Full list of gatekeepers’ core platform services that must comply with the Digital Markets Act:
- Social Networks: TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn
- N-IICS (aka messaging services): WhatsApp, Messenger
- Intermediation: Google Maps, Google Play, Google Shopping, Amazon Marketplace, Apple’s App Store, Meta Marketplace
- Video Sharing: YouTube
- Advertising services: Google, Amazon, Meta
- Web Browsers: Chrome, Safari
- Search: Google Search
- Operating Systems: Android, iOS, Windows
Thats all good news! When can we expect changes to come?
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They really need to allow sideloading and other browser engines in iOS already. They allow it in Mac OS
This was the biggest thing I was hoping we would gain from Epic’s suit against Apple. As an app developer, it absolutely sucks that I can’t develop my own apps for my own device without Apple’s approval.
They allow it on Mac because Mac predates the locked down experience they created on the iPhone. I’m sure Apple love having it so that you can only install Mac apps from the app store, but users have been able to install their own software for 30 years and know it would be bad if they took that away.
Agreed. This needs to be the expectation before Apple’s Vision platform launches as well. Imagine if apple tried to sell an expensive new Mac that can’t run anything but iPadOS. That’s basically what’s happening with the Vision Pro.
Fuck that.
All I need is some tracking app that’s required by my company for communication, harvesting intel off my phone. I try to keep it lean and curated - I don’t need some wild-west version of the app store where there’s no boundaries.
You want all that? Go Android.
Just don’t install it ffs.
It’s like being mad I can buy a movie you don’t like. You live your own life.
They said it couldn’t be done but it’s slowly finally happening, let’s go
Good. Let’s start to get some real competition and innovation going on in these spaces.
Maybe iOS browsers other than Safari can have extensions and more control over their builds. Just switched back to Safari after ads got to be too much on Firefox for iOS.
So are we gonna get an alternative OS for iPhones? I wonder how that would even work, with the hardware-level security that I assume requires a signature that Apple won’t wanna make publicly available.
And what about the SDKs? Would you be able to reuse the Apple-maintained ones, or would we need FOSS reimplementations – or would that even be possible without violating IP?
Cuz some of the ways that Apple achieves privacy while enabling functionality (I’m thinking things like ARKit shared sessions) could be considered trade secrets, and I wouldn’t be comfortable using an alternative that doesn’t provide the same level of privacy…
In a statement, Apple told Bloomberg “We remain very concerned about the privacy and data security risks the DMA poses for our users.”
Usually, the “We’re gonna fight this!” response the corpos publish when we do antitrust action is like “Yeah sure buddy, whatever you gotta tell yourself”. But this one does actually ring kinda true for me.
Most likely, it would look like Asahi Linux, which has managed to reverse engineer and re-implement many parts of the Mac environment relatively quickly in Linux. If it works like the Mac does, we may see a project to make a custom ROM for iPhone (probably a fork of either a Linux phone project or of AOSP) soon after the responsive update, and within about a year of that, we might see it be fairly usable.
It is apparent however that the platform security model was engineered to allow third party operating systems to coexist with macOS in a way that does not compromise any of Apple’s security guarantees for macOS itself. Rumours circulating that Apple are actively hostile towards efforts such as Asahi, or that their security must be bypassed or jailbroken to run untrusted code are unfounded and false. In fact, Apple have expended effort and time on improving their security tooling in ways that only improve the execution of non-macOS binaries.
So if Apple complies with this new ruling in a similar way, we could expect to (eventually) have the same level of security on a third-party OS!
Is being able to run an alternative OS on your device covered in the law?
I would love to be able to put another OS on iPhone hardware, as now they become waste quickly after Apple drops them from the latest iOS version.
