So this sounds like a “whatsapp didn’t want to do it” more than a “Apple disallowed it”
You can blame Apple for other things if that is the intention, but this particular one was a decision made by Meta and by Meta only.
Write to your regulator and make a complaint that Meta is keeping the WhatsApp stage gate.
So until there will be more incentive to make it globally, the UX is intentionally crippled not only by making the minimal viable but also by region locking.
Imagine pairing headphones working great in EU and then you’re traveling somewhere and it’s broken.
And when "comply with local laws" means "unbrick bluetooth pairing for third-party devices" then a company in good faith could just, you know, not brick the functionality in the first place. There's no law against products that "just work".
How can the failures to innovate from privates companies be the responsibility of a political union of different governments?
Most of the EU corpus of law is based on culturally acceptable actions from their members. The EU regulations don't strangle, the EU culture is just different.
Innovation for the sake of innovation and the pursuit of money isn't deeply entrenched in European culture.
So yes, innovation based on "go fast and don't care if you break stuff" comes mainly from outside of EU.
So in fact, this is a case where the answer is more EU (specifically, a better set of cross-country capital markets). Depressingly, the obvious place to build this is no longer in the EU.
> So in fact, this is a case where the answer is more EU (specifically, a better set of cross-country capital markets).
Can you give me a set of non-EU countries with better cross-country capital markets, that are as such now instead the place to build this? Especially for a set size bigger than 3? Serious question, as I've never heard of one and am fairly sure it doesn't exist, though I'd love to be proven wrong.
This does not exist, however the EU single market is also pretty unique in terms of how many countries are involved. If you include the EEA and the customs union, it's definitely the largest.
Given that there's an obvious currency union, the capital markets thing is relatively plausible (difficult but not impossible), and I personally think it would be great.
Note that I am biased, as I live in a small EU country and our financial and insurance providers are both expensive and terrible. And obviously the EU tech industry would benefit, which would also help me.
I think the real reason this hasn't happened is hangover from the EZ crisis, as sharing risk for banks across nations was toxic in many countries as a result of the financial and EZ crises. But now seems like a good time to at least start it.
As I said above, the biggest problem here would be where to put it, and the UK's absence from the EU makes the obvious place politically a non-runner (unfortunately).
Digital regulation is not a serious blocker, as any EU founder can tell you. Per above, neither are cross-country capital markets a disadvantage of the EU compared to the non-EU world. Then what is the disadvantage? Do Japanese startups have it any better? Korean? Kenyan? Serbian? Mexican? Taiwanese? Malaysian? Singaporean? Do those startups benefit from "less regulations" or from cross-country capital markets? Of course they don't, yet I've never seen a single person in my life mention those countries' regulations or lack of cross-country capital markets. Because they don't have an advantage in those areas, showing that the EU indeed doesn't actually cause any disadvantages in them.
Lots to unpack here.
So the issue is size of capital markets (for startup and IPO purposes). 27 small markets are much, much less liquid than one large one (like China or the US). Therefore, it's easier for European founders to raise US capital, which often leads to them incorporating or floating in the US. Like, Flutter (which is an Irish company) is on the US markets for exactly this reason, as are a bunch of other large Irish companies.
It would be better for the EU if these companies incorporated in the EU, for which one large capital market would work better.
And it's not that EU companies are disadvantaged vs Singaporean companies, it's that they are disadvantaged relative to US companies.
> are still a lot more integrated than if you'd pick two random non-EU countries.
I guess my point is that they're not integrated enough.
Of course I didn't say that being unregulated automatically makes the tech sector thrive. Kenya has plenty of other problems to solve first.
And it's not only about users. Headphone manufactures too. Their headphones need to support both iOS and Android phones.
If you want to use your phone like normal people do in 2025, and not relegate yourself to being a second-class citizen when it comes to simple things like paying for stuff, riding the subway, etc, your phone is either an iPhone or something that plays nicely with Play Services.
And that's just the remote attestation side. Many apps rely on Play Services themselves, and without access to them, will not work. Google gates access to Play Services through contracts, it is not open source or part of Android.
Problem is, every year Android announces some new stupid-ass restriction or anti-feature that significantly degrades the capability of application software on the OS in the name of security. In other words, Google keeps trying to turn my Android into a shittier iPhone. It's gotten so bad that they recently floated the idea of mandatory notarization, and only marginally backed down after shittons of pushback.
Every time the EU passes a law intended to stop obviously monopolistic shit like this from happening, a certain brand of Ayn Randroid Apple fan comes out of the woodwork to decry the EU "forcing Apple to give away its technology for free". Which is absolutely bullshit, on two counts. First off, Apple sold its technology to us when we bought the phone. That's the whole deal with Apple: the OS is a bundle with the hardware. Ergo, them going to app developers and asking for a cut is double billing. Second off, and more importantly, the only reason why you even need the EU DMA is because Apple won't let you ship an app that is capable of doing what their own first-party daemons do.
I'm going to be honest. Every time I read people like you saying "you can just buy an Android if you want that", I get the same vibes as I do when I see, say, old boomers showing up at town hall meetings to oppose the building of the IBX[0]. You're just App NIMBYs, carrying water for a tech industry trying to turn every computer into the tech equivalent of a car-dependent suburb with restrictive zoning laws.
Now if only the EU could pass a law saying Apple needs to ship an Android app that provides all the missing functionality of AirPods on that platform. At the very least, I should be able to update the firmware on them.
[0] Inter-Borough eXpress - A proposed circumferential NYC subway line connecting Brooklyn and Queens.
These companies spend billions in dollars on PR agencies and lobbying. They spend the most on lobbying the EU out of everyone. The likelihood that zero of that goes towards writing such comments in places like HN is minuscule. And then there's the legions of actual Googlers and Applers here and elsewhere who have drunk the koolaid.
(Which, ironically, was also the strategy of Epic's entire Fortnite stunt...)
Plenty of other markets and businesses operate just fine while operating in an environment that makes protecting individual innovation functionally impossible. Just look at any related to fast fashion (not that I think the fast fashion market is a healthy phenomenon) or any commodities market. Or for that matter, most of the software industry.
The incentive for creating features should be to remain relevant and competitive. It shouldn’t be to build moats and war chests.
Or to put it another way, find an alternative.
They've done extra work to cripple competing devices. It's obnoxious.
https://gs.statcounter.com/vendor-market-share/mobile/europe
EDIT: Downvotes for what? That’s literally what the DMA is for. If you don’t like it, take it up with your representatives - it’s nothing to do with me.
So if a company creates a widget and sells that widget, thereby creating a market, they are automatically a monopoly? how is anything invented without creating a monopoly?
Also why is it an iOS market and not a mobile phone market? if we compare features of devices then there’s not a lot of difference between modern phones, so segregating them by what OS they run seems odd.
The general problem is that there must be a line.
Vendors don’t create lock-ins because they are malicious, they create it because it makes them money.
Now, if we limit these lock-ins, it will reduce their ability to make money and yes, it will impact some features - short term.
But looking at it long terms, vendor lock-ins are actually a reason to stop innovating: your customers are locked in anyway.
So, overall, I would say this is good for innovation in general.
If Apple knew they would need to expand this feature past their gear, possible they’d never have implemented.
We may never know what stays unimplemented due to this.
(This is a neutral take - note I do not have a personal opinion formed in this “debate”.)
And this is EXACTLY why they need to open up more core access to their devices. So someone else can innovate.
I'm not seeing an incentive structure for them to change being the only source of good workflows for their users - it's their whole thing "It just works" - regardless of if it's true in practice or not.
It’s just less obvious / measurable that immediate benefits.
And also, short term, isn’t it that other EarPods are getting better, rather than AirPods getting worse?
Medium term, I don’t think that Apple will stop innovating on AirPods just because of the EU market and this one feature not being exclusive to AirPods anymore. But it’s a possibility, I agree.
A government mandating standards in electricity transmission or gasoline composition may disincentivize the development of features that make some people's devices incompatible with charging at certain locations or cars that can only use gas from certain gas stations but that is the opposite of a bad thing.
We live in a much better world because people in the past decided that all telephones should be able to make calls to each other and that people don't really have to think about messing up putting fuel in their car because the size of the nozzles at pumps are standardized.
There are absolutely more opportunities for governments to make small but objectively measurable improvements in society with well placed regulations on interoperability.
You're basically saying Apple would be disincentivized to innovate on the Apple Watch because Apple would need to release the underlying APIs that make those work with the phone to competing solutions. But the status quo is that competing solutions that are already better than the Apple Watch straight up aren't allowed on the platform, and the Apple Watch generally costs more than its competitors.
You are unintentionally saying that if Apple had to allow third parties to use their private APIs, that the Apple Watch would have to cost less and/or innovate more in order to convince us all to buy it instead of buying a watch from Samsung or Google.
What you are describing is a more competitive and open market where consumers benefit from lower prices and more of an incentive to innovate and justify high prices.
I would also dispute the notion that merely releasing these APIs would somehow give away all your secret sauce. Competitors still have to build the experience on top of that.
> There is simply no good way to make the API public while maintaining the performance and quality expectations that Apple consumers have. If the third party device doesn’t work people will blame Apple even though it’s not their fault.
And, competition probably can’t build for it anyway:
> It’s impossible to build Apple Silicon level of quality in power to watt performance or realtime audio apps over public APIs.
And:
> […] Apple has to sabotage their own devices performance and security to let other people use it. The EU has no business in this.
Well, I look forward to next year when we’ll have the receipts and see!
I’ve found it to be worst when using Xcode / simulator and having headphones on for music.
sudo killall coreaudiod seems to fix it for a while.
Sounded absolutely amazing, no skipping or crackling no matter what I was doing on the PC, nor how heavy I was cranking it. Quality was better than on macOS as well.,
My M1 sounded like an AM radio when driving the same headphones using the same software (Spotify lossless).
For me this fixes it for about 30 minutes then I have to do it again… and again… and again…
I wonder why some folks need to do it more than others
Taking a further step back, this same group of HN users probably understands the straightforward idea that what’s good for Bay Area tech companies is beneficial to them in a much broader sense, since they’re generally employed by them or by a very small group of other companies closely related to them.
You can accuse them of being greedy, selfish, or whatever, but certainly not that they’re unaware of where their interests lie.
> Not the EU and its blob of unelected bureaucratic despots and unelected Commission of dictators
EU haters have two complaints, that it is unelected and that it takes away sovereignty, yet it consists of the members of national governments that not only elect the various officers of the EU (including the Commission) but also vote on all major decisions of the EU, as well as the directly elected EU parliament. So in fact the EU preserves both sovereignty and the votes of EU citizens, both member governments and citizen representatives must approve all EU actions.
It's a little complicated sure, apparently too complicated for some to understand.
So do I. And my >20 years in the business gives me the experience and knowledge to see through Apple’s FUD.
> […] but also wanting to benefit from all the work and focus that went into creating it, is understandable to me.
It is my device. I paid for it. If Apple thinks they deserve more money for what they did they are free to ask me, the customer, for more money.
> […] unelected bureaucratic despots
Aha, the dog whistle of the AfD brand of conspiratorial bullshit ”unelected” nonsense! Career bureaucracy is supposed to be certified and educated, not elected, because that is the only way they can properly implement the laws of the electorate. Bureaucracy still answers to elected officials, but they are supposed to act without political interference and provide specialist knowledge. For the same reason you do not vote on every captain and colonel in the military hierarchy, or every tax collector/auditor in your IRS equivalent, you do not vote on every bureaucrat in the Commission tasked to execute and implement law.
But you really just emphasized it with the AfD nonsense, as if everyone in the world cares about your little provincial political obsessions. “Eeek, the eradicated Italian ideology of 80+ years ago that I have been conditioned with basic Pavlovian techniques to hate to control my mind is coming for me”. Ever hear of the book 1984 and the purpose of Emmanuel Goldstein? You seem to have totally missed that they used that very same technique on you, they just templated a different event on your little mind.
Are the commission popularly elected? No they are not, child. But do explain your narcissistic rationalization for how being not elected by the relevant populace makes calling them unelected nonsense. You can’t.
Why are you so fixated on running interference for what amounts to being a cult? Do you personally benefit financially from it or something? Nothing else makes any rational, sane sense. At least if you financially benefit from your own subjugation to unelected tyrannical despots in the commission and the council, at least you can say you are corrupted, greedy, and unprincipled… if you have the confidence and character to admit it.
But you lack the most fundamental understanding of how the EU and government, let alone different systems work or are suppressed to work, so I am not sure that your statements allow for any other conclusion than that you are deluding yourself either intentionally or in some belief that you can fool or gaslight me and others.
Besides, let’s have you put on your own thinking cap for a second. Take off the mind control cap for a minute and put your thinking cap on. Ready? Do you think it is smart for the same commission that originates imaginary “legislation” that the parliament votes on like any other dictatorial system’s apparatchiks do, should also be the body overseeing the implementation of that law? It breaks the most fundamental and major human advancement in governance produced by separating powers through the Constitution. You said people should be educated. Forget government education for a second, you seem to lack the ability to think at all. Do you not understand the danger of the legislative also being the executive? It’s basically just a novel form of aristocracy you are defending, a regression, total conflict of interest in abusing power … which they aren’t even elected to.
What has been done to your mind and all of Europe is commonly called a bait and switch, also known as coercive control in basic abuse patterns of toxic relationships.
You’re quite literally just a textbook abused person rationalizing and excusing the behaviors and actions of your abusers, like someone in any other toxic relationship or a cult.
Please reconsider the harm you are doing to the world and yourself too. I get the EU told you there was candy in the windowless panel van, but you have no idea what mistake you are making and are going to make others suffer for.
Perhaps you should come back when you’re less emotional. Suggesting incredibly poor value for shareholder decision while also being hateful (non-binary balls, indeed) is showing the whole ass. Never go whole ass.
I for one believe every human has equal worth and right to speak whatever they want. It may not be relevant, important, smart, or even benevolent; but I still think they should be allowed to say it and even more importantly those who choose to, should be afforded the ability to see/read/hear it. Everything else is just authoritarian, even if it’s just some narcissist who believes HE/SHE is the authority over someone else.
Actually that's what it's fighting, people like you.
> I for one believe every human...
People can say what they like, that doesn't mean anyone has to listen to it. Freedom of speech also means the ability to silence speech you don't like.
You don't have the right to spread hate and division on a company's website any more than pedophiles have a right to talk to people's children about sex. In both cases the ability to silence speech is fundamental.
HN chooses what kind of discussion it wants to have because doing otherwise would block the sort of speech it wants to host.
I know this will be hard for you to understand, but if you think about it for a while it makes perfect sense.
That's akin to saying the right to physical autonomy means the ability to dominate others. A completely meaningless and self-defeating argument.
> A completely meaningless and self-defeating argument.
Your example is literally true: in Texas you have the right to kill someone entering your home without permission.
So far from being "meaningless and self-defeating", it's reality.
Just like you can't walk on my property without my permission, you can't speak on my property without my permission, including my website. I decide who speaks and who doesn't there.
It's not hard to understand for most people.
Government intervention like forbidding led-based paints or asbestos in homes? Or government intervention like doing something about the ozone depletion? Government intervention like forbidding roaming fees? Intervention like requiring 3-point seat belts? Like progressive taxation? Like forbidding discrimination based on skin colour? Like air travel safety? Like a max ceiling on credit card fees?
Always?
Ok, sometimes.
It even put the life of a Republican lawmaker in dander in Florida. Of course she blamed democrats.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/22/kat-cammack-...
- Drastic overregulation of nuclear energy in the US, resulting in fossil-fuel pollution measurable in gigatons over the past several decades accompanied by literally countless illnesses and premature deaths.
- Premature mandates for airbags in cars that resulted in hundreds of needless child deaths because the technology wasn't yet safe enough for universal deployment. A scenario that's playing out right now with misfeatures like automated emergency braking.
- The Jones Act (Merchant Marine Act of 1920), whose effects are too convoluted to go into here.
- Misguided, market-distorting housing policies, ranging across the spectrum from rent control to Proposition 13.
- Many if not most aspects of the War on Drugs, including but not limited to mandatory minimum sentencing and de-facto hardwiring of racial bias into the justice system.
Sony is a monopoly as well then? They decide what gets sold in the Playstation store. Same with Nintendo.
Ford and Tesla are monopolies, they solely decide what is software is sold or used in their car's infotainment center stores, despite the fact that I have purchased the car!
AWS is a monopoly, despite the fact that I purchase an EC2 instance from them for one year they will not let me run certain kinds of software on it (Parler, some crypto, etc.)
Not many. That's fine. Just buy another car. There's plenty of competition in the space.
I exclusively use non Apple headphones and I have no issues. I had AirPods for a while and I don’t remember them being better.
It's mostly gimicky, but it does give the user the impression that the apple Air pods are higher quality because they have all these things thought out. In actuality, Apple just made it so they're the only ones who can do that.
Apple has stopped improving long ago, and it’s not regulation that’s at fault.
Everything else feels flakey.
For example, I have Sony and Bose headphones with bluetooth multi point. The way this is supposed to work for example is that I can connect them to my PC and my smartphone and have my PC playing videos or whatever, and my phone can override that when something "priority" like a phone call comes in.
Except if the iPad is one of the connected devices, then it will claim priority once a minute or so, _even if it's playing no audio_, thereby interrupting other audio streams pointlessly. This makes all the other devices look like they can't play audio and the iPad can, and I'm sure the iPad plays nice with airpods, but it seems weird to me that every non-Apple combination of devices I hve also plays nice with each other.
- Reliable internet sharing, especially when connection is spotty, and when your connection switches between operators or countries
- Making alarms randomly silent. I missed a flight once because of this. There is no excuse for this.
- Randomly not working AirPlay
- GPS is terrible compared to any of my previous Androids. Even my first Android in 2010 was better than this.
- Finding an operator can take a loooong time after crossing border
- Random restrictions in App Store, like no torrent clients
- Generally terrible keyboard for my native language (Hungarian). Prediction and basic accent fixing doesn’t work at all. The exception is when I don’t need to change a word with diacritics… when the keyboard’s dictionary clearly contains them
- Apple Maps is still a joke. Many times it doesn’t load the underlying map layer at all. I switch to Google Maps search for what I want, finding it, reading some info, looking some images, then switching back to Apple Maps, and it still doesn’t load. Also, navigation and speed limit information are unreliable to say the least.
- Heavily underdocumented MacOS virtualization API, and half the features can’t be used in a real environment, but these restrictions are completely undocumented
- Wanting to have a running DNS server is a challenge on MacOS
- Unusable GPU when no monitor is connected
- You basically need to turn off all security features in MacOS to allow some basic automation, like with FaceTime
- Generally terrible compatibility with anything non Apple. Do you want to show your photos on your friend’s random TV without hassle? Good luck.
- Many built in features (eg SSH, VNC) are heavily restricted, and good luck if you want to replace them cleanly. Most information on internet is “just use the built in solution”. Also they are many times completely insecure.
There are hacks for these, but “they just work” is not true at all. On the level of how “they just work”, top level Android and Windows devices are also on that level for more than a decade in case of Android, and at least 20 years for Windows (if not more). Maybe Apple TV is my only device which just works without hitting some quirks. Especially compared to my other TV and TV adjacent devices. But even here its FaceTime solution, let’s say “interesting”.
For example, you need to root and patch your Bluetooth stack on your phone if you want to use all of your AirPods features on Android, and not because Android is doing something wrong, it's because the Android Bluetooth stack actually sticks to the spec and AirPods don't.
And even when you do that, you can't do native AAC streaming like you can with iOS/macOS. Even if you're listening to AAC encoded audio, it'll be transcoded again as 256kbps AAC over Bluetooth.
Even no name earbuds on Amazon manage to not break Bluetooth and can offer cross platform high quality audio over Bluetooth.
https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/371713238
Some comments on the bug accuse Google of intentionally not fixing it to make people buy Pixel Buds instead of AirPods.
I wouldn’t say that myself, but then again I also wouldn’t say that Apple intentionally violated the spec just to make AirPods not work on Android.
You're welcome to write an actually correct patch for android if you want, one that isn't just commenting out code and probably breaking some spec-compliant bluetooth devices.
Make sure to test your patch against all the bluetooth devices in existence to make sure it doesn't regress.
Do that, make a PR, wait the average third-party-android-PR review time (approximately 5 years), and then if your PR isn't accepted at that point we can maybe say Google is intentionally ignoring this issue.
Nobody actually productively commenting in the thread thinks it's a conspiracy theory and everyone acknowledges that the Apple hardware is off-spec. It would be nice to see Android add this workaround.
This seems to go against how OS development (and perhaps consumer software in general, just think about browsers!) works in reality, it's just piles of exceptions on top of exceptions for weird hardware.
It’s a mix of bad Bluetooth implementations still on the Android side, and Apple extensions to cram audio features into the BLE envelope.
> And even when you do that, you can't do native AAC streaming like you can with iOS/macOS. Even if you're listening to AAC encoded audio, it'll be transcoded again as 256kbps AAC over Bluetooth.
How would this be Apple’s fault if the OS audio stack can’t do direct AAC streaming? Or are you saying the headphones themselves decode, re-encode and then re-decode the AAC?
There are multiple Bluetooth standards for lossless audio that work across platforms. Instead of implementing those features, Apple uses a proprietary protocol to half-ass it only for the case of AAC. Even in that case, it requires a proprietary Bluetooth stack to work. Without that proprietary stack, the Airpods default to low quality transcoding of audio streams at 256kbps, and don't offer true high quality or lossless audio playback. So even in the one case where Airpods offer some semblance of lossless playback, it's non-standard and applicable to AAC only.
Cross platform high quality and lossless audio, multipoint pairing, etc solved problems and features that even $20 white label earbuds on Amazon are able to implement.
They do that? Mine can't even switch quickly between my corporate and my own iphone.
But why would switching headphone connections need the cloud... ah... nevermind...
That's because they're all based on a small set of BT SoCs from companies who are not exclusively dependent on the Apple ecosystem and need to interoperate with everything BT-compliant.
[1]:https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2025/dec/19/bluetooth-wi...
This is the kinda claim that really needs citations, and ideally some commentary on how the examples demonstrate the point you’re trying to make. Otherwise it’s impossible to reply to, and just comes across a little shrill and conspiratorial. Which I don’t think is your goal.
I guess "the regulations will continue until product management improves".
That Apple is so petty that it blocks on legal technicalities like that, when everyone knows it is just a matter of time. Really sours me on the whole company.
What does it mean to open the “default map app”? Maps apps typically act a native rendering for a web site, and have their own web-parameter based API for locations, navigation, and points of interest, as well as customizing informational layers.
So if I set say Bing maps to be the default map app, does that mean:
1. The OS hijacks attempts to link to sites such as Google Maps (https://maps.google.com) and Apple Maps (https://maps.apple.com) and send them to Bing Maps instead?
2. Bing Maps reverse engineers as much as possible of the various other mapping products and tries to support them with roughly equivalent features or error messages?
What the default maps app setting Apple created does is create an entirely new URI scheme of geo-navigation and an entitlement for apps which wish to support it to be the default map app. This appears to be roughly limited to a subset of parameters common between Apple and Google Maps.
So this setting in the EU and Japan.. mostly does nothing currently. Every developer needs to change their native apps and web pages to call out to this new custom scheme that only works on Apple platforms. Each of these mapping apps needs to support this scheme. That hasn’t happened yet.
The EU (and in this case Japan) gets early access and the potential exposure of multiple breaking revisions.
It is also certainly possible that a good number of web/app developers decide they don’t _want_ to support multiple mapping apps, since they’ve only verified one or two of them actually provide proper navigation/visualization/POI, and that the whole concept is flawed.
Just curious: why do you understand they restrict it to EU?
They do so with third-party app stores.
And if they wanted to have airpods-like pairing to third-parties in US, they would already have.
The only reason they might bring this to US is customers will be royally pissed.
If it were, they wouldn’t be asking. And you haven’t answered it either. Your parent comment is asking why the grandparent commenter thinks it makes sense to restrict third-party stores to the EU instead of having them everywhere.
Personally, I discovered it in Android when I recently bought Xiaomi buds for $15 (in Brazil, where this kind of stuff is much more expensive), took them out of the case, and my phone instantly asked whether I wanted to connect. One click, done. Afterward, every time I took those earbuds out, they were _instantly_ connected, and I had access to their individual battery levels in the system UI. These didn't have geolocation, but that's because I literally bought the cheapest earbuds I could find that would be delivered in 24 hours.
Has anyone had bad experiences with the Google Fast Pair (proprietary) technology? (Like Apple defenders here say would happen if you “open up” the proprietary protocol for everyone to implement).
Regulation is unfortunately necessary: the market isn't as magical as we would like it to be and competition is not a magic wand that makes everything good for users. Companies either become dominant, or universally screw over their users. Users either have no choice, do not understand the choices, or simply don't care.
I am glad the EU tries to do something. They aren't always right, but they should be trying. As a reminder, one of the biggest success stories of EU regulation: cheap cellular roaming within the EU. It used to be horribly expensive (like it is in the US), but the EU (specifically, Margrethe Vestager) regulated this and miracle of miracles, we can now move across the EU and not worry about horrendous cell phone bills.
All through that fiasco, where Apple was going through all sorts of twists and turns to avoid switching to USB-C, which was objectively better even if you’re an Apple partisan (given that I could carry a single charging cable for my Mac and Samsung phone, but not for my Mac and iPhone), he was going on and on about how the EU was killing creativity by forcing Apple to do something they didn’t want to.
And then Apple relented, their USB-C iPhone saw some of the fastest growth over a previous model despite having minimal other upgrades, indicating significant pent up demand for a USB-C phone.
And I’m guessing at this point even Gruber can’t imagine living life with a Lightning charger, so now the tune is that Apple was planning on switching to USB-C and they were playing a game to make it like like they were forced to switch by the EU so as not to alienate their current Lightning charger fans.
It’s a patently ridiculous idea but it’s necessary given how badly wrong he was on this issue because of how badly he continues to misunderstand how the EU works (which isn’t anything like how the US govt works).
Is there any evidence that "Apple was going through all sorts of twists and turns to avoid switching to USB-C"?
Apple worked to create the USB-C standard, was among the first to widely deploy it.
Apple fighting against a precedent where the EU would force them to switch everything to USB-C is strictly different from Apple going through all sorts of twists and turns to avoid switching to USB-C.
And that is exactly Gruber's take. Apple created USB-C standard and gave it to the USB committee for free.
And it is not even half true. But it spread across the internet as if it was verified.
The other one being Apple AirPod sold at cost, and suggest Apple invented big.SMALL CPU core.
Conversely, the inference you leave readers with from your description of Apple’s contribution to USB-C and CPU design is just as untrue.
Not my description. Or you mean Gruber's description of Apple's contribution.
His post on USB-C, CPU Design and AirPod is still Up on his site.
Those who actually worked on USB-C before it was even known also posted on HN.
Conversely, the inference you leave readers with from your description of Apple’s contribution to USB-C and CPU design is just as untrue.
Apple certainly didn't create USB-C, but was one of the biggest contributors.
And many post before that. But was too late, by that time the words were spread on internet like wildfire. Especially in Apple focused publishing sites.
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2017/03/17/cybart-apple-pr...
I cant find the exact one, but he at the time was suggesting AirPods was sold at cost. Along with plenty of American so called "analyst".
He might have his network within Apple on software. But anything that has to do with Hardware or things like MFi Licensing scheme he is completely wrong.
https://www.those.ch/designtechnik/wp-content/uploads/2014/0...
The net effect of this is that in Poland, for example, you can carry your phone and no wallet, because you can pay literally for everything using your phone. And I do mean everything, I've recently been to a club in Warsaw and the cloakroom had a terminal mounted on the wall, people just tapped their phones.
In EU there is also more consumer protection by default, so charge backs can be rejected by merchants but a consumer can easily take a merchant to court. So capping card fees is also more reasonable.
Also, when a merchant goes bankrupt and customers perform charge-backs it would involve the entire payment chain. First merchant reserves, then acquiring bank, then MasterCard/Visa, then issuing bank (customer), and lastly the customer. With lower card fees, this has impact on the merchant reserves and their risk profile. Furthermore, acquirers can add additional fees on top if needed.
You can also get lower card fees in US if you have a low risk business model.
It is only the maximum fee that is capped (along with various provisions for eg transparency). You can also get lower fees in EU, just twenty minutes ago I saw an ad for just such a zero-fee card.
All though I would say EU regulation has far more misses than hits, this and forcing Apple to USB-C were great but millions of man hours a year are burned navigating cookie banners on every website and chat control being forced through soon.
So we have two wins on iOS device convenience, not a great trade off for the other overreach.
Cookie banner are not, in fact, an obligation under GDPR. All you need to do to be GDPR compliant is “not collect and sell data to partners” and call it a day. Cookie banners are a loophole that the EC conceded to an ad industry that is addicted to tracking everyone all the time.
Are you asserting that I can log IP addresses in my Apache logs? Seems like no one can give me a straight answer there.
The only thing you need to do is to have some document where you list all the personal information you process and store, for how long and what you do with the said data.
What you cannot do is store data that you don't have a legitimate interest in storing. And this is why you have to document what you do with the data, because if you're not doing anything with it (“I want to store 10 years worth of IP address logs just in case”) then you aren't allowed to (on the opposite “I want to store IP addresses for a month for DDoS protection purpose ” is allowed).
Let’s not forget also that the EU first wanted to standardize on micro USB.
So far the DMA seems like a partial-win for technology users. I wish it enshrined the right to run software on your own computer in less ambiguous language, because as-is there are carve-outs that may let Apple get away with their core technology fee and mandatory app signing.
And mind you, I own 3 Apple devices - 2 Macs and 1 iPad and the watch can't connect to any of those. I must be forced to buy a $1000 device just because I made the mistake of recording something on their watch. We need more regulation because of things like this and I would absolutely hate to live in a society where this is the norm.
All in all a big improvement, with some future improvements left to make. Fingers crossed for a more sane USB-D in twenty years.
Most arguments in favour of regulation cherry pick what they feel are success stories and ignore everything else. Interfering with highly complex and dynamical self-regulating systems has a cost. There are many examples of regulation leading to negative outcomes, and it's also telling that large corporations push for regulation because it's one of the most effective obstacles for competition in a market.
Free market absolutists don’t know what they are talking about.
The actual originators of market capitalism, most famously Adam Smith, but also proponents like Milton Friedman, had no such confusion.
In reality, today’s free market absolutists don’t get their ideas from economists (even free market economists). Instead, they get their ideas from terrible mid 20th century novelists (I’ll let you figure out who I’m talking about), who didn’t know much about how anything worked, never mind economics.
If you'd like to reconsider your stance from a realpolitik perspective, it might clarify the parent's response.
Your claim that the parent ignored everything you said is bad-faith and objectively wrong. They are critiquing your attack on regulation and pointing out that reality works in the opposite way. Case in point, you have no bombshell argument against regulating Apple in this instance. You cited no real-world examples and gestured at generic and irrelevant anti-regulation boogeymen. Then you used ad-hominem to attack them instead of refuting the point they made.
If you're actually interested in having a discussion it would be worthwhile to explain your reasoning behind why you think markets depend on regulation. I can think of a few good arguments for that position, because I'm capable of considering multiple perspectives and I'm actually interested in having a debate. You seem more interested in shutting down opposing viewpoints and bullying the other participants into submission.
Some regulations are good, some are bad. In order to have a free market, you MUST have some regulations. It's not optional.
The reason is simple and intuitive - if you don't regulate the free market, it will just make itself un-free, which is what we're seeing with Apple. You need to actively push back against that.
The reason is all free market players, no exceptions, have the utmost fundamental incentive to make the market non-free. Everyone, all the time, is devising new and innovative ways to make the market they control non-free. Because this is how you maximize revenue.
Apple is the result of a broad class of regulations: IP laws. Would Apple even exist without IP laws? I doubt it.
A proper laissez-faire capitalist economy would not have any legally-enforced monopolies at all. That means no IP laws whatsoever!
I would push back a bit on the ideological comment, just to say that ideological acceptance of regulation is also probably wrong. This is different from a philosophical opposition/acceptance of political authority, although it often appears the same.
I think it's fairly obvious that the base prerequisites for market economies are property rights and some form of legal system to handle disputes. I don't consider that to be "regulation", especially not government regulation, but if that is what you mean by the term then of course I would concede that markets require it. However since even the most fervent proponents of laissez-faire economies accept the necessary role of property rights and a legal system, I would consider those to be separate from what we commonly refer to as regulation.
Ok to respond to your main point: It seems reasonable to me that in a competitive market there is an incentive to win, and companies can win by preventing others from being able to compete. This is commonly done via regulation, for example the big companies are lobbying for regulation on AI to help cement their position at the top. The thing is, just because companies are incentivized to win doesn't mean that it's possible to sustain a monopoly position for a significant amount of time. Unlike other competitive activities there isn't a time clock with winners declared at the end. Economists have shown that absent of external cofounders, a position where a company can charge monopoly prices is unsustainable.
There is of course a stronger position to be made for regulating so called natural monopolies, but even then there isn't much evidence that they really exist. Some of the most cited examples, like telecom providers, end up not being true - look at Eastern Europe and what happened when they deregulated that industry for example.
And pray tell, how did that work out? It didn't. The worst of it came from OpenAI snatching up long-term federal contracts, but it's not illegal or anticompetitive to waste taxpayer money on debt-encumbered AI outfits. You're citing an example that works against your broader point.
> doesn't mean that it's possible to sustain a monopoly position for a significant amount of time.
> Unlike other competitive activities there isn't a time clock with winners declared at the end.
Neither the SEC nor the FTC has ever argued either of these points to my knowledge. Maybe this is true for other economies, but not America.
> Economists have shown that absent of external cofounders
We don't live in a world absent of confounding factors. Simple cartel logic is enough to loophole around this little theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartel
---
Re. OpenAI et al, they actually work with the US government to help shape the regulatory landscape, and interestingly enough since Google jumped out ahead they are now pushing for a lighter model. I imagine Google is pushing for heavier regulation since that tends to be their M.O.
Also I don't have anarchist economics - anarchists don't believe in property rights or markets, and they certainly don't understand economics. And I certainly don't put any stock in what right leaning American politicians or their courts think or say.
Unless you mean ol' Hans Gruber. He is quite the villain.
He just wrote about Japan's implementation of a similar set of laws rather favourably - the theme is that Japan's implementation looks very much like a genuine attempt at protecting users and benefitting end users and developers.
While I don't agree with what a lot of what Gruber has to say. A point I do agree with is that the DMA is being sold (by Margrethe Vestager, Thierry Breton and Ursula von der Leyer) as a set of consumer protections, when it's plainly not that, and in some clear ways does the opposite.
There's also persistent transparency questions like why the EU has excessive meetings with Spotify, or why there is not a "music" gatekeeper in the DMA, or the requirement to easily move music libraries between music services - things that would actually help consumers and prevent genuine lock in.
(Note this isn't to excuse the behaviour of big tech.)
The only example he gave where the MSCA is better than the DMA is:
> E.g. apps distributed outside the App Store in Japan still require age ratings. There’s no such requirement in the EU.
Most of his description of what Japan does better is simply “mutual respect”. Which reinforces the idea that this isn’t about the actual practical differences but about ego. Apple hates how the EU forces them to make change.
And Apple has done this before. After the EU forced them to make a change, which emboldened other nations to push similar changes, Apple points to those other nations’s obviously more streamlined law making process (given that the EU has already gone through the hard work of drafting the law, working with a non-cooperative Apple, and then actually seeing it implemented and the practical issues that arise), to justify their hostility to the EU’s trend setting efforts, without which those other nations would almost certainly have not proceeded.
I bet if Japan’s MSCA had come before the DMA, Apple’s tone towards both those governments would have been reversed.
Great, now let's stack what you've written in both of your comments directly against what Gruber has written, and not what an imaginary strawman wrote.
You wrote:
1. I have no doubt that Gruber will find reasons why the EU is bad and regulation is bad.
2. The EU has already gone through the hard work of drafting the law, working with a non-cooperative Apple, and then actually seeing it implemented and the practical issues that arise.
3. Most of his description of what Japan does better is simply “mutual respect”.
Addressing point 1 (again):
I wrote words to the effect of (they're just above): Gruber's writing is not as black and white as you assert and then I made reference to the Japan regulation article as an example where Gruber again makes nuanced arguments towards regulated changes.
That article does not make a blanket statement that regulation is bad, and Gruber points to a long-standing idea that he has which neither the EU nor Japan have regulated, which he believes should be. He's also stated (repeatedly) that he's in favour of link-outs and other commonly requested changes to the app store terms, and believe's Apple are too slow to change on these.
So does Gruber believe all regulation is bad as you have asserted: no. His views are demonstrably in favour of well-minded regulation.
Addressing point 2: The belief that the EU bears the brunt of regulation teething, and that's why it goes well in other regions.
Maybe you skipped the part where Gruber points to a 2021 regulation requirement from Japan, which Apple in fact did not provide resistance to, but worked with the regulatory authority to achieve their goal - then Schiller himself (the overseer of the App store at the time) came out and spoke in public with supportive language. That is an example Gruber provided, however there are plenty more examples of the app store changing policies long before the EU took notice. The EU gets all the attention here because they seem to be uniquely incapable of foreseeing unintended consequences.
So is the EU's leading the source of friction. No and they're not even first in many respects.
Addressing point 3: Gruber makes only immaterial "mutual respect" comparisons between DMA/MSCA.
I'm guessing you skimmed this bit too - Gruber talks at length to MSCA and DMA's approach to regulation, stating that MSCA's changes prioritise privacy and security in contrast to the DMA, and practical aspects such as user safety (that's a wee bit more than "mutual respect"). Secondly that users are not presented with onerous choice screens (see end note 1) which is making reference to the EU's requirement that browser selection screens must be repeatedly shown when the user's default browser is Safari (but not if it's any other browser), Japan doesn't take this approach to a browser selection screen.
So is it true that Gruber makes immaterial comparisons between the two: again no.
This seems incorrect, or at least misleading. I have always (since I switched to iPhone in 2020) been receive notifications on my Garmin Fenix watch. In fact, the only problem I have with notifications is that I have no ability to blacklist apps from notifying on my watch, and its all or nothing. This is a huge downgrade from Android, and I wish whomever is responsible could fix that.. That's probably my biggest annoyance with my iphone.
Anyone have a solution for this?
Probably better would have been just simpler access, even if not the integrated experience like. But that would lead to complains from third party manufacturers.
So if the solution is not optimal, that circles back to Apple who are responsible for coming up with a solution that works. Then choosing to prioritise platform lock-in is a business strategy, leaving regulation the only recourse.
My contention is this: expecting a third party provider to be able to provide the same experience as the first party is an impractical goal. Even pushing companies towards that means a lot of second order effects where everyone ends up like Intel or Windows for that matter. We already have android on that level.
You can have a reasonable requirement where Apple should not be able to block other companies from providing similar services based on an iphone. But clearly the directive here is that Apple's competing products should not be better based on better integration, which can only go in one direction. Apple degrades its own products to comply. Yes, competition wins, but consumers lose. In this case specifically - consumers who would want to choose Apple, better experiences would not be able to simply because Apple cannot ensure the level of software/hardware alignment as it works today if the same software is written with modular hardware in mind.
This is what the requirement is. The EU isn’t demanding that Apple provide the same experience for 3rd Party and 1st Party products. It only requires that Apple allow 3rd Parties access to the same capabilities as 1st Party products, so 3rd Parties could build 1st Party quality experiences.
Nobody is asking Apple to degrade their own products. They’re just demanding that Apple don’t artificially degrade other people’s products.
> That Apple did not want to open it up is a separate discussion.
This is the only point of discussion here. Because all the EU requires is that Apple open up their internal protocols so others can implement them.
Apple supports Bluetooth just like Android phones do and does not degrade that.
A fair way of dealing with this is to ask Apple to license its technology to third parties, not be forced to give it away for free.
Apple could “license its technology”, but what use would that be. Having other phone manufacturers implement the same UI doesn’t change the market distorting effects of the iPhone.
Also, device manufacturers can create apps for their devices and trigger those apps when a device is close by.
I am against the idea of having a company spend resources on designing and implementing features for its devices and then being forced to give them away for free.
Maybe if Apple actually offered that at a reasonable price, and to be clear they have never offered this at any price, the EU wouldn’t have felt compelled to act. AirPods have been around for a decade now, the DSA has been in the works for five years. So it’s not like Apple hasn’t had time to act. They chose to do nothing, so now the EU is removing their right to choose.
> Also, device manufacturers can create apps for their devices and trigger those apps when a device is close by.
This would require support from Apple, which notably, it doesn’t provide.
> I am against the idea of having a company spend resources on designing and implementing features for its devices and then being forced to give them away for free.
We’re talking about Apple here, one of the richest companies on the planet. I think it can survive. The DSA only applies to companies that achieve gatekeeper status, which basically means they’re an effective monopoly in a market that many people are forced to participate in (in this case smartphones). It’s a heck of bar to cross, and something that only been achieved by unbelievably profitable companies.
Duopolies are just as dangerous as monopolies. Basically anything where there is a dozen or so competitors tends to be dangerous, as the US loves to demonstrate in as many industries as possible.
Apple makes a choice here, they don’t degrade anything they just choose to be difficult and to have to be forced to do the right thing by “whomever has enough money to sue us”.
If you’re a user of Apple devices, I don’t know why you’re defending them because noting this corporation does is meant for you once they double dip on you buying their hardware and then signing up for their services.
I disagree, this is not a given. Usually the opposite is true.
Meaning, properly designed APIs and protocols for public use are more robust than one-off private protocols. Because there are expectations.
Apple could be malicious and make the API stupid, but if they were genuine then they wouldn't. They would make a good API, which is much more likely, I think, when the API is public versus some secret private API.
This is the polar opposite of my experience. Whether it's Bluetooth, PDF's, or a web audio JavaScript spec, actual products are plagued with inconsistencies and incompatibilities, as they implement the spec in different ways or brand A has bugs that brands B, C and D need to write special code for to get interoperability working. And brand C has other bugs brands A, B and D now need to also handle.
Whereas private protocols are much more likely to just work because there's only one implementation. There are no differing interpretations.
This isn't given. For example the company that makes smart light switches doesn't provide a code entry pad and the company that makes the alarm doesn't provide a light switch. If they were interoperable I'd have a better system. Futhermore they'd both sell more widgets, as I'm holding off on further units in case I find a better third option and end up disposing of my current ones.
You're missing the point. Apple isn't in trouble beacuse of user's choice between iPhone and Android. They're in trouble because of 20-50 headphone makers who Apple prevents from truely competing Apple for 2 billion iPhone users.
It's the same with all of these issues Apple (and Google) are running into. It's not about the user's choice to buy iPhone or Android. It's about 100s of thousands of businesses ability to reach those billions of users without a gatekeeper.
The example you shared is the opposite. I am imagining a kernel today written in a manner that airpods would be able to use it to extract the max out of it. Now, it has to support 10 other third party pods, so at the minimum, kernel would be more generalized.
Aren’t peripherals inherently modular kind of definitionally?
You should check that GitHub, it makes AirPod functionality mostly agnostic. The warts could (in some world) be mere bug reports for the manufacturer firmware team.
Personally, I think the Bluetooth standards suck a big one even recognizing how good it’s gotten and I _almost_ resent apple for not pushing this out as anither standard.
That was never proven. Although their PR response was atrocious.
“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...
https://www.macrumors.com/2010/06/24/steve-jobs-describes-ip...
Jobs wasn't exactly wrong - bridging the antenna with your finger was not a good way to hold the iPhone 4.
What's hilarious is how they "fixed" it in software - by changing the signal bar display curve, and then making the lower bars appear taller.
https://9to5mac.com/2025/10/08/a-15-year-mystery-solved-the-...
iOS has a daemon that reads your notifications and ships them to Apple Watch. They have a daemon that scans for AirPods and gives you UI to pair them. But you as an app developer cannot do any of those things. There was no public API for notification stream access, scanning for specific Bluetooth devices, floating UI widgets, or even just persistent daemons. All of those capabilities more or less exist on Android, which is why multiple smartwatch ecosystems have been built on top of it while iOS only supports the first-party option.
Back in the 2000s, when Apple was just getting into mobile devices, the app development landscape was far less bleak. iTunes on Windows could happily index your entire music and video collection and sync it to an iPod and there was nothing Microsoft could do to stop them. Everything is just finding the appropriate file and connecting to the appropriate USB device to transfer it. And that's more or less how things still work today, except now on smartphones all of that is put into isolated containers and walled off behind private APIs.
The issue comes in second order effects. If third party headphones are given access and then the experience is not as good, they complain that Apple hasnt open up the spec enough, and it just results in Apple being forced to be modular in their approach.
Third-party headphones already have access. Bluetooth audio is a standard that is well-supported both by iOS and headphones of any kind[0]. The problem is that the process for pairing a device on iOS (or, for that matter, Android) is a pain in the ass for knowledgeable users and completely untenable for everyone else.
Apple recognized that this was a problem, and made their phone detect if you were trying to pair new headphones and pop up a notification for it. But only for Apple's headphones. Which is stupid.
[0] In fact, this is why I use AirPods Pro on an Android phone.
But even ignoring that, I think your claim can be true while forcing Apple to be compatible is still the right thing to do, because optimizing for personal convenience and user experience only is not the best outcome if it comes at the expense of market failure due to vendor lock-in.
Previously, this was available on Android but not iOS as Apple didn’t expose the APIs for watches other than their own.
a) API to not just read notifications but also perform the notification quick actions (if any), e.g snooze for a calendar event, mark complete for a reminder, and of course reply for a text (SMS or otherwise). This seems entirely reasonable and ludicrous that it doesn't exist.
b) API to access SMS / Messages. That one appears to be heavily guarded because security / E2E (for iMessage).
I mention b) because a lot of times people invoke the problem a being b) (and possibly a problem in its own right, forcing one to use Messages for SMS) but really for watches a) is sufficient and probably much more relevant.
There's also a.1) API access to media (images) in notifications.
In any case, DMA could definitely help crack both.
The last update from Garmin did this to my Epix. Funnily enough the complications can still be activated if you touch the screen, they’re just invisible.
Will that mean we’ll see some last step assembly move into the EU, or does it only require legal presence?
I think Tim Cook’s strategy is rather “hoard and extract as much money as legally possible, no matter what it does to the experience”. Selling tech products is no different to him than selling car parts of frozen meat. What matters to him is the pile of money at the end.
But worldwide tech is dying
Part of the appeal of Airpods is how seamless they are to pair and share between devices. The UX of bluetooth headphones pairing and device switching before Airpods came along seemed atrocious.
Is this a case of Apple arbitrarily locking out third parties, or is a case of Apple doing the work to get something to work nicely and now being forced to give competition access?
But between my Android phone and my contractor issued Windows laptop, the $20 headphone I use just works. It connects to both of them because of multi-pairing. If one of the devices is playing, say, a Youtube video, the other doesn't take over the sound even if I start playing music there. And if I pause the Youtube video in one device, the other is free to play sounds.
It's seamless and intuitive.
I should try also pairing to my Linux workstation. If that works too I would be impressed.
We miss you, British Friends <3