Due to the regulatory uncertainties brought about by the Digital Markets Act, we do not believe that we will be able to roll out three of these [new] features – iPhone Mirroring, SharePlay Screen Sharing enhancements, and Apple Intelligence – to our EU users this year.
This is what never made sense to me about this argument.
Who exactly is forcing people to buy iPhones? How is the platform anti-competition when there’s loads of competition all around it, in equally as large numbers?
The walled garden has always been a feature, a selling point. And people choose to adopt it or not.
Can you explain better how the logic in your argument above goes, with that in mind?
The iPhone platform has competition against other platforms. The platform as a whole is competing with android for instance.
Within the android platform, google play competes with fdroid, Samsung galaxy store, etc.
Within the iPhone platform, the app store has no competition.
But what does that matter when the platform has plenty of competition? This is what doesn’t make sense to me. Google chose to allow other app stores. That’s a feature of the platform. Apple chose to not allow sideloading or other app stores, again, as a feature.
Who is forcing people to use Apple devices?
Why doesn’t this extend to other platforms like Nintendo or PlayStation whose stores are explicit features of the platforms?
No one is forcing people to use Apple devices. That’s not what this is about.
It’s about other services trying to reach potential customers that happen to be using an iPhone. Spotify has to go through the App Store if they want to reach any customers on the second largest mobile platform. And Apple themselves have a lot of advantages concerning integrating their own music streaming service into the OS while Spotify is limited by the rules Apple sets, including taking 30% of any subscription made through the App Store.
The anti-competitive behaviour implied in a walled-garden starts once that flagship product is bought.
Ok, so maybe some cars decide not to offer seatbelts as a feature. Oh wait, they can’t, because that’s dumb.
Not having a feature that helps consumers is not a feature. When Apple prevents people from repairing their phones, that’s not a feature. When they prevent consumers from loading their own apps on their own device that they bought, that’s not a feature! It’s comically anti-competitive and bad for everyone.
The DMA doesn’t seem to have ever been about consumer choice, it’s about the choice of other competitors to have access to Apple’s customers without having to play by Apple’s rules. Just look at who was pushing for sideloading on iOS, I mostly saw Meta and Epic Games at the forefront. Why should Apple compromise my device’s integrity so that Meta can spy on me? I have no good answer to that.