The Register has learned from those involved in the browser trade that Apple has limited the development and testing of third-party browser engines to devices physically located in the EU. That requirement adds an additional barrier to anyone planning to develop and support a browser with an alternative engine in the EU.
It effectively geofences the development team. Browser-makers whose dev teams are located in the US will only be able to work on simulators. While some testing can be done in a simulator, there’s no substitute for testing on device – which means developers will have to work within Apple’s prescribed geographical boundary.
… as Mozilla put it – to make it “as painful as possible for others to provide competitive alternatives to Safari.”
Just one more reason to make laws that enforce similarly fair competition in other countries. Don’t let companies get away with this shit!
Can they do that? I’d love it, but I don’t think they can really force Apple, or any company to do something globally can they? (USB C was probably managed this way because of logistic and pricing matters).
they can make whatever laws they like really - the EU punishes corporate infringement with percentage of global revenue for example
whether they can enforce them or not is questionable in most cases, but unless apple wants to pull out of europe, the EU can kinda do whatever it likes
Not entirely. There still exists trade agreements, and diplomatic pushback.
Forcing companies to make products to a certain specification, would mean the EU is attempting to regulate other markets. Markets it has no direct governance over. While it may come from good intentions, it still invades the authonomy of the governments that should have governance over these markets.
Much better would be to work together with other countries, and help these countries implement similar rules, and enforce them together. Like, pretty much that the EU is doing for its members in the first place.
trade agreements likely don’t cover this though
and sure there might be diplomatic pushback, but… is that really going to happen?
the EU already forces companies to make products to certain specifications if they want to be sold in the EU… as does the US and most other countries, and California in the US tends to set the standard that everyone else lives by
countries “invade” the autonomy of other countries’ markets all the time. the US is the worst offender. this is kinda the reason the EU exists: to have the power to force things to happen that is “outside” their jurisdiction
apple doesn’t have to comply. they don’t have to sell iphones in the EU. they’re making a choice
I could be wrong, but I believe he meant that other countries themselves should pass similar laws; not that the EU should make laws mandating what Apple does in other countries
enforcing fair competition is certainly not very American
freedom TO vs freedom FROM
Wouldn’t a vpn solve this?
I assume they are doing checks of other things. Local software is not the same as a web service that is checking your IP for your location.
They could use location services, your registration country for your Apple ID, the sale location of your device, and other things. They could even aggregate indicators and use that.
iOS would have root access to aGPS (or even real GPS) to determine location. There’s no easy way to spoof that against a determined asshole actor.
I have the feeling that it would require a GPS spoof
Wow making it as pricy as possible for developers to add features thanks Apple.
Only after getting around 20 billion of fine, these old timers will understand how tech works.
geolocking is immoral. if they’re getting it why the fuck shouldn’t we?
Time to elect better politicians.
Where are they?
And of course with First-past-the-post even if they appear it is harmful to vote for them because you are better to strategically vote for a party that actually has a chance of winning even if they are only marginally better than the other party that is expected to win.
The system is really fucked up top-to-bottom. Very likely on purpose.
Apple scummy once again.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Apple’s designation under Europe’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) as a gatekeeper for the App Store, iOS, Safari, and just recently iPadOS forced Cupertino to make concessions.
Parisa Tabriz, VP of engineering and general manager of Chrome at Google, dismissed Apple’s rule changes earlier this year.
When Apple announced its plan to make changes in response to DMA in January, developers expressed concern that supporting a separate EU browser might be a problem.
“The contract terms are bonkers and almost no vendor I’m aware of will agree to them,” lamented one industry veteran familiar with the making of browsers in response to an inquiry from The Register.
In March, the European Commission opened an investigation into Apple based on concerns that Cupertino’s “steering” rules and browser choice screen fell short of DMA requirements.
Asked about Apple’s geofencing of devices for development, an Opera spokesperson replied that it hadn’t heard about the issue – but that’s not surprising given that the organization is headquartered in the EU.
The original article contains 817 words, the summary contains 165 words. Saved 80%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
And people ask me why I de-appled…
So who did you go with? Because stock android ain’t much better privacy wise.
no, but on android you have firefox… and you have f-droid with tons of OSS applications - and a lot of them are really good, so you can ignore everything made by google.
I’d recommend using GrapheneOS. (i’m using it, and it is a breath of fresh air)
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GrapheneOS running on Pixel phone.
I’ll de-apple when we get a viable alternative to Android. As is Google has far too much control over the entirety of that ecosystem to call it workably open, and if I’m going to choose between two proprietary vendors I’m going to choose the more reliable one with a business built around consumer interest instead of ad-company interests.
Try GrapheneOS. It has some quirks but it’s a good alternative. Been using it for two years on a phone and I’m considering getting it on a tablet.
Google still owns the ecosystem. They want to roll a new packaging system that depreciates apks and forces play store installs or Google based certificate pining? They’ll have 90% market capture in a year. It’s like using Opera/Edge/Etc and feeling safe from the decisions Google makes because of it, but they’re writing and designing Chromium upstream so they still own the agency and the choice (See Manifest v3). Given two companies both preventing me from owning agency of my own device, I’ll pick the lesser of the two evils and in my eyes that is currently Apple. I do hope to have a mobile operating system akin to Linux someday, but graphine os or any android dirivitive is not the solution, it just takes away my agency while they further the problem.
I don’t see third party engines making it to the market unless the US also slams down some regulations. How many Firefox users are there in the EU? How many use iOS, and how many of those are likely to use the iOS version of Firefox? Is it worth maintaining two to four separate apps for this?
It’s guaranteed that Google will create a version of chrome of the EU market as well. Yea it’s another big tech, but app devs having the same browser engine working on iOS and droid will be a boon. Since ff has the android app already, it’s also not like they will have a new greenfield development for it.
Google has infinite money to throw at shitty projects, and the more marketshare they control the better for them since that just means more data that they can sell, so I can see that happening. I don’t think Mozilla has the same luxury.
That’s one way to stop outsourcing to India and create EU jobs.
Seems like this is just delaying the inevitable - just like using USB-C connectors.
I’m sure Google would love to point out the hypocrisy to get Blink in the US.
This is worse that USB-C connectors. They did launch Lightning first and it wasn’t significantly worse that USB-C for a long time. Sure, they dragged their feet for longer than they probably should have (I think the iPad switched at a relatively reasonable time) but making their users switch connectors is a big change and it made sense to make sure that USB-C was here to stay and whatnot.
This is just 100% user hostile. They are doing more work to keep features from their users. Features that the user can just not use if they don’t want them.
