this post was submitted on 21 Feb 2024
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The terms would make something like F-Droid impossible. The fundamental problem is that Apple believes it is owed a fee when people distribute apps for the iPhone, but no legal mechanism entitles them to such a fee; I'm fairly sure it's possible to make an iPhone app without copying any of Apple's copyrighted code or using any of their patents.
The only mechanism that allows them to collect one is their technical control over the platform, and that's what the DMA was intended to remove.
I know this is going to be a hot take especially on the lemmyverse, but that's not the fundamental problem.
The issue in question is: should a company that provides a product, one whose value proposition is focused on a cohesive ecosystem and experience, be forced to break down their walled garden to let people create a new app store or install apps in a way that's outside that companies vision for their own product.
My personal opinion is that it's a dumb fight for apple to take, because 99.9% of their users will never deviate from their app store. But I understand why they are fighting it. I'd fight it too. Huge companies that have made a fortune benefiting from the apple ecosystem have gotten so big they want to take even more and forgot how much value apples environment and user based provides them.
Yes. Because it's too big and too popular to be making niche arguments like this. Its customer base is vast and diverse, nearly as diverse as the population of the planet. It's absurd to suggest that every single one of those customers, or even 80% of them expect everything they do on the device to be taxed by Apple. It's their device, not Apple's.
The reason they should be forced to do this is that no one will force users to use this option. They can make it slightly out of way, just like how Android makes you explicitly allow installing apps from anywhere but the Play Store if you want to do that. And just like on Android, most users won't touch that option. Those that want it would. Just like any other general computing device on the planet.
Apple is openly acting like a government and claims it has the rights to tax anything that goes on in its realm. But it sure as fuck isn't a democratic government. About fucking time an actual government took it down a peg. Or a hundred.
Edit: FWIW, I'm definitely not singling out Apple here. All big tech companies are acting like governments and they all need to be punished for it. Or they should become actual democracies. That would be nice.
(I don't think that could ever work, not in my lifetime at least)