Under the European Union’s new Digital Markets Act (DMA), which aims to increase competition, large online platforms, including Apple, must open up their devices to third-party app stores.
[…]While the consensus is that this provision of the law is good for users and even Apple, it’s unclear how the regulation will affect application developers.
The question is what do app developers think about these new regulations? Will they actually be beneficial to EU based developers and what will be the short and long term impact on the EU’s app market? We spoke with a few to find out.
In short, they’re actually interested in the effects of this legislation, because sideloading and alternative application stores on iOS will give developers more options, and these options will in turn put pressure on Apple to lower its fees as well. Competition is a beautiful, beautiful thing.
Think this is gonna go about as well as Apples right to repair. Don’t see any new people repairing iPhones using that. Just like I doubt there will be many people sideloading. Just like a lot of Android phones have locked bootloaders etc. You can side load but it’s such a pain that no average person will do it.
It’s just a switch in settings, not hard at all really. Plenty of people used it to download Flappy Bird after it was pulled from the store. Meanwhile No one uses Apple’s “Right to repair” as it comes with such terms as we can audit your entire shop and destroy/fine you for some non-Apple procured products, Apple will only sell you whole motherboards instead of parts, and demand you get the rights to the customer’s first born child before they activate anything for the repair shop. Literally just a dog and pony show to pretend they aren’t acting like a monopoly for the courts.
Supporting normal installation of application for iOS will at minimum enable the emergence of F-Droid alike store for iOS users. Due to such store containing free and open source software with reproducible build system it will likely surpass the trust level Apple could ever achieve with App Store. I agree that most people might not use it in foreseeable future. Or will they? But in the end that is not all that important. As for commercial projects, such as lets say games and social applications. Here end users can decide if they trust App Store or some other party more. Software was, is, and will continue to be delivered through a lot of channels. Believing Apple is somehow protecting you more. When you install TikTok or Fortnite from the App Store. Compared to installing such application directly from creator. That is just stupid. If you are concerned about your privacy then simply don’t use TikTok. Apple isn’t protecting your privacy when you install TikTok from App Store. Next steps are unrestricted access to APIs, proper background running support, opt-in checkbox enabling the end user root access … Users have had root access to their hardware for decades. No real reason “smart mobile” devices should not allow it.
“Competition is a beautiful, beautiful thing.” – aka “Capitalism”
joe,
I would agree that competition is good, but unfortunately it is not emergent from capitalism. It’s one of the great ironies that the end game for unrestricted capitalism is devoid of competition due to power imbalances inherent in capitalistic economies. Anyone who’s played a game of monopoly should recognize this. Outside of the initial starting conditions inherited by a capitalistic society, the imbalanced feedback loops practically guarantee less competition is produced by capitalism over time. This is what we see happening on main street as well as wall street as more and more of our resources and economy gets consolidated under fewer yet more powerful corporate entities.
If not for the intervention of antitrust regulators, every industry would become a monopoly and even the monopolies themselves would start morphing into cross-industry meta-monopolies. For the people expressing the dislike of antitrust regulation, I really have to wonder to what end they’d hold their convictions under the rule of absolute monopolies. Personally I feel that even the duopolies and oligopolies with less than 50% market share that regulators aren’t going after are still too big and have a negative impact on competition.
Schools don’t usually teach negative aspects of capitalism, which might even be considered traitorous, though I think they should because consolidation of economic power has a big impact on our liberties and quality of life as individuals.