It's interesting to hear Apple always talk about the level playing field they've tried to create. From within the company i think they really believe they've got a level playing field.
But then Apple has apps that can do much more than everyone else has access to, in ways that have nothing to do with security or privacy.
- Apps access to NFC (e.g Apple Pay vs you being able to make your own nfc card)
- Inability to have non WKWebView type browsers. Safari can do the one it wants, which is Apples choice.
- Health app has access to nicer push notifications than
standard
- Federated Identity type login only works with Apple. So login with Apple is built tightly into the OS, where you can't make an app that does that.
- Wallet app can access 2FA SMS code without having to type it
The list is much longer but it is not a level playing field with regards to the access to apis. If Apple has an app like Messages, other apps should be able to access the same things too.
I pretty much couldn't care less about the app store and review process, but the asymmetric access to APIs really helps Apple cement their moat (e.g with iMessage, Wallet), basically any app where they do it has serious market power.
Access to NFC is a huge one. This has a ton of use-cases in for instance IoT and smart home, and Apple limiting access prevents a lot of innovation in that space which might compete with their offering.
Another example is Apple's privileged access to your wifi credentials. Basically this means if you want to share wifi access via your app, as you might want to do in setting up an IoT device, this is only possible if you enter Apple's expensive MFI program.
So in other words, to have a seamless and competitive IoT hardware setup process, you essentially have to enter an agreement with Apple which involves giving them a percentage of your overall hardware sales revenue on MFI devices.
If you delete an Apple app and redownload it it will put itself on the homebar or first app page pushing your other apps away. Comman, they dont let other apps do that!
Doesn’t NFC work just fine for most third parties? I have various cards that all work for payment, including a third party credit card (ie. not Apple Pay), mass transit pass, a student card which has payment functionality in addition to key card access to doors. I guess Apple still has final say-so, so an individual can’t create an NFC for her home, or is this possible now? Then again, when it comes to zero-knowledge, do you really want Apple knowing when you open and close your doors? From a privacy perspective this is a double-edged sword.
The browser for me is still an issue. I know the question is more broad, but if Firefox could run natively on iOS, I’d feel substantially better about Apple’s promise to be more privacy-oriented. I don’t expect their platform to have zero telemetry, but it is larger projects like this that speak volumes to me because that indicates they at least entertain the notion of privacy for people who care enough to try to opt out of tracking (versus the many many individuals who are unaware or don’t care).
> Inability to have non WKWebView type browsers. Safari can do the one it wants, which is Apples choice.
This is primarily for privacy and security reasons. One wouldn't want a funny casino app, or the likes of Google or Facebook to hijack people's web access.
Another aspect is the user experience - a piece of web content will render exactly the same way anywhere on the system. There is no need for people to be concerned with webapps asking absurd things like "Download browser X to view this page".
A third aspect is actually very helpful to developers - you can count on 100% of the APIs you intent to use being available on the system's web browser, creating in-app experiences significantly easier (and cheaper) to develop.
After a year long market study, the CMA has concluded that Apple's browser engine ban on iOS in anti-competitive and distort the browser market, as well as limit the capabilities of web apps on iOS and on the entire mobile eco-system. They note that it is obviously to their own benefit, as a weaker web on iOS results in a stronger exclusive and captive native app eco-system, which they can tax at will.
The CMA is now set to start a market investigation reference (MIR) which will give them the power to impose changes to Apple. The number one remedy considered is requiring Apple to stop banning competing engines on iOS.
Music to my ears - from my own experience, safari is a pain to deal with. I've run into many bugs that haven't been fixed for years, and they've lagged behind in implementing standards like WebGL 2.
Hopefully this will force them to invest more resources into safari and webkit
I would hope that this ends with Apple being pressured to make changes. Whether Apple will comply in a way that meets the spirit of the requirement is an entirely different question. I can see them allowing other engines, hamstringing them or otherwise adding friction, and blaming it on “security” reasons.
It's a bit like IE in the 2000s, it was possible to install an alternative browser on Windows but the fact that IE was pre-installed and set as default meant that it was very hard for competitors to get in the market.
There you go. Even if Apple allowed more browser engines on their devices, you will still see the same Chrome and Safari market dominance once again. It actually changes little to nothing as we already have seen with Android, I would not expect any significant change if Apple did this and it will result in Chrome still being on top then Safari second.
The harsh truth is that you need a properly executed competitor to both iOS and Android. Unfortunately from the open-source and free-software world, there are just too many failures or potentials never being 'realised'.
We saw Firefox OS being cheered all over the place here as an alternative to the mobile device duopoly and it turned out to be a failure due to little to no usage. The same thing with the promising Ubuntu OS and now again we have low usage with the plethora of Linux-based phones. So it seems that the market just does not care, and Mozilla and others are still unable to bring in something viable to compete against the big two.
It is not 'early days' anymore and it may even be almost too late, unless massive amounts of funding gets poured into an alternative. The same thing is happening with smartwatches with Apple again having a 5+ year lead. We've all waited for Mozilla, Servo and others to become useful and they have all underperformed.
What's wrong with a wrapper around Safari? It's a capable and efficient browser. Firefox can wrap its bookmark sharing and whatever around it (I actually use Firefox on iOS, though I don't bother with the profile sharing). We don't need Safari to be 100% Chrome compatible, right? That's just for lazy programmers and greedy marketeers.
The Samsung browser is a Chromium wrapper. Some people dismiss wrappers around Safari on iOS, although I think there are more important things to worry about than exactly which rendering engine gets used.
Regarding YouTube ads on iPad: App called ‘Vinegar - Tube Cleaner’. Incredible. Best few bucks I’ve ever spent. It replaces the native YouTube player with the standard iOS video player which means you can also do system-wide picture-in-picture from the YouTube website. And I’ve not seen a YouTube ad in videos since I installed the extension.
I always want to set Startpage as the default search engine in Safari. But it is impossible unless Apple adds it. Hopefully regulators somehow will make Apple more open in the near future.
It sounds like there might be a backhander in play here that this country suddenly decides there’s no competing in a market which has had the same rules for fifth teen years. Given the ongoing scandals of the current British government then that makes sense that their elected officials area easily bribed and corrupt.
For the foreseeable future the only companies that may foster alternatives to the Apple / Google duopoly are Chinese ones. And there is absolutely no way they will be allowed to gain foldhold in the west.
You can't regulate capable competition into existence. PalmOS and Windows Phone/Mobile/10 both died because their parent companies screwed up.
PalmOS was a painfully out of date design by the time it got stuck on phones. No amount of regulation was going to solve the clusterfuck of Palm and PalmSource. Nor was regulation going to make Cobalt actually ship and work as advertised.
Regulation also wasn't going to stop Microsoft from screwing up Windows Mobile. After the iPhone's release the WinMo 6.x development was an obvious dead end for licensees. Android was just a better response to iOS than WinMo. Microsoft then knifed the platform moving to 7 giving licensees even less reason to use it. Regulation wasn't going to make companies license a dead end platform.
An OS landscape isn't vibrant or exciting when established players just stop meaningful development or just have a shit vision. Apple showed the multitouch and a soft keyboard could be practical on a mobile device. Palm and Microsoft were stuck iterating a design from 1995. No regulation was going to fix their lack of imagination.
As a user I have no desire to even try any browser other than Safari in my iPhone. As a developer I have a strong desire to not have to deal with multiple browsers on iOS. Forgive my ignorance but I’ve got no idea what tangible benefit a new browser engine would give. Perhaps I’m just lazy and part of the problem.
We were considering asking for this, but we’re just unsure how important it was and whether it would place an undue burden on manufacturers for more simple devices.
Mobile devices are an obvious target for competition because they are just so ubiquitous and two companies basically control the market.
At least with cars things are different for now; the browser/platform business model is a "surveillance capitalism" one.
Where we (Google or Google via a deal with Apple) give away a product, that has been extremely costly to build, for free, in return for you giving us a (de-facto) exclusive on profiling and data mining your online behaviour, so we can get an effective monopoly on brokering advertisement.
For me it looked like the article is hosted on google.com, but it's actually just a redirect. Updating the URL of the submission would be great as currently it can be misleading.
The obvious one would be to fine Apple until they implement Android-style mechanisms for openness. As pointed out above, although they're being lumped together, Android is leagues more open than iOS. Does it even make sense to talk about an Android "stranglehold" when the OS is forkable and many vendors have their own spins on it, with new features often appearing there first before Google even have it themselves?
In reality they are going to be treated together, because governments tend to reason in terms of countries and people not technical details. Apple/Android are both rich US tech firms who aren't going to leave the market regardless of how big the fines get, and in Android's case literally can't (because someone else could simply license it or use it and step in to replace Google). So it'll be like all other attempts at tech regulation, it'll just turn into cranking the handle on the cash cow to try and fill a part of the lockdown-created budget holes.
Apple has budget to the requirement for allowing alternative payment methods in dating apps for the Dutch market following a lawsuit and racking up a noncompliance fine they'll now need to pay anyway.
These regulatory bodies can and often do have an effect on large corporations if the punishment for ignoring them is set high enough.
[+] [-] neximo64|3 years ago|reply
But then Apple has apps that can do much more than everyone else has access to, in ways that have nothing to do with security or privacy.
- Apps access to NFC (e.g Apple Pay vs you being able to make your own nfc card)
- Inability to have non WKWebView type browsers. Safari can do the one it wants, which is Apples choice.
- Health app has access to nicer push notifications than standard
- Federated Identity type login only works with Apple. So login with Apple is built tightly into the OS, where you can't make an app that does that.
- Wallet app can access 2FA SMS code without having to type it
The list is much longer but it is not a level playing field with regards to the access to apis. If Apple has an app like Messages, other apps should be able to access the same things too.
I pretty much couldn't care less about the app store and review process, but the asymmetric access to APIs really helps Apple cement their moat (e.g with iMessage, Wallet), basically any app where they do it has serious market power.
[+] [-] skohan|3 years ago|reply
Another example is Apple's privileged access to your wifi credentials. Basically this means if you want to share wifi access via your app, as you might want to do in setting up an IoT device, this is only possible if you enter Apple's expensive MFI program.
So in other words, to have a seamless and competitive IoT hardware setup process, you essentially have to enter an agreement with Apple which involves giving them a percentage of your overall hardware sales revenue on MFI devices.
[+] [-] AndersSandvik|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zahma|3 years ago|reply
The browser for me is still an issue. I know the question is more broad, but if Firefox could run natively on iOS, I’d feel substantially better about Apple’s promise to be more privacy-oriented. I don’t expect their platform to have zero telemetry, but it is larger projects like this that speak volumes to me because that indicates they at least entertain the notion of privacy for people who care enough to try to opt out of tracking (versus the many many individuals who are unaware or don’t care).
[+] [-] mgsk|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] isodev|3 years ago|reply
This is primarily for privacy and security reasons. One wouldn't want a funny casino app, or the likes of Google or Facebook to hijack people's web access.
Another aspect is the user experience - a piece of web content will render exactly the same way anywhere on the system. There is no need for people to be concerned with webapps asking absurd things like "Download browser X to view this page".
A third aspect is actually very helpful to developers - you can count on 100% of the APIs you intent to use being available on the system's web browser, creating in-app experiences significantly easier (and cheaper) to develop.
[+] [-] agust|3 years ago|reply
After a year long market study, the CMA has concluded that Apple's browser engine ban on iOS in anti-competitive and distort the browser market, as well as limit the capabilities of web apps on iOS and on the entire mobile eco-system. They note that it is obviously to their own benefit, as a weaker web on iOS results in a stronger exclusive and captive native app eco-system, which they can tax at will.
The CMA is now set to start a market investigation reference (MIR) which will give them the power to impose changes to Apple. The number one remedy considered is requiring Apple to stop banning competing engines on iOS.
Announcement for the MIR: https://www.gov.uk/cma-cases/mobile-browsers-and-cloud-gamin...
Final market study report: https://www.gov.uk/cma-cases/mobile-ecosystems-market-study
[+] [-] MCArth|3 years ago|reply
Hopefully this will force them to invest more resources into safari and webkit
[+] [-] tempodox|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] the_other|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] closedloop129|3 years ago|reply
Isn't this a good thing? Without this distortion, what is preventing the web from becoming fully dependent on the Chrome engine?
[+] [-] Aardwolf|3 years ago|reply
On iPhones, afaik, you can only get Safari, or other browsers that are just a thin wrapper around Safari.
That is a huge difference and I hope they know that.
[+] [-] boudin|3 years ago|reply
This is a similar situation on Android.
[+] [-] Gigachad|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rvz|3 years ago|reply
The harsh truth is that you need a properly executed competitor to both iOS and Android. Unfortunately from the open-source and free-software world, there are just too many failures or potentials never being 'realised'.
We saw Firefox OS being cheered all over the place here as an alternative to the mobile device duopoly and it turned out to be a failure due to little to no usage. The same thing with the promising Ubuntu OS and now again we have low usage with the plethora of Linux-based phones. So it seems that the market just does not care, and Mozilla and others are still unable to bring in something viable to compete against the big two.
It is not 'early days' anymore and it may even be almost too late, unless massive amounts of funding gets poured into an alternative. The same thing is happening with smartwatches with Apple again having a 5+ year lead. We've all waited for Mozilla, Servo and others to become useful and they have all underperformed.
[+] [-] nuker|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tgv|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mtomweb|3 years ago|reply
https://www.macrumors.com/2022/06/10/uk-to-target-apple-gami...
It’s not “may face investigation”, it’s the start of the process to force Apple to support third party browsers and web apps.
[+] [-] ccouzens|3 years ago|reply
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/cma-plans-market-investig...
The pdf from the original article doesn't work.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/mobile-ecosystems...
[+] [-] underdeserver|3 years ago|reply
From my experience using Firefox on Android, very few websites care about compatibility with it.
[+] [-] tgv|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ccouzens|3 years ago|reply
I get an inferior version of Facebook on mobile Firefox compared to mobile Chrome. What other sites have caused you problems?
[+] [-] makeitdouble|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TekMol|3 years ago|reply
On my Laptop, I get no YouTube ads. It seems uBlock Origin removes them.
On my iPad, I get YouTube ads in an unbearable frequency.
It seems there is no solution for this?
How is the situation on Android?
[+] [-] mttjj|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hank_z|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sys_64738|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway4good|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] codefeenix|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skc|3 years ago|reply
This is what happens when the tech press is cheered on for laughing off anyone that dares to compete with iOS and Android.
Yes, I'm still very bitter about the demise of WindowsPhone and PalmOS.
Had they been championed a little more the mobile OS landscape would have been much more vibrant and exciting.
[+] [-] giantrobot|3 years ago|reply
PalmOS was a painfully out of date design by the time it got stuck on phones. No amount of regulation was going to solve the clusterfuck of Palm and PalmSource. Nor was regulation going to make Cobalt actually ship and work as advertised.
Regulation also wasn't going to stop Microsoft from screwing up Windows Mobile. After the iPhone's release the WinMo 6.x development was an obvious dead end for licensees. Android was just a better response to iOS than WinMo. Microsoft then knifed the platform moving to 7 giving licensees even less reason to use it. Regulation wasn't going to make companies license a dead end platform.
An OS landscape isn't vibrant or exciting when established players just stop meaningful development or just have a shit vision. Apple showed the multitouch and a soft keyboard could be practical on a mobile device. Palm and Microsoft were stuck iterating a design from 1995. No regulation was going to fix their lack of imagination.
[+] [-] mrcartmeneses|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] talideon|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Terry_Roll|3 years ago|reply
When is a device with a general purpose cpu something that can be upgraded or modified with other software and when isnt it?
[+] [-] gernb|3 years ago|reply
no car company has that reach. no video game platform has that reach. hence they're not held to the same standard
[+] [-] numpad0|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mtomweb|3 years ago|reply
Mobile devices are an obvious target for competition because they are just so ubiquitous and two companies basically control the market.
[+] [-] throwaway4good|3 years ago|reply
Where we (Google or Google via a deal with Apple) give away a product, that has been extremely costly to build, for free, in return for you giving us a (de-facto) exclusive on profiling and data mining your online behaviour, so we can get an effective monopoly on brokering advertisement.
[+] [-] tomschwiha|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stjohnswarts|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ubermonkey|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] timmg|3 years ago|reply
Big difference.
[+] [-] tambourine_man|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway4good|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] native_samples|3 years ago|reply
In reality they are going to be treated together, because governments tend to reason in terms of countries and people not technical details. Apple/Android are both rich US tech firms who aren't going to leave the market regardless of how big the fines get, and in Android's case literally can't (because someone else could simply license it or use it and step in to replace Google). So it'll be like all other attempts at tech regulation, it'll just turn into cranking the handle on the cash cow to try and fill a part of the lockdown-created budget holes.
[+] [-] agust|3 years ago|reply
You should read the study, it's very insightful.
[+] [-] jeroenhd|3 years ago|reply
These regulatory bodies can and often do have an effect on large corporations if the punishment for ignoring them is set high enough.
[+] [-] fulafel|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seaman1921|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tjpnz|3 years ago|reply