tested in the field over this time period.
That means Apple must cover jailbroken devices under warranty too. Sideloading Cydia will be even easier now. Apple must support all device configurations now.
Software modifications are already covered under warranty in Europe too as long as they didn’t cause hardware issues (and it’s up to the manufacturer to prove it).
Cydia is just an App Store for modifications, right? Don’t you also need to exploit a vulnerability in the OS to get arbitrary code execution? Doubt modifying the OS will be covered under warranty.
No I didn’t “hack” the device or anything, the last thing I want to do is tinker with my single most important computing device, I need it to work all the time and work well. It’s been possible for years, officially.
Interesting didn’t know they have a browser for iOS with web extensions working I check it out. Thanks. Would be super cool if Ublock works with it as u say.
With these legislations, I always wonder how the lawmakers come up with timeframes like 6 months. Who is to say this implementation doesn't take, say, a year? I doubt lawmakers have the technological know how to estimate such a project (actually, I doubt anyone has) - but 6 months seems rather short (given they hadn't just had to implement the same thing for iOS)...?
> given they hadn't just had to implement the same thing for iOS
You've kind of answered this for yourself; iPadOS _is_ iOS.
Apple has, in any case, presumably more or less known this was coming for a year or so; they kind of had to make the argument that iPadOS and iOS were not the same thing, I suppose, but it was always a bit far-fetched that the EC would buy that.
It was actually due to the way "gatekeeper" is defined. The EU has now said that although iPads (still) do not meet the criteria, they are being explicitly targeted anyway. My guess is because this is simpler than expanding the criteria to include iPads in some way.
> My guess is because this is simpler than expanding the criteria to include iPads in some way.
They don't need to expand the criteria. DMA empowers the commission to investigate, and even declare as gatekeepers, products that do not meet the quantitative thresholds on the basis of qualitative assessment.
EU Commissioner Thierry Breton said: “We continue monitoring market developments and will not hesitate to open new investigations should other services below the thresholds present characteristics to be considered important gateways for business users,”. per the commission iPad passes the threshold for business users elevenfold.
Any deadline will be declared either too short or too long.
That's why the deadlines usually tend to be on the shorter side to put actual pressure on companies needing to implement them. However, the companies always have a way to say "look, we've tried our best, it's just we just need more time". No one is going to fine them for not meeting those deadlines if the companies are actually working on implementing the changes in good faith.
It's telling that they are even going after iPadOS. Really messages to Apple strongly that they have no hope of dodging this on iOS if even a relatively niche product by comparison is also qualifying them for gatekeeper status.
I'm genuinely surprised by this. I figured the differences between tablets and phones, combined with Apple's efforts to distinguish between 'iPadOS' and 'iOS', would be enough to get them a win on this point. If the shared app store is part of the problem I wonder if that makes it a liability for any new apple ecosystem to tie into the App Store, like Vision OS for example.
Why would IpadOS not be held to the same DSA rules as IOS? Apple has applied the same model of gatekeeping (walled garden) to both the iPhone and the iPad. DSA attaches requirements to the gatekeepers if they are big enough.
Software similarity and market positioning don't really come into consideration once the role of gatekeeper has been established.
It's control of the market that matters. Apple (and Google) each effectively control 40%-60% of the world market on digital goods. Pay Apple 30% for your app and 15-30% for all digital goods. That's unacceptable because their market is so large. 2 billion+ devices each (or is it 3 billion now?) 100s of thousands of companies are under their thumb. Don't follow their rules, loose 50% of your entire market. Do follow their rules, lose all your profit.
Sony/Nintendo/Microsoft's markets 2 orders of magnitude smaller and effect 3-4 orders of magnitude less companies.
That doesn't really change much. Assuming the numbers are correct, there are 6 billion people have smartphones and 2 billion have PCs. That still means Google and Apple collectively control the majority of world's digital distribution. I suspect many of those PCs are not used nearly as much as the phones as well and have far less digital content on them (apps/music/movies/games/books)
Consoles are (still and mostly) singe purpose devices. While I do approve force opening every Turing complete device to side loading - game consoles are way down in the worst offenders list.
Last year, 7.4 million games consoles were sold in Europe. And 57 million iPhones (as far as I can see they don't report numbers on iPads). Like, I think it's fairly obvious why they concentrated on iOS first.
Consoles are not defined as general-purpose computers (except for a time, the PS3), and there aren't many complaints from the game industry at large about access discrimination or unaffordable devkits any more, there's tons of indie games for just about every major platform these days. So, too much effort for too little gain, there is no artificial competition impediments any more.
The only complaints tend to come from gamers - DRM, "console exclusive" titles and lootboxes, mostly, but of these three the only realistic field where the EU can/will/should intervene is the lootbox crap.
The iPad was heavily marketed as a computer replacement so definitely is supposed to be "general purpose" device. Many people I know don't use a laptop or desktop at all, and just use their iPad.
iPad marketing has historically focused on how it's _not_ a computer, so if people bought the marketing that is an implicit indication that they weren't looking for a general purpose computer.
iPad is so versatile, it’s more than up to any task. Whether you’re working on a project, expressing your creativity, or playing an immersive game, iPad is a fun and powerful way to get it done. Here are just a few of the countless things you can do with iPad.
--- end quote ---
And it has historically been "it's like a computer, but in tablet form".
The new iPad Pro will enable a new generation of advanced apps for everything from productivity, design, illustration, engineering and medical, to education, gaming and entertainment.
The innovative Apple Pencil and new Smart Keyboard enable users ... making iPad Pro ideal for everything from professional productivity to advanced 3D design.
Deloitte is creating a first-of-its-kind Apple practice with over 5,000 strategic advisors who are solely focused on helping businesses change the way they work across their entire enterprise, from customer-facing functions such as retail, field services and recruiting, to R&D, inventory management and back-office systems.
The new offering will help customers discover the highest impact possibilities within their industries and quickly develop custom solutions through rapid prototyping.
I don't believe that's true. Can you provide some details? There are some programs indie devs can use to get software on Xbox, but they require approval from MS, which is the opposite of side loading.
Because it doesn't meet the criteria. To summarise heavily, they are:
- Size criteria:
Have an annual turnover in the European Economic Area (EEA) of at least €7.5 billion in each of the last three financial years, or
Have a market capitalization of at least €75 billion, and
Provide the same core platform service in at least three EU countries.
- Control an important gateway:
Provide a core platform service which is an important gateway for business users to reach end users.
- Entrenched and durable position:
Enjoy an entrenched and durable position on the market, operationalized by having had at least 45 million monthly active end users and 10,000 yearly business users of the same core platform service in the EEA in the last three years.
In fact, the EU has admitted that iPads do not meet the criteria, and are making an explicit exception to include them.
Don't get me wrong, I'm _very_ happy about this, but you asked ;)
EU isn't making an exception in this case. DMA empowers the commission to investigate, and even declare as gatekeepers, products that do not meet the quantitative thresholds on the basis of qualitative assessment.
Following this decision EU Commissioner Thierry Breton said: “We continue monitoring market developments and will not hesitate to open new investigations should other services below the thresholds present characteristics to be considered important gateways for business users,”.
per the commission iPad passes the threshold for business users elevenfold.
>The Commission's investigation found that Apple presents the features of a gatekeeper in relation to iPadOS, as among others:
>Apple's business user numbers exceeded the quantitative threshold elevenfold, while its end user numbers were close to the threshold and are predicted to rise in the near future.
>End users are locked-in to iPadOS. Apple leverages its large ecosystem to disincentivise end users from switching to other operating systems for tablets.
>Business users are locked-in to iPadOS because of its large and commercially attractive user base, and its importance for certain use cases, such as gaming apps.
>On the basis of the findings of the investigation, the Commission concluded that iPadOS constitutes an important gateway for business users to reach end users, and that Apple enjoys an entrenched and durable position with respect to iPadOS. Apple has now six months to ensure full compliance with the DMA obligations as applied to iPadOS.
> In this case the iPad is actually not big enough but the EU has chosen to regulate anyway.
They just realized that Apple was full of shit and trying to circumvent the law by differenciating iPadOS and iOS in the same arbitrary way you think the EU is working.
It is rarely a good strategy to play the smart ass in front of authority.
Why are you defending having less ownership over devices that you own? It’s like your employer wants to give you a salary increase but you complain and say you don’t want more money.
Because I should have that choice. Government should not make this decision for me. If it’s important to me that I have devices I fully own, I should seek that out. If I like the products and prices that result from walled-garden business models, I should be able to choose them.
You will have the choice of installing or not installing the software you wish. The "choice" as you're describing it is a symptom of Stockholm Syndrome.
I might not want that choice. That requires that I use my brain as I use the device and not do the harmful thing. Or maybe I want to hand the device to my child and be assured that she cannot install software, or use it as a publicly-accessible kiosk and be assured members of the public can’t break it. People who have handed Windows PCs to software illiterates and have to constantly return to eradicate crapware understand this problem.
Also, it costs the vendor to implement support for installing other software - resources the vendor could have spent on features I value, rather than features I don’t want. If only a government didn’t dictate to the vendor what it should do, stripping the vendor and the user of the power to decide for themselves.
If you don't want that choice you don't have to enable the feature. Installation from Unknown Sources in Android is off by default and requires a user to explicitly go into the settings and find the obscure toggle, which in recent times has proven to be a big enough deterrent that there don't appear to be any recent mass-scale attacks using this vector. On top of that Android and Windows both have fairly comprehensive parental controls, which can disable the entire option of installing non-approved software, so that point is moot.
And the resources needed to make an app installer are not nearly as high as you make it out to be because iOS already has the mechanism to install signed .ipas. All that's needed in theory is a check to disable signing (which they already have implemented in MacOS) and to add a few pages to the Settings app, which surely shouldn't be an issue for a tech company of Apple's size. And if you argue that it might break some spaghetti code then maybe that should be fixed anyways and it's doing them a favour.
Having a choice will not harm you. The "brainpower" required to stick to one appstores is virtually nil, evidenced by the vast majority of android users sticking with only the play store. You don't want other people to have that choice because you're a sycophant for a corporation.
Because there are already users with Apple devices and those users might have been locked into using Apple's ecosystem for other reasons (already purchased apps, already owning Apple accessories that don't work with other devices, etc).
As an anecdote myself, the main reason I haven't switched to a Galaxy S24 is because my Airpods work amazingly with my iPhone and Macbook, and my Apple Watch only works with iPhones. But very often I sorely miss having Termux, NewPipe, Tachiyomi, a non-gimped version of GBoard, Syncthing, a sensible launcher, and probably other things that I can't remember off the top of my head. I've decided that I value the Apple system more than the value I get from those apps but this regulation means I get to have my cake and eat it too.
Why are you presenting something that happened as entirely one sided? This move means the end of an enforced, curated walled garden for iOS. This will mean a race to the bottom for iPad apps. Which, of course, means even more ads (since everything must be paid for one way or another). It likely means iPad prices go up even more because now they're forced to support configurations they've never tested.
For me personally, all of the above is the cost and what I get is something I wasn't using and didn't miss (if I want to install things outside the walled garden, I use a my Mac not a mobile device).
> This move means the end of an enforced, curated walled garden for iOS.
Great! (Imagine having wallgardened Windows computer where you could not install whatever you want).
> This will mean a race to the bottom for iPad apps. Which, of course, means even more ads
iOS store is already at the bottom. Everything is with ads or subscription based. More ads won’t scare me because I won’t use app with any ads. If app offers one time purchase - I’ll buy it if I like it. Examples of apps I bought: Structured, Bobby, ArtStudio, MusicStudio.
> if I want to install things outside the walled garden, I use a my Mac not a mobile device
What if Apple decided you cannot install apps outdide off their App Store on a Mac neither? What would your “Apple-defending” argument be then? It’s NOT a far fetched idea. Microsoft tries it with Windows S Mode and they currently constantly threaten people when they download software from internet about how dangerous it may be, trying to scare people into using their store.
>Great! (Imagine having wallgardened Windows computer where you could not install whatever you want).
Again, you are presenting this as if it has only one side to it. I need a computer that has no walled garden for certain kinds of work. For other kinds of work I'm happy to know I can't break it. Even more important, I'm happy when my parents can't break the one I buy them.
>More ads won’t scare me because I won’t use app with any ads. If app offers one time purchase - I’ll buy it if I like it.
As long as such an option exists. But in a true race to the bottom situation, there may not be anyone willing to invest in developing an app and then selling for a one time purchase. One time purchase is a model that's nearly dead anyway.
>What if Apple decided you cannot install apps outdide off their App Store on a Mac neither?
This I wouldn't accept because I can't. It's a development machine for me. But an iPad is a consumption device, I need the thing to just always work.
The EC decides what the rules for defining a gatekeeper are, they invented the designation. You can call that arbitrary if you want, but they set their rules and are sticking to them. Deciding that iPads and iPhones are the same platform seems pretty common-sense to me.
> The EC decides what the rules for defining a gatekeeper are, they invented the designation.
It's more complicated than this: the EC has the initiative for legislation in the EU but the text they submit is later amended and voted by both the European Parliament and the Council (representing member states) so it's not true that the EC defines the rules. And both the member states and the European Parliament are pretty jealous of their prerogatives in the decision process so you can be sure that the EC cannot have arbitrary power that bypasses the Council and the Parliament.
If the unqualified existence of judicial remedy justified any arbitrary bureaucratic action, the world would be a much worse place (and indeed countries where bureaucrats make up rules to suit their whims and your only recourse is the judiciary tend to be dysfunctional).
You are making things up: there is no arbitrary action at all here. The EC must abide to the DMA and have no power to overcome it. If they did it would basically be a coup from the Commission against the Parliament and the Council, and you can be sure that member states would not stay silent against it (but don't worry it's not going to happen, as the balance of power is clearly not in favor of the Commission).
I'm just using the CJEU as an illustration that Apple themselves doesn't believe in the “arbitrary rules” narrative as they aren't even fighting in court.
Also, you're trying to use the “bureaucrates” card here, but Apple executives are bureaucrates too, and Apple's management of sanctions and their habits of shutting down user accounts without recourse shows that their own bureaucracy is closer to the one from authoritarian regimes than anything else.
I believe it follows the Digital Markets Act (DMA), a European Union legislation designed to promote fairness and competition in digital markets. You can find more information here: https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/index_en
Just that less people buy tablets than phones. As a percentage of market share iPad probably the same or higher (guess). But in absolute numbers lower.
The distinction between both OS and app stores is entirely arbitrary as well, and the EC is just not buying the argument that this is a different product and should be treated differently.
Edit: looks like the EU didn't even bother challenging the arbitrary distinction between both OS, since the iPad crosses the threshold for business users by itself, it's submitted to DMA on its own.
> looks like the EU didn't even bother challenging the arbitrary distinction between both OS, since the iPad crosses the threshold for business users by itself, it's submitted to DMA on its own.
While it does pass the threshold for business user the threshold, I think, is end users and business users. But that doesn't matter at all since the EU commission can declare a service as a gatekeeper, after an investigation, even if it had both business and end users bellow the threshold.
I mean, I think they're just not buying Apple's claim that iOS on the phone and iOS on the iPad are different things. If they _were_ to accept this, it would be a slippery slope - coming soon: iOS Smol for the smaller phones. It's totally different, we promise.
I mean it’s literally the same thing. That Apple got away with pretending iPadOS and iOS are somehow fundamentally different for this long is insane to me.
The number of user is the important metric. I doubt VisionOS will quickly get to the threshold that would make the EU deem it a gatekeeping piece of software.
> combined with Apple's efforts to distinguish between 'iPadOS' and 'iOS', would be enough to get them a win on this point
I mean, regulators aren't stupid; just because Apple rebranded iOS on iPads to 'iPadOS' a few years ago, presumably seeing the writing on the wall, you shouldn't expect the EC to go "oh, well, the company we're regulating _says_ it's a different thing, so it must be a different thing".
If this is your logic, then you must believe regulators are stupid because the EC indeed recognized iPadOS as a distinct platform. In addition, the insinuation that Apple diverged iOS and iPadOS six years ago in anticipation of legislation that would not be submitted for another year and a half requires more evidence than you provide.
For all the publicity that the AltStore solo developer tries to push, it's not really a marketplace - it's a hack that Apple let live precisely because it will never get any serious traction.
There's no reason for this change. Experience has shown that when governments dictate technology changes, in the end, none of us are better off. There are alternatives to the IPad. Buy one of them. IOS/IPadOS are going to become less stable and less secure with forced access. Too much government everywhere.
iPhone and iPads are marketed as general computing devices and are used by people as general computing devices. Being able to run whatever software you want is a cornerstone of computers that some computer companies have tried to prohibit for their own profit margins, and branded it as a security feature. The industry hasn’t been able to right this in over a decade, so I support governments intervening.
I suspect the only reason Apple rebranded iOS on iPad as iPadOS a few years ago was just to be able to claim it's a separate OS for regulatory reasons, despite it obviously being the same iOS as run on iPhones but on a different form factor device. I'm glad this gambit did not fool the EU.
Sounds like it's time again for the litany of fear, uncertainly and doubt or will we, now that the EU has hit so many times, finally hear the other one? The one where Apple came up with the idea by themselves, and they just needed some time to reassure quality?
> or will we, now that the EU has hit so many times, finally hear the other one
This thread actually contains a new argument that I had not seen before: that “the EC is reinventing the rules in an arbitrary fashion”, and it's again a very bad argument (if the EC was doing that, Apple would just go in front of CJEU and win)
While not word for word, it echoes the sentiment of the "official" response from Apple.
"If you ever experience this on your iPhone 4, avoid gripping it in the lower left corner in a way that covers both sides of the black strip in the metal band"
I know they did, that’s not my point. My point is that the words “you are holding it wrong” were never said.
They told people how to avoid the problem. “Here’s a workaround” doesn’t assign blame to the user. “You are holding it wrong” does. The sentiment is different.
Oh, the sentiment was there alright. You must've forgotten how Jobs was in general and his massive annoyance when he explained this "workaround" in particular.
Of course, it was users' fault. They have always been simpletons.
"You are holding it wrong" is spot on. It captures extremely accurately the very essence of Jobs' attitude towards the users.
A factual quote and some advice. There is no context as to whether they knew the full extent of the issue or not. Anyone attributing malice to this assumes they do.
“All software has bugs”, “avoid using this button” would be a perfectly reasonable thing to say if you were still analysing a problem and the user had an alternative way of using a feature.
They eventually did acknowledge a problem and issue bumpers, just as a software issue would be acknowledged and a patch issued.
Jobs exact words where: "All phones have sensitive areas, just avoid holding it in this way."
Which is arguably worse, since all of Apples official statements on that case contained that bit of intentional gaslighting at the beginning. The iPhone 4 did not just have "sensitive areas", it completely exposed the antenna, causing it to short circuit from normal use.
> Gripping any mobile phone will result in some attenuation of its antenna performance, with certain places being worse than others depending on the placement of the antennas. This is a fact of life for every wireless phone. If you ever experience this on your iPhone 4, avoid gripping it in the lower left corner in a way that covers both sides of the black strip in the metal band, or simply use one of many available cases. - Steve Jobs
The sentence I cited is from an Ars Technica article and directly attributed to Jobs. Your text is essentially an extended version of that, but I cannot find any site that attributes it directly to Jobs. It also does double down on the gaslighting by insisting that it isn't bad design but "a fact of life" and consistent with any other mobile phone.
I know the history of it, I followed it closely at the time. That’s why I pointed out that the quote was wrong ( and got downvoted ). I expect the same will happen to you since you posted the correct quote.
So if I tell a user a workaround for a software issue, and they turn round and accuse me of telling them they are using the software wrong I have to agree with them?
You are assuming they had done all the testing and knew the full extent of the issue. When you run in to an issue like this it could be a bad batch, a certain radio variant, firmware version, only 2G vs 3G and so on.
Nothing in the statement argues either way, it’s simply two statements- one factual and one bit of advice on how to mitigate.
See my above statement. If someone reports issues with software you don’t immediately say it’s definitely a bug unto you fully understand it. Hardware is no different. We do not know if they were in a position to say either way at the time.
I have been told by a mod that I am replying too much to this conversation (?) and I therefore cannot address your point.
It’s a shame as I think it is interesting to see how people perceive things with hindsight specifically related to apple and how engineers who presumably work on similar problems cannot apply the same logic to apple but I am forced to stop the conversation. This will be my last comment on any thread related to this and I am rethinking my contributions to HN.
Complaining about downvoting is bad form. If you are temporarily downvoted on a post and react by editing it to complain, that's a surefire way for that post to remain negative on its point balance.
I’m not scared by downvotes. I called out bad form as I interpreted it, just as you are you are doing now. Posting facts in HN should not warrant downvotes. Neither should reasonable discussions.
You posted 10 comments about this. That's way too much, and the site guidelines specifically ask people not to comment about downvotes because "it never does any good and makes boring reading": https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
You're quite right, of course, that people vote with feelings and ignore facts, but you're wrong about that being specific to Apple. It's true of everything, and therefore it is not interesting (although it certainly is annoying). We want HN threads to be for interesting conversation.
Look at all the wonderful ways American citizens flourish now that basic public systems and protocols have been privatized! Life is great here, provided you're paid well.
Wait, you're not paid well and got laid off by hand-wringing executives that went cagey when SVB collapsed? C-clearly the problem is not enough investment in Big-Tech then! How will anyone be able to meaningfully disrupt other businesses now that basic consumer protections exist?!
So on and so forth until the $AAPL in your 401k shrinks to a size that you no longer feel embarrassed calling them out.
I bet it will happen that some apps i now use, which are in the regualar app store, will be pulled in favor of a own app store which has more tracking and maybe even cost money. So it will be a downgrade if now working apps move to an ad and tracking app store which are not privacy sensitive like iAds.
> I bet it will happen that some apps i now use, which are in the regualar app store, will be pulled in favor of a own app store which has more tracking and maybe even cost money.
Did not happen for Andorid so there is no reason to think that it will happen in this case. Also, how would an app installed from another store be able to track you more if you are using the same OS. That just sounds like bad OS design from Apple.
Personally I think other people should be welded into their homes to protect them from all the dangers they might face outside. If they opened their doors they would be subjected to all manner of hazards and risks like crime or being hit by a bus, and I'm not an egoist so.. weld them in!
So, me liking the AppStore checks as an extra security measure leads to you suggesting people should be welded into their homes. That is totally sane and absolutely not childish.
It’s bad news for regular folks who will be clicking those install links with no protection from the App Store. The majority of people have been kept safe up until now.
If it’s the Apple we all know, they will probably have to click through about 14 warnings to be able to do this. Someone might make the point that this is not enough of a deterrent, but I’ll counter with the fact that browsers helped make https a thing by giving an ugly looking sign whenever http came around and it definitely helped
Why people are acting like the appstore is somehow safe? The top apps are casino-like games which aren't that far off malware. Not something I would like my family to use in any case.
Of course there will be more backdoored, hacked spyware outside the appstore, because there's no oversight for side-loading. And if some game dev says "hey, you can get rid of the ads by side loading" then quite a lot of people are going to do that. They don't understand security.
I don't see how appstore reviews (because that's the only thing that changes compared to an install from a website) can prevent much spyware to happen. Only the most obvious stuff could possibly get caught in these processes.
Having passed the appstore review myself, they are nothing but very shallow (except for anything touching their revenue streams of course)
Saying that the phone will be full of malware with a normal install is just saying with other words that the iPhone sandboxing is trash, which it really isn't, it's well made.
You may be not be aware of or simply have forgotten ever visiting a friend or family’s computer where all kinds of AskJeeeves toolbars are installed from god knows where. Many people I know managed to have entire pop ups installed soon as they start their computer.
I’m not worried about you or me. The EU is just wrong on this one. They are making the worst assumption about the average user, and that’s that they are tech savvy.
> You may be not be aware of or simply have forgotten ever visiting a friend or family’s computer where all kinds of AskJeeeves toolbars are installed from god knows where.
And how are you going to make those OS-wide popups with the iOS sandbox exactly?
Be sure that if apps could make it, they already would, appstore reviews or not.
There's some very strange communication on Apple side saying simultaneously that their phone is the most secure thing in the world on their website and pretending to the EU that it's Swiss cheese and that manual reviews kind of save the day instead. They have to pick one.
> I’m not worried about you or me. The EU is just wrong on this one.
No, I believe the EU is right here but very late to the party and not even pushing far enough if I'm being honest. There's some talks need to allow OS reinstalls and I don't see any yet.
I’ve seen tracking apps that prompt the user to enable a vpn on iOS so all their traffic is routed through them (this was not a vpn app, this was a user tracking app - not malicious. Now imagine a malicious one that doesn’t go through App Store review). The vpn thing on iOS is concerning. The user may not even know or remember they allowed it and it could just be sitting on their phone indefinitely.
I’d like it if Apple restricted VPN access for only App Store approved apps.
Again, it’s not you who I’m concerned about. It’s everyone else. It’s not hard, watch:
here you go dumb teenager, download this crypto app and hit accept on everything and get mining this new alt coin
Even on the web, those are blocked with a malware list, I'm not sure that's the best argument for the appstore.
The contribution of the review here (which this kind of malware would easily pass with a server side trigger anyways) doesn't seem that important.
I don't think Apple should restrict which VPN can go though anyways just because of the privacy issues in a lot of dictatorships, they're aren't the best party to do that and are subject to dubious requests, as seen as in China or Russia.
I think the EU should just straight up run the company now since it seems to know what's best for its customers. Just replace Tim Cook with Ursula von der Leyen already
EU seems like it’s just going to keep daring Apple to exit their market. I’m looking forward to their regulations requiring Apple to write open source drivers for the alternative operating system installs they’ll be required to allow.
It will probably happen at some point. In 1990, the EU was easy to do business in and represented 25% of world GDP. Now it’s exceeding difficult to do business in and represents just 14% of world GDP. If those two trends continue, there will be a point where it’s just not worth it for large companies to be threatened with fines on their “global turnover”.
> You know that EU also have computers engineers ? It’s not like we couldn’t survive without Apple or Google.
You vastly underestimate how interconnected and dependent the modern tech stack is.
EU computer engineers would be thrown back to 1950s if they could not depend on decades of US engineering and services.
I say that as a European.
EU is clearly playing a losing game here and is well on track of becoming the world's largest outdoor museum.
Apple and Google are not "decades of US engineering". They are two corporations that really exploit decades of (open source) US (and European) engineering to siphon huge profits to tax havens. If they were to exit the EU market, Europeans would still have access to US engineering just fine.
Yeah, I think that’s the likely direction, similar to the path China took in the aughts. There will probably eventually be some reasonably large EU-based social networks and maybe even operating systems.
I don’t think that will save you from monopolies, though. Network effects are strong.
... Eh? The EU is far easier to do business in today than in 1990; in 1990 you had to care about local regulations to a far larger extent, and they were far weirder and often more protectionist/anticompetitive. In a number of countries in 1990 Apple wouldn't have been able to sell phones, say, had they been in that business at the time; consumer phone equipment was a state monopoly. Very few foreign (or European) countries actually did business in all Western European countries in 1990; it was too much overhead.
If "easy to do business in" and having a large percentage of global GDP requires the ability for tech companies to exploit their users, then I for one am glad as a EU citizen to give up on those to be able to have tech companies curtailed like this, and I wish for the EC to make business even more difficult here.
Nothing is stopping companies from acting in a way that isn't anti-customer, other than the fact that anti-customer behaviour is more profitable than acting properly in the single market. We're finally seeing these externalities be addressed and be made slightly better, even if there's still so much more that could be done.
There is literally no chance of Apple exiting Europe. Don't be silly. Next largest consumer market would be China. Good luck finding economic freedom there.
Apple's hardware since the 2021 iPad Pro (with M1) has had the ability to do this. The iPads have the RAM (16gb on higher storage models), appropriate keyboard and trackpads, the works. Great hardware being held back by Apple's vision people weren't allowed to deviate from.
A straightforward reading of the DMA suggests that Apple is not allowed to restrict apps from using hardware features. Let's hope that means Parallels/VMware style VMs are possible without too much of a fight.
I was skeptical about getting a Linux tablet because of the worse battery life and less polished overall experience, but having a desktop Firefox with all add-ons, my text editor of choice, and the ability to open a terminal and run whatever I want really more than makes up for it (Plus GNOME is a pretty good tablet experience out of the box these days as long as you broadly stick to their 'official' apps).
Felt the goal was to overtake Mac during the 2015-2019 era, all the real engineering focus was on iPad, the Macs were underpowered and not really fit for purpose.
Why would Apple choose a platform where they don't get 30% of every Creative Cloud sub when they could have had that.
Only reason they backtracked was because Mac sales didn't fall off and the iPad just isn't that good to do real work on.
Everything in Apple is designed to silo off the two product groups.
An "iPad with MacOS" would just shift revenue from the MacOS division to the iPad division, losing a MacOS customer and probably NOT gaining a iPad customer (as he would have purchased an iPad anyway).
Just as much as developing an MacBook convertible is not an issue of user experience but an issue of unnecessary cannibalization of iPad sales...
From mid-to-late 90s onwards a mobile phone was basically an essential item.
I was never tempted to buy an iPod, but combine the phone and iPod and give me internet access to boot... sold.
Before the iPhone there were already phones which could play music and access the web. I even remember some Motorolas which interacted directly with iTunes. The iPhone didn’t succeed just by smooshing those together.
Either way, that’s neither here nor there, the point is precisely that Apple didn’t shy away from cannibalising their own product.
The point is that TODAY the PC line and the iPad line of Apple are quite notable silo'ed to very specific usage-patterns.
There is no technical reason for that, but the distinct commercial reason that there is nothing to gain in terms of revenue or profit by combining the two products into one.
They both sell fine and at great margin separately, there is little to gain by building an iPad Pro that is 2000 USD and supports the use-cases of both a 600 USD iPad and a 1600 USD MacBook respectively.
Quite bluntly: You want the iPad to be convenient in a workflow as far as possible, and then SUCK really bad in a way only a fully synchronized Macbook can fix.
The iPhone was an iPod combined with an iTunes store, allowing the user to buy content without being in front of a PC, and only buy from Apple.
It was an iPod and a Browser that could be sold in huge volumes via a carrier.
Ah yeah. And a Phone.
Apple is building the hardware, and they decide that the Pencil use-case a iPhone user may have shall not be covered by buying an Apple Pencil, but by buying an iPad (and a Apple Pencil)
They also decided for a while that all their premium iPhones shall have "Force Touch", an entirely unique display technology only for iPhones to sense pressure without the potential of additional accessory sales.
These are all valid decisions. They are not a charity, they operate to maximize the profit they can gain from each customer.
The iPad has the big "issue" of barely needing to be replaced with new models, as most use-cases are consumption-oriented and there are no real disrupting sales-driving requirements for iPad media consumption.
So the Pencil was created to drive the proposition towards Media CREATION, because people would buy a new, more-expensive iPad then and requirements for that segment are constantly increasing (better pencils, lower latency, more-demanding apps).
Also in the past year: iPhone increases focus on Media recording with more-complex video features, iPad is tagging along with demanding Media processing use-cases
Do not think it's possible. Traditional Mac computers can win in so many ways
Apple isn’t afraid to cannibalise its own products. They did exactly that with the iPhone in regard to the iPod. If someone is going to displace one of your most successful products, it better be yourself with something even more outstanding.
It would have been in Apple’s best (financial) interest to have the iPad cannibalise the Mac because they’d have more control and earn more money from app sales.
Tantalizingly close to perfection with one glaring flaw is extremely frustrating!
https://imgur.com/svSZzYD
Obviously not for full time use, but as something you can plug in if you're traveling, it's amazing
https://blink.sh/
see also https://docs.blink.sh/advanced/code
After installing https://ish.app for Alpine Linux emulation on iPad, one immediately comes up with use cases, even though it's excruciatingly slow.
Hopefully Apple opens up the imminent M3 iPad Pros to allow macOS and Linux VMs, even if the feature is initially price segmented to devices with extra RAM. The iPad 4:3 high-resolution screen offers unmatched vertical real estate for text editing.
They are well-aware of this, visible from the fact that they never bothered to add a touch panel or Pen-support to any MacBook, or make the Watch a standalone device: Customers wanting this either buy the devices individually anyway, or wouldn't be willing to hand over the sum of all combined devices for a single "superset" device.
Just imagine that Apple's view of the "iPad Pro with MacOS" demographic are customers who purchased a 1600 USD MacBook and a 1000 USD iPad. Is the "iPad with MacOS" able to replace either of those? Would they be able to charge 2600 USD for that device and sell comparable volumes?
"iPad with MacOS VM" is technically adjacent to "iPad with Linux VM", since both make use of hardware nested virtualization support that is present on Apple M* processors. Good performance/watt Linux on Arm will launch in a month on Microsoft/HP/Dell/Lenovo/etc laptops and tablets with Qualcomm-Nuvia (ex-Apple) Snapdragon Elite X.
If Apple opens up Linux VMs on iPad (as a side effect of opening MacOS VMs), they can keep some users entirely within the Apple walled garden, similar to Microsoft's introduction of WSL on Windows. If they allow defections to Nuvia hardware, it can expand to Macbooks Pros, given the Qualcomm roadmap for AI silicon on laptops, co-funded by billions of automotive pipeline.
Those who already purchased two Apple devices have already given their money to Apple. They won't do it again, since iPads are already overpowered for the artificially constrained use cases. If new iPads with extra memory/storage allow VMs, that's net new revenue above the $1500 price point. We'll find out next week.
Unless, of course, you’re suggesting that it be made available for Android users as well.
It's amazing when you shut down the telemetry-battery-draining functionality of devices. And to add some more insult, I am using an Android phone, which ofc don't even try to connect to my watch :) I believe -and Gemini just confirmed- that they don't work together.
> it depends on a larger device for configuration
yes, the architecture was purposfully made, so that the Watch only collects your bio-metrics, with limited own/independent functionality. They (Apple) does want everyone in the 'garden', so why open it up?
> I see the Watch the same as a late 90s Palm device.
Yes, but the LTE-variant is more along the lines of a Palm Treo.
Apple could probably make it link to a MacBook with very little effort, and to all other platforms with just a little more.
It's just a direction not worth for Apple to explore, because in their view those are just customers who have "not yet bought an iPhone", so why try to win them with the Watch if it just prolongs their journey to the iPhone
Actually I’d love to run a Linux VM on my iPhone too!
I use the pi and battery for running various ham radio stuff while out in a park or whatever and connect from an iPad, and that works very well in my use case.
Like not having reliable internet access everywhere. In a lot of areas mobile internet is spotty. Or you're in roaming so it's insanely expensive.
Plus we already have these powerful devices in out pocket, more powerful than PC's were 10 years ago, sitting idly doing nothing most of the time, why not put them to use when in need instead of paying for some extra remote cloud compute on top of that.
Also, VMs don't just mean Linux for web development, it could be a VM for retro gaming or running things in VM for security sandboxing etc. That would be really neat to always have with me instead of having to ssh all the time.
But It will run down the battery only for me, not for you. Why do you care about how I want use my battery life? You don't have to do what I do, with your own phone. You can just keep using like a regular phone if that's all you want. Me having more freedom with my own device, does not reduce your freedoms you have with your own device.
I paid for the device and I own it so why shouldn't I be allowed to use it how I like even if it runs the battery in 2 hours? That's why I have portable power banks and GAN chargers. They can even throw in a disclaimer about waving your rights to warranty for devices used like that.
Otherwise what's the point of all that technological progress of M* chips if all that we're allowed to wo with them is browse Instagram but now even faster, and play Candy Crush but now with ray tracing.
I was just pointing at an aspect of how these devices are engineered. In fact, I jailbroke my first iPhone and spent years running with a rooted and modded Android device. So, be my guest...
> Otherwise what's the point of all that technological progress of M* chips
Showing that ARM is a viable computation platform? I'm not particularly enamored of the Apple ecosystem. It's great for what I use them for and awful for anything else. Reverse-engineering is an option, but I prefer focusing my efforts on more hackable platforms for my tinkering. Unless the law mandates openness, I'm not seeing Apple's stance changing.
And you pointed at the wrong thing. Apple isn't preventing you from running VMs on their M* iPhones to stop you from draining your battery too fast. Come on, don't act this naive.
>Showing that ARM is a viable computation platform?
If their motives were that charitable, and cared so much about the ARM platform, they would open up their M* platform to others to run whatever OS they want on it and provide OSS drivers, no keep it as locked as possible.
Apple silicon?
First, in the major European city where I live mobile internet is not super reliable and flat data packs are relatively expensive - I have one because I develop a lot on trains, but most of my friends don't.
Second: it's a waste of hardware and money. If I can already run the thing on my device, renting twice as much hardware for the same result is hard to justify.
And finally, it keeps my data under my power. Some of the work I do has strict requirements on what I can do with the data, and "upload it to a cheap cloud provider" is not on that list.
At some point i had multiple older iPads with perfectly great screens, and i wanted to use them as "hubs" for a home setup to control various things, another option was using them as secondary screens, or maybe just give them to a kid.
You couldn't, they were simply to old for the new IOS update, and almost all apps including browsers requires the newer IOS and update automatically without asking - essentially bricking them on purpose.
Anyway i ended up giving them to a "safe e-waste center" but i'm sceptical they'll actually be recycled.
I think locking down a device should be illegal especially e-waste considered, and if there's some reason not to, then it should at least be opened the day official support ends so the device can be used to watch videos/games for kids/whatever.
I have a Sony Xperia phone from 2017. It has stopped receiving OS updates after Android 8, and I don't use it any more other than occasionally as a backup phone. A while ago, I discovered that people on xda are putting LineageOS (a custom ROM based on AOSP) with Android 14 on it, tried that myself, and it works! As slow as the phone is, it can run apps without any problem. This is truly amazing.
So yeah, i'm sceptical. There's a reason it's called reduce, re-use, recycle as a very distant third as far as i've seen.
https://getutm.app/
Coding work on iOS:
blink shell
https://blink.sh/
...but nothing on the iPad can _really_ use it.
I can buy a 15" screen right now for under $75. It's the ultimate super-thin laptop if you remove the compute and keep the brick in your purse/backpack/holster.
For extra points, connect two compute bricks for more muscle.
It's just a lot less information dense than macOS, and making it the same scale will make using it as a touch device harder.
But part of it was reconditioning myself; the “proper tablet experience” largely comes from limitations of what they let you do with it. And with more features comes some complexity. For me it’s worth the tradeoff.
No, it wouldn't be. You're probably thinking about gaming consoles who's HW is sold at a loss or at very thin profit margins and subsidized by the more expensive game purchases, but Apple hardware already has the highest profit margins of any HW manufacturer out there, and at their 200 USD per 8GB of commodity RAM and NAND chips, you better believe it.
So no, they don't need the walled garden SW money to fund HW. Their HW alone brings in plenty of cash.
In the current situation Apple has to consider that a marginal price rise in hardware will lose marginal revenue in software, thereby shifting the equilibrium price of hardware lower.
To build intuition on this, it helps to think about the extreme cases: If the marginal cost of production is zero, you can sell the product for close to zero to pick up pennies from almost every human on earth. So the revenue-maximizing and profit-maximizing prices depend on demand elasticity, but are both low.
If the marginal cost of production is a million dollars, selling for anything less than that will result in negative unit economics. You can still maximize revenue with low prices, but that incurs negative per-unit profit. In fact, the price must be more than one million dollars per unit to make any profit. That might imply that the profit-maximizing condition is one unit sold for $1m+1.
For certain demand curves, that might even imply the profit-maximizing condition is to tell zero units! A real-world example of this is Rivian. They have negative unit economics, and would be more profitable if they simply stopped production.
I think what confuses some people is that all these things can be (and are) true at once:
1. The price where Apple achieves maximum profit under the new rules is higher than before.
2. After raising prices, that profit will be less than what they earned before.
3. Units sold will be less than before.
4. Apple won't reduce prices in response to the lower profit because the new higher prices, lower quantity and lower profit are profit-maximal under the new market conditions.
What we will observe in practice is not higher MSRPs in Europe, but fewer discounts (it is an open secret that you should never buy an Apple product without at least a 10% discount).
I see a lot of people claiming (I believe disingenuously) that the changes forced by the EU will convince them to consider buying Apple's products in the future. If you believe those people, that's yet another reason to think Apple hardware prices will rise in Europe: Both the supply and demand curves are moving in directions that imply higher prices.
My reasoning was this: If Apple can get away with a higher price without demand dropping off, why would they not charge this higher price in the first place?
But the idea is flawed. Apple could ultimately make more money selling fewer more expensive devices at higher margins than selling more devices at lower margins. So you're absolutely right.
Of course they could also make less profit by protecting their margins. We don't know.
Do I believe indie devs will be worse off? Unfortunately, also yes.
If you are a solo app developer, you will now have to keep presence on all app stores out there, since if you don’t publish on one then a copycat will. Every store would have its own review processes, fee structures, billing and tax procedures. Since you would need to follow a dozen of those, as an indie operation realistically you will either go under or pay middleman companies a chunk for this—so, in the end, you’ll lose the same cut or more and we’re back to the starting point.
Furthermore, I believe you will have much less protection against plain piracy, which was a big thing in the days of yore until it was spectacularly dealt with by Apple within its mobile ecosystem.
This is why I suspect the primary interests side-loading and alt app stores on Apple devices would satisfy is large enterprises and a few opportunistic middlemen. Entities like Epic, Netflix, who will be able to generate more profit; governments, perhaps; a few publishing companies (think CDBaby for apps) will win small time; some users who don’t want to pay and want to get things for free might be able to get their way; indie devs will be worse off.
2) How did this play out on every other platform. Sure - piracy exists, but most don't and it's pretty non-impactful AFAICT.
Took all summer to port those games and I made maybe five bucks for the effort. Never again.
In some way, the success of the App Store towards indie/solo developers is because there was a way to sell things without the piracy easily steal your sales.
Yes, I know that "it's not stealing", "it's not theft", etc. Beside the ethical/moral conundrum of piracy, the fact is that it destroys the market for small developers.
So depending on product category it might be a large drop (EU study finds -38% displacement rate for books) but it might also be a boost (EU study finds +24% for video games), and it is hard to say in general, since even a 90% piracy rate might only mean a maximum of 5%-10% lost sales (from the wolfire blog post). Either way it isn't at the level of "impossible to succeed".
If we are talking about app stores specifically, I bet a much bigger factor in (lack of) success is discoverability, both because your app is literally hard to find and because app store owners allow a flow of cheap clones to compete with your genuine app.
Yes, Adobe, Microsoft or makers of viral AAA games absolutely benefit from piracy (that’s why they have actually tolerated it for decades): it helps their software penetrate the market and get more users hooked up on their ecosystem. However, to John Doe’s lifestyle business of a couple small niche or utility apps each lost sale is bread off the table.
In addition, piracy on iOS is great for major providers who do subscription services (a device where you can pirate means a device with more users, and more users means more monthly revenue).
Again, the people hit the most are the above-mentioned small time John Does.
The other point I was trying to make is that the disappearance of "stand-alone" apps, not tied to a web service, is primarily driven by the fact that, this way, you can avoid piracy. You can offer a free-tier (that would be eaten by the piracy anyway) and sell (say) a synchronize, or additional features tied to a web service (so not printable).
May be it's not the only thing, but that's what (anecdotically) I hear from solo-indie-very small developers.
I fully agree with you on both the current discoverability problem and also with games piracy having a different, may be even not negative effect.
I would argue almost the opposite way. Users are now conditioned to expect the software to be free with ads of 99 cents. Both greatly lowering the cap on what people can charge for software due to expectations. Instead we've seen the rise of subscription services apps that have no business needing one.
Apple created a new reality where you pay 99 cents and buy to own. It made so very compelling, through general ease of payment flow that just works worldwide and through a large ecosystem of compelling hardware.
Then, subscription behemoths like Epic started crying how it’s all unfair. Of course, it is to them, but there is no way kowtowing to them is beneficial to small app developers.
If it weren't, you wouldn't be experiencing this cascade of downvotes, so get with the program.
Disregarding this statement's general silliness, it is also downvoted. Now we're in a paradox. Downvotes mean you're wrong, so the statement that downvotes mean you're wrong..is wrong?
Secondly, the Android ecosystem seems to be doing well even with the situation you describe. There are not that many competing stores (mostly from sellers of devices, like huawei, samsung, amazon, which is something will not happen with Apple devices), and piracy, while present is not as commons as with desktops.
Android apps are notoriously pirated through and through. For a smaller company in developed market anything Android is a second thought because monetization is much harder
I look forward to the day an fdroid like platform is available on Apple phones and tablets.
I pirated virtually everything I consumed as a kid/teen and now that I have money I pay for it. The companies I pirated off of lost nothing because I had no means to purchase it anyways.
> If you are a solo app developer, you will now have to keep presence on all app stores out there, since if you don’t publish on one then a copycat will.
This doesn't make much sense. The App Store will still be where 90%+ apps are installed from, and I'm willing to bet money on that. Where are all the Google Play devs pushing their apps on the Amazon store or on 3rd party app stores?
> Furthermore, I believe you will have much less protection against plain piracy, which was a big thing in the days of yore until it was spectacularly dealt with by Apple within its mobile ecosystem.
Depending on your familiarity you already had lots of such websites (I'm not going to mention any names but it's easily googleable if anyone wants to verify). Yes keeping the app for >7 days was a pain as they expire but a 3rd party altserver helps with that.
> This is why I suspect the primary interests side-loading and alt app stores on Apple devices would satisfy is large enterprises and a few opportunistic middlemen.
Have you taken a look at any of the privacy forums/subreddits? Places where they use say GrapheneOS? Do you know what's their favorite app store? It's this thing called F-droid. And it only contains open source apps. Such a move would be amazing for open source devs. Hell, it would be great for beginner/hobbyist devs too. I (ages ago) had tried my hand at android dev. And unlike iOS, you don't need to pay $99 to appease the Apple gods for that. Free publishing is great for indie and small devs who may never hit $99/yr revenue.
Btw, afaik you already needed to pay a higher price for youtube premium if subscribing through the app. And apple's draconian/benevolent-and-super-nice policies (/s) meant that you couldn't even tell your users to get it for cheaper from elsewhere. Would you like paying 30% of your income regardless of choice?
Worse off than having 15% to 30% of their entire revenue stream taken? Doubt it.
(Have the top games even changed since then? some variant of Clash of Credit Cards dominating?)
Maybe give it some time to see how things shake out, before tying yourself to strong "beliefs" up front?
Not really a common approach with the people I know.
People can make educated guesses ahead of facts. That's pretty standard.
But having strong "beliefs" without evidence just means there's no real basis for the "belief". And that makes it just an irrational feeling or wish-for-it-to-be-true for whatever reason.
If a copycat is using your brand, you’ll have zero issue removing them from any App Store. If a copycat is just copying your app, well, that’s called a competitor.
Also, web is very open ecosystem and phishing is a problem but for users and corporate, not for small devs
If that's what happens then I see no way for this to be bad for indie devs - the ones who want to write a paid app and can afford the upfront capital to publish can still do so on the store with 99% of users, while those who don't have the capital or don't want to publish paid apps now have the option of going with AltStore.
This is what I hope happens at least, as I am a big fan of Apple hardware but absolutely despise how its software treats me like a baby. If Android can allow for more freedom without compromising security by hiding advanced features behind several scary menus and parental controls then I don't see why Apple can't have the same.
Nobody has to do anything. If you don't want the trouble of publishing on an alt-store to serve your customers, what's the problem of letting others do so?
This is such a lazyness argument, to be honest...
Sideload as Apple implemented, yes. Sideload as what sideload always meant, no.
Apple is trying to distract and mislead the public by redefining what "sideload" means. If I can't install whatever open source shit I build myself on NON-APPLE HARDWARE to an iPhone then it's not sideload. I hope EU figure this out soon and retroactively fine Apple for this dishonest move.
There's a high number of indie devs which just gave up with the cumbersome appstore process. The ones you see on the appstore are the ones who made past this filter already.
I personally advise single devs against making an app unless you are really sure to have the motivation to go through all all of this.
The mobile stores are particularly bad and unsuited for hobbyists or single devs at the moment.
Just compare that to a website where you deploy and you are done.
I really wouldn't worry about it. Those of us who care about this kind of thing are the small minority. I'm incredibly happy to have this in the EU, but am under no illusions that it means the average Joe is going to care enough to jump through the hoops necessary to install (yes, install!) an alternative app store.
i underdstand your worries but at least in my main line of work, i've seen a lot of innovation over the 20 years i've been doing this. fret not. i guess that's a guitar pun.
On the pc, you could create applications entirely out of the control of microsoft (formerly ibm) and the world was better for it.
When ios came out with the app store, apple immediately prevented large swaths of useful applications from seeing the light of day. The debacle with privacy would be of less consequence if Little Snitch had been ported from macos to ios.
oh and a way to do all this without paying rent money to apple...
https://forums.developer.apple.com/forums/thread/91519
Every employer I’ve ever had will reimburse my personal dev account fee as an educational expense. Have you tried asking?
https://atlc.apple.com/downloads/AppleDeveloperProgram_FeeWa...
The EU adjust doesn’t get that, and probably never will, because the bureaucrats are more worried about impact to their industry lobbyists than to their citizens.
Isn't that how Google Play Store works? $25 once, for life. Presumably revenue is from IAPs and ads.
And yes, I think not being able to put an app on a device that I paid for is dystopian. I also think not being allowed to repair my own devices is dystopian, too.
If no device had ever prevented a user from installing their own home-made apps, "side-loading" would never have become a thing.
For gaming consoles, I was vaguely uneased by it at first, but quickly got over it because it had always been that way. I never had a chance to put my own game on a game console.
But with general-use computers, including mobile phones, the whole idea really bothers me. I PDAs and brick phones had never allowed people to write their own apps, I might be less bothered by it. But (thankfully!) they did. That cat's out of the bag, and long ago.
Even Google's attempts to prevent "sideloading" bother me at this point. Any warning that applies to side-loaded apps should also apply to store-installed apps because they have shown they aren't foolproof.
Last year I got myself an M series iPad "Pro" thinking things would have changed. Well, VS Code was the only product that allowed me to run a tiny VM to edit and deploy my apps online. It worked really well to its credit despite a little bit of hacks (have to save it as a Safari shortcut) but still, a far cry from replacing my MacBook Pro.
I have the same M series Mac mini back home that I do insane multi-tasking on and something I would claim is easily the best god damn computer ever made for IT devs like myself. That's when I realized, the limitation is in the OS and not the hardware. The iPad "Pro" is really powerful for a lot of other stuff. Photo editing, music creation and what not.
Ironically, I saw someone on YouTube get annoyed with the same problem and use a Raspberry Pi attached with the iPad as a MacBook Pro replacement (it draws power from the iPad itself, so it's a single cable solution). I was amazed and sad at the same time that Apple had to push their neglected audience so far to the point of even bundling our own DIY hardware to make it usable to call it a "Pro". The iPad's "Pro" is such a misnomer.
I am still waiting for the day when I can throw away my MacBook Pro and work from a small factor without carrying a brick to charge a 14", almost 3Kg device in my office bag every day.
Hopefully this changes things.
Most people don't need MacBook Pro. Those extra cores just sit idle most of the time if not utilised for heavy computation.
"work from a small factor without carrying a brick to charge a 14", almost 3Kg device"
13" M2 Air - 15 Hours of battery life and 1.24kg. An iPad + Keyboard case is likely going to weight more than a MacBook Air anyways.
These days, my work is almost mostly AI related, so I am on Google Colab most of the time too. So, the use case for a proper laptop without a touchscreen is diminishing with each day (for me).
I want to be able to take notes with a pen but also use a full browser. If I want a keyboard to type something, I’ll attach one.
Basically a surface pro, but using an iPad.
Thin, light, Apple ecosystem for sharing things.
But I want Firefox with extensions, a good editor, etc.
I would also love to run a Linux VM on my iPad Pro, but if we could get third-party app sideloading to work without alternative app stores and other idiocy UTM would fix that for me.
Install Wayland (easy install now). Enjoy Linux Dev & Android Apps
Apple enabled this for iOS 14+, but killed it again with iOS 17. It's basically the reason why we currently don't have full speed VM's on iOS / iPadOS devices.
While Sideloading / Altstore / Sidestore allows you to install any IPA, this still doesn't enable JIT for these apps. There are currently some workarounds that involve running certain software on your local network (search SideJITServer on Github).
> but killed it again with iOS 17
Aah, this explains why UTM (iirc) allowed VMs on iOS 16 on M1 macs but not on 17.
> There are currently some workarounds that involve running certain software on your local network (search SideJITServer on Github).
If I understand right this requires another computer to run some code, right?
I think this might honestly make iPad more appealing, and serve Apple more than they might think. The room for improvement on iPadOS seems greater than iOS due to iPadOS underutilizing the device.
More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40196573
I feel like the thinking is that there must be an entity — somebody running an app store — who could be held legally responsible for any damage caused by malware distributed via their channels. Regular non-tech-savvy users cannot be trusted with such delicate software as apps running on their personal phones.
The only difference is Apple has the $$ and incentives to remove it as soon as it's brought to their attention (assuming it's actual malware that may cause large financial loss not just copyright infringement).
Alt-stores will be ridden with malware and nobody is going to be legally responsible for it. We can just hope the alt-stores that end up existing have incentives to keep them "clean".
If so, one would think that unless Apple gets to dictate terms strongly to the App stores, that this would only be a matter of time.
This is essentially the same on MacOS now if you distribute, things built without signature at all only open on the machine they were built, you need to provide even a self signature to get it to open with a warning on another machine.
But I really like this change.
On the contrary, mostly the iPad and iPad OS was the testbed for VisionOS UI management for years, ensuring that iPad apps (and app devs) had to implement support for arbitrary window shapes and layering, using the same affordances (more or less) as VisionOS, unlike iPhone apps that are stuck in portrait or landscape.
There's a lot of truth to AVP is an iPad strapped to your face, and if you have worked on iPad as professional daily driver for 5+ years and now own an AVP, you can remember aspects of VisionPro getting tested in the field over this time period.
And so is Kagi Orion+ browser with Firefox and Chrome extensions like uBlock Origin.
Don't drink the "you can'd do that on iPad" koolaid without asking someone unbiased quietly using these things already.
https://twitter.com/mysk_co/status/1683256902484992004
(probably unrelated) https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/12/apple-admits-to-...
No I didn’t “hack” the device or anything, the last thing I want to do is tinker with my single most important computing device, I need it to work all the time and work well. It’s been possible for years, officially.
You've kind of answered this for yourself; iPadOS _is_ iOS.
Apple has, in any case, presumably more or less known this was coming for a year or so; they kind of had to make the argument that iPadOS and iOS were not the same thing, I suppose, but it was always a bit far-fetched that the EC would buy that.
They don't need to expand the criteria. DMA empowers the commission to investigate, and even declare as gatekeepers, products that do not meet the quantitative thresholds on the basis of qualitative assessment.
EU Commissioner Thierry Breton said: “We continue monitoring market developments and will not hesitate to open new investigations should other services below the thresholds present characteristics to be considered important gateways for business users,”. per the commission iPad passes the threshold for business users elevenfold.
That's why the deadlines usually tend to be on the shorter side to put actual pressure on companies needing to implement them. However, the companies always have a way to say "look, we've tried our best, it's just we just need more time". No one is going to fine them for not meeting those deadlines if the companies are actually working on implementing the changes in good faith.
Will I ever install something side loaded? No.
Should your position impose any limitation on what people can do with their own devices? Also no.
Software similarity and market positioning don't really come into consideration once the role of gatekeeper has been established.
Sony/Nintendo/Microsoft's markets 2 orders of magnitude smaller and effect 3-4 orders of magnitude less companies.
I'd like to know if there's another explanation.
The only complaints tend to come from gamers - DRM, "console exclusive" titles and lootboxes, mostly, but of these three the only realistic field where the EU can/will/should intervene is the lootbox crap.
--- start quote ---
Yes, it does that. And then some.
iPad is so versatile, it’s more than up to any task. Whether you’re working on a project, expressing your creativity, or playing an immersive game, iPad is a fun and powerful way to get it done. Here are just a few of the countless things you can do with iPad.
--- end quote ---
And it has historically been "it's like a computer, but in tablet form".
Here's how Apple introduced iPad Pro just a year after it introduced iPad as a product: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2015/09/09Apple-Introduces-iP...
--- start quote ---
The new iPad Pro will enable a new generation of advanced apps for everything from productivity, design, illustration, engineering and medical, to education, gaming and entertainment.
The innovative Apple Pencil and new Smart Keyboard enable users ... making iPad Pro ideal for everything from professional productivity to advanced 3D design.
--- end quote ---
Or in 2016 here's Apple announcing how it will transform businesses with Deloitte: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2016/09/apple-and-deloitte-te...
--- start quote ---
Deloitte is creating a first-of-its-kind Apple practice with over 5,000 strategic advisors who are solely focused on helping businesses change the way they work across their entire enterprise, from customer-facing functions such as retail, field services and recruiting, to R&D, inventory management and back-office systems.
The new offering will help customers discover the highest impact possibilities within their industries and quickly develop custom solutions through rapid prototyping.
--- end quote ---
etc. etc.
- Size criteria:
- Control an important gateway: - Entrenched and durable position: In fact, the EU has admitted that iPads do not meet the criteria, and are making an explicit exception to include them.Don't get me wrong, I'm _very_ happy about this, but you asked ;)
Following this decision EU Commissioner Thierry Breton said: “We continue monitoring market developments and will not hesitate to open new investigations should other services below the thresholds present characteristics to be considered important gateways for business users,”.
per the commission iPad passes the threshold for business users elevenfold.
>The Commission's investigation found that Apple presents the features of a gatekeeper in relation to iPadOS, as among others:
>Apple's business user numbers exceeded the quantitative threshold elevenfold, while its end user numbers were close to the threshold and are predicted to rise in the near future.
>End users are locked-in to iPadOS. Apple leverages its large ecosystem to disincentivise end users from switching to other operating systems for tablets.
>Business users are locked-in to iPadOS because of its large and commercially attractive user base, and its importance for certain use cases, such as gaming apps.
>On the basis of the findings of the investigation, the Commission concluded that iPadOS constitutes an important gateway for business users to reach end users, and that Apple enjoys an entrenched and durable position with respect to iPadOS. Apple has now six months to ensure full compliance with the DMA obligations as applied to iPadOS.
They just realized that Apple was full of shit and trying to circumvent the law by differenciating iPadOS and iOS in the same arbitrary way you think the EU is working.
It is rarely a good strategy to play the smart ass in front of authority.
Also, it costs the vendor to implement support for installing other software - resources the vendor could have spent on features I value, rather than features I don’t want. If only a government didn’t dictate to the vendor what it should do, stripping the vendor and the user of the power to decide for themselves.
And the resources needed to make an app installer are not nearly as high as you make it out to be because iOS already has the mechanism to install signed .ipas. All that's needed in theory is a check to disable signing (which they already have implemented in MacOS) and to add a few pages to the Settings app, which surely shouldn't be an issue for a tech company of Apple's size. And if you argue that it might break some spaghetti code then maybe that should be fixed anyways and it's doing them a favour.
As an anecdote myself, the main reason I haven't switched to a Galaxy S24 is because my Airpods work amazingly with my iPhone and Macbook, and my Apple Watch only works with iPhones. But very often I sorely miss having Termux, NewPipe, Tachiyomi, a non-gimped version of GBoard, Syncthing, a sensible launcher, and probably other things that I can't remember off the top of my head. I've decided that I value the Apple system more than the value I get from those apps but this regulation means I get to have my cake and eat it too.
There, you fell into a trap of your own making.
For me personally, all of the above is the cost and what I get is something I wasn't using and didn't miss (if I want to install things outside the walled garden, I use a my Mac not a mobile device).
Great! (Imagine having wallgardened Windows computer where you could not install whatever you want).
> This will mean a race to the bottom for iPad apps. Which, of course, means even more ads
iOS store is already at the bottom. Everything is with ads or subscription based. More ads won’t scare me because I won’t use app with any ads. If app offers one time purchase - I’ll buy it if I like it. Examples of apps I bought: Structured, Bobby, ArtStudio, MusicStudio.
> if I want to install things outside the walled garden, I use a my Mac not a mobile device
What if Apple decided you cannot install apps outdide off their App Store on a Mac neither? What would your “Apple-defending” argument be then? It’s NOT a far fetched idea. Microsoft tries it with Windows S Mode and they currently constantly threaten people when they download software from internet about how dangerous it may be, trying to scare people into using their store.
Again, you are presenting this as if it has only one side to it. I need a computer that has no walled garden for certain kinds of work. For other kinds of work I'm happy to know I can't break it. Even more important, I'm happy when my parents can't break the one I buy them.
>More ads won’t scare me because I won’t use app with any ads. If app offers one time purchase - I’ll buy it if I like it.
As long as such an option exists. But in a true race to the bottom situation, there may not be anyone willing to invest in developing an app and then selling for a one time purchase. One time purchase is a model that's nearly dead anyway.
>What if Apple decided you cannot install apps outdide off their App Store on a Mac neither?
This I wouldn't accept because I can't. It's a development machine for me. But an iPad is a consumption device, I need the thing to just always work.
They had valid reasons for it.
There are no rules that are governing what is or isn't a gatekeeper. It's just whatever EC decides that day.
It's more complicated than this: the EC has the initiative for legislation in the EU but the text they submit is later amended and voted by both the European Parliament and the Council (representing member states) so it's not true that the EC defines the rules. And both the member states and the European Parliament are pretty jealous of their prerogatives in the decision process so you can be sure that the EC cannot have arbitrary power that bypasses the Council and the Parliament.
b) EC never said that iPads and iPhones are the same platform.
I'm just using the CJEU as an illustration that Apple themselves doesn't believe in the “arbitrary rules” narrative as they aren't even fighting in court.
Also, you're trying to use the “bureaucrates” card here, but Apple executives are bureaucrates too, and Apple's management of sanctions and their habits of shutting down user accounts without recourse shows that their own bureaucracy is closer to the one from authoritarian regimes than anything else.
Tell me you've not actually read the regulation without telling me you've not read the regulation.
Edit: looks like the EU didn't even bother challenging the arbitrary distinction between both OS, since the iPad crosses the threshold for business users by itself, it's submitted to DMA on its own.
While it does pass the threshold for business user the threshold, I think, is end users and business users. But that doesn't matter at all since the EU commission can declare a service as a gatekeeper, after an investigation, even if it had both business and end users bellow the threshold.
I mean, regulators aren't stupid; just because Apple rebranded iOS on iPads to 'iPadOS' a few years ago, presumably seeing the writing on the wall, you shouldn't expect the EC to go "oh, well, the company we're regulating _says_ it's a different thing, so it must be a different thing".
This thread actually contains a new argument that I had not seen before: that “the EC is reinventing the rules in an arbitrary fashion”, and it's again a very bad argument (if the EC was doing that, Apple would just go in front of CJEU and win)
"If you ever experience this on your iPhone 4, avoid gripping it in the lower left corner in a way that covers both sides of the black strip in the metal band"
They told people how to avoid the problem. “Here’s a workaround” doesn’t assign blame to the user. “You are holding it wrong” does. The sentiment is different.
Of course, it was users' fault. They have always been simpletons.
"You are holding it wrong" is spot on. It captures extremely accurately the very essence of Jobs' attitude towards the users.
"All phones have sensitive areas," Jobs wrote. "Just avoid holding it in this way."
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2010/06/jobs-on-iphone-4-ant...
“All software has bugs”, “avoid using this button” would be a perfectly reasonable thing to say if you were still analysing a problem and the user had an alternative way of using a feature.
They eventually did acknowledge a problem and issue bumpers, just as a software issue would be acknowledged and a patch issued.
Which is arguably worse, since all of Apples official statements on that case contained that bit of intentional gaslighting at the beginning. The iPhone 4 did not just have "sensitive areas", it completely exposed the antenna, causing it to short circuit from normal use.
> Gripping any mobile phone will result in some attenuation of its antenna performance, with certain places being worse than others depending on the placement of the antennas. This is a fact of life for every wireless phone. If you ever experience this on your iPhone 4, avoid gripping it in the lower left corner in a way that covers both sides of the black strip in the metal band, or simply use one of many available cases. - Steve Jobs
So the distinction is between "We screwed up but at least you can do x to mitigate it" and "There's nothing wrong with us. It's you."
Nothing in the statement argues either way, it’s simply two statements- one factual and one bit of advice on how to mitigate.
It’s a shame as I think it is interesting to see how people perceive things with hindsight specifically related to apple and how engineers who presumably work on similar problems cannot apply the same logic to apple but I am forced to stop the conversation. This will be my last comment on any thread related to this and I am rethinking my contributions to HN.
You're quite right, of course, that people vote with feelings and ignore facts, but you're wrong about that being specific to Apple. It's true of everything, and therefore it is not interesting (although it certainly is annoying). We want HN threads to be for interesting conversation.
Randos on the internet: EU is communism
Wait, you're not paid well and got laid off by hand-wringing executives that went cagey when SVB collapsed? C-clearly the problem is not enough investment in Big-Tech then! How will anyone be able to meaningfully disrupt other businesses now that basic consumer protections exist?!
So on and so forth until the $AAPL in your 401k shrinks to a size that you no longer feel embarrassed calling them out.
Did not happen for Andorid so there is no reason to think that it will happen in this case. Also, how would an app installed from another store be able to track you more if you are using the same OS. That just sounds like bad OS design from Apple.
So, me liking the AppStore checks as an extra security measure leads to you suggesting people should be welded into their homes. That is totally sane and absolutely not childish.
I expect apps predominantly rejected from the appstore to try to go outside it and those casino-like scams are accepted on the appstore.
Having passed the appstore review myself, they are nothing but very shallow (except for anything touching their revenue streams of course)
Saying that the phone will be full of malware with a normal install is just saying with other words that the iPhone sandboxing is trash, which it really isn't, it's well made.
I’m not worried about you or me. The EU is just wrong on this one. They are making the worst assumption about the average user, and that’s that they are tech savvy.
And how are you going to make those OS-wide popups with the iOS sandbox exactly?
Be sure that if apps could make it, they already would, appstore reviews or not.
There's some very strange communication on Apple side saying simultaneously that their phone is the most secure thing in the world on their website and pretending to the EU that it's Swiss cheese and that manual reviews kind of save the day instead. They have to pick one.
> I’m not worried about you or me. The EU is just wrong on this one.
No, I believe the EU is right here but very late to the party and not even pushing far enough if I'm being honest. There's some talks need to allow OS reinstalls and I don't see any yet.
I’d like it if Apple restricted VPN access for only App Store approved apps.
Again, it’s not you who I’m concerned about. It’s everyone else. It’s not hard, watch:
here you go dumb teenager, download this crypto app and hit accept on everything and get mining this new alt coin
Boom, vpn enabled and traffic intercepted.
The contribution of the review here (which this kind of malware would easily pass with a server side trigger anyways) doesn't seem that important.
I don't think Apple should restrict which VPN can go though anyways just because of the privacy issues in a lot of dictatorships, they're aren't the best party to do that and are subject to dubious requests, as seen as in China or Russia.
I think the EU should just straight up run the company now since it seems to know what's best for its customers. Just replace Tim Cook with Ursula von der Leyen already
While we are at it, let's hope Apple takes Google and Facebook along for the ride.
Probably nobody wants it to happen but if it were to happen, well, I prefer regulated companies than monopolies.
You vastly underestimate how interconnected and dependent the modern tech stack is. EU computer engineers would be thrown back to 1950s if they could not depend on decades of US engineering and services.
I say that as a European.
EU is clearly playing a losing game here and is well on track of becoming the world's largest outdoor museum.
I don’t think that will save you from monopolies, though. Network effects are strong.
Nothing is stopping companies from acting in a way that isn't anti-customer, other than the fact that anti-customer behaviour is more profitable than acting properly in the single market. We're finally seeing these externalities be addressed and be made slightly better, even if there's still so much more that could be done.