Apple vs the Law

The greatest gem is found in the footnote, IMO

> "They managed to convince the courts that iPadOS is a separate operating system to iOS (it's not), which delayed iPadOS being designated as a gatekeeper for almost a year. They are currently challenging all of the rest: the iOS, Safari, and App Store designations, and successfully managed to avoid iMessage being designated at all. They have taken the DMA law to court for an apparently ambiguous comma in article 5(4) - the payment one, and for somehow infringing on human rights law in article 6(7) - the interoperability one."

Looking at the actual filing[1], Apple says:

> "First plea in law, alleging that Article 6(7) of Regulation (EU) 2022/1925 is inconsistent with the requirements of the European Charter of Fundamental Rights and the principle of proportionality, and that Article 2(b) of the European Commission Decision of 5 September 2023 is unlawful insofar as it imposes the obligations under Article 6(7) of Regulation (EU) 2022/1925 on Apple in relation to iOS."

For context, here are the full contents of Article 6(7):

"The gatekeeper shall allow business users and alternative providers of services provided together with, or in support of, core platform services, free of charge, effective interoperability with, and access for the purposes of interoperability to, the same operating system, hardware or software features, regardless of whether those features are part of the operating system, as are available to, or used by, that gatekeeper when providing such services."

[1] https://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf;jsession...

Big companies like that have a vested interest in paying their legal team A Lot Of Money to find stupid details like this and to argue the toss over them because a ruling can cost them billions. If arguing over a comma means they don't have to, or that it pushes the point where they have to pay forwards, it's worth the expense to them.

It also costs them my trust, though.

This happens in the confines of legal (EU, California, ...) institutions and courts with the occasional boring news reporting the average consumer doesn't read, like this article.

It's clearly a win for Apple.

More people are getting annoyed with Apple over these issues, and they are bleeding into the mainstream media more frequently. I have a few die hard Apple friends (Non-professionals) that have recently got so frustrated with being pushed into corners that they have given up the fruity ecosystem altogether.

In no way am I suggesting that Apple are on the way out, but they have definitely started to turn the same corner that IBM and Microsoft have in the past. They are becoming seen as 'big business' instead of 'challenging underdog'.

> I have a few die hard Apple friends (Non-professionals) that have recently got so frustrated with being pushed into corners that they have given up the fruity ecosystem altogether.

I'm nearly there myself. The problem is, and what the EU in theory is trying to solve, is there's no real competition. My choice is Apple, which while an anti-competitive PITA, provides some real nice quality of life features and some privacy protections, or Android which can be a mixed bag from needing to connect every new phone to my computer and use ADB to get rid of crapware, or Pixels where Google is increasingly expanding Gemini's tentacles into every aspect of your life to harvest data all while taking actions to slow down Graphene OS by limiting access to device trees.

Linux is fine enough on the desktop, but for everything else? (Phone, watch, etc.) I can either live within the walled garden and just accept it, or take my pick of crapware loaded devices, or sketchy vendors that don't patch their stuff, and have all my data sold to the highest bidder.

We desperately need more competition in the mobile & wearables space, and I don't mean many different flavors of Android, I mean more competitors that care about user experience, preserve your privacy to an extent, and aren't using the platform as just yet another way to serve ads and harvest data.