They'd come crawling back to Apple faster than Apple would to them. Especially if Apple works with Microsoft and Google to do the same.
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Apple's Decision to Disable Web Apps Attracts Scrutiny in EU
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Seems like a good idea. Except, how would third-party apps get on your black market iPhone? I have an idea, how about side-loading .... buhahaha.
Unparalleled security 😂
CHINA hacked airdrop in 2019 and Apple did nothing until media found out recently.
Don’t let their marketing team fool you.
This is another disgusting move by Apple yet again, they haven’t stopped turning into 1990s Microsoft.
I’m on the verge of sacking iPhone off for good at this rate out of principle.
Sure pal
Don’t think you realise the EU don’t bully each other over the colour of messages. We don’t care.
We’ll buy a Samsung or pixel and be happy.
Apple know others will clean up.
Which is no choice at all.
In today's world, owning a cell phone is almost as mandatory as paying taxes. But if Apple and Google agree on something, what the customers need or want is irrelevant. There is no free market - The barriers to new entries are too high. You've got more choice in governments than you do with phones, and the switching costs are comparable.
Apple has been flagrantly abusing their duopoly for years. The consequences are well deserved, even if the details don't meet to everyone's preferences. If Apple had played fair with their customers, we'd all be supporting them now.
From the Very Stable Geniuses who brought you the cookie nag screen. One wonders how the EU regulators, with all their know-how and foresight, did not create iOS before Jobs' engineers did.
You know I always find this fascinating. Here's a company that wants to pride itself on privacy and limitation of tracking, with a userbase that loves to point out how important control over their own data is for them.
And here's a law that says companies, more or less, can only process your data if you give them your consent. What is said userbase's most common reaction to it? 'Having to consent to dodgy websites processing my data is so annoying. Stupid EU.'
Sorry, I should have said the companies running to the EU complaining about this (which was the point of a previous front page MR article) are alleging maliciousness. Apple has already given their technical reasons as to why this currently doesn’t work anymore for EU users in 17.4
It's guaranteed they wouldn't be "crawling back to Apple". Apple's market share in the EU will just drop like a rock and in a few years people will have generally replaced their apple products with the officially available products(just imagine all the companies that were using iphones, those would be bye bye).
But this decision will also affect Apple globally and their ability to compete in general(less volume, less cash). Also it would be a huge PR nightmare.
Microsoft and Google will just double down their efforts in the EU, they are not idiots.
This is what I don't understand. So why do you keep buying iPhones? It's no secret how iPhones work. And if someone wants side-loading, etc... then buy Android.
If what Apple did was so bad, then people would stop buying them and developers would stop making apps. You yourself say no one cares about blue bubbles and a Samsung or Pixel is fine. That's the real way to make Apple change - stop using them.
The DMA isn't about what's best for consumers. It's the EU hating on US companies, and trying to favor a few EU companies like Spotify.
You are talking about an irrelevant fraction of their current volume.
Europeans in general are not that huge Apple fans that they would pay considerably inflated prices for products without official warranty and regional support.
Privacy is always a trade-off. Nothing you do online is ever really private. The question is the right balance between preventing collection of data and having a sane user experience. The cookie nag screen, which most people just click away from anyway without carefully selecting the most stringent protections two screens into a dialog box, definitely tilts toward an awful user experience for the purpose of minimal data protection. It's one of those things where you can tell a group of regulators with very little knowledge of how tech works practically devised a system that ended up doing very little apart from wrecking people's experience of the web. I appreciate your cut-and-paste defense of the regulation, though. Do you work for an EU agency, by any chance?
It went farther they were informed of the issue in 2019 and did nothing until the media picked up on it.
Please Tim, closed down iOS for EU, and the whole nightmare will be over!
I do not. Do you work for a tech or ad company?
My response to you would be that the 'awful' user experience isn't inherent in complying with the regulation. The 'nag screen,' as you call it, could be very straightforward and user friendly. It doesn't even need to be there at all.
What you're falling for is malicious compliance that is directed against users. It's companies giving you an awful user experience to frustrate you into giving up your data and you blaming the government for it.
You're right that the cookie consent form *could* be user friendly, but why would it be? Obviously the sites that are required to comply with the regulation (which, btw, are always going to be the sites that are not shady--shady sites don't have cookie nag screens) were always going to stack the deck to make it as difficult as possible for users to select the privacy-protection options. And if there were ever a new regulation to try to fix that, the advertisers would get around it.
The disagreement we're having is that you understand the regulation from the perspective of hypotheticals of what the regulation could be--in a very abstract and academic way. No doubt the EU honchos who wrote the regulation had the same aloof understanding, which is why the regulation has panned out as it has, i.e., a nuisance that the vast bulk of people neither understand nor care enough about to take the time to activate the privacy protections it was designed to encourage in the first place.
All of which is somewhat irrelevant to the present story btw, as Apple doing this is not about privacy protections. If anything, loosening Apple's grip on its own ecosystem will endanger privacy. Odd that you're silent about that.
The cookie nag popup is easily bypassed with the best privacy choices selected by just using Firefox.
Block cookie banners on Firefox | Firefox Help
To address frustrations caused by cookie banners on websites, Firefox version 120 introduces a cookie banner blocker. Learn how it works.
support.mozilla.org
You can reduce cookie banners in some browsers (like Firefox, which has a market penetration of what? 3 percent now?) if you burrow into the settings. You can also install adblockers like ublock origin that bypass those annoying reminders of EU regulator overreach *if you have the know-how*. Most people do not. I would wager that most people who run adblockers probably aren't aware that one potential feature is blocking the cookie nag screen--or how to go about activating that feature. It's the same reason the cookie consent nag regulation is a bad idea in the first place: its effectiveness presupposes an amount of knowledge and acumen regarding the web that most people simply do not have.The cookie nag popup is easily bypassed with the best privacy choices selected by just using Firefox.
Block cookie banners on Firefox | Firefox Help
To address frustrations caused by cookie banners on websites, Firefox version 120 introduces a cookie banner blocker. Learn how it works.
Cookie banners are not more annoying than agreeing to countless pop ups every time I upgrade my fleet of Apple devices because of changed terms of service, amazing tipps about new features, and occasionally signing in to iCloud ... again.
Also, iOS is not the privacy el dorado some think it is. Ever heard about app tracking, which is by default turned on in iOS? Apple will hobble ad tracking in Safari, where they can't profit from it, but keep it on by default, when it suits them. Yes, it's still better than using an operating system that was designed by an ad company.
Microsoft and Google stand to benefit from a more open iOS. Why would they join Apple in backing out of a huge and lucrative market in an attempt to prevent something they want to see happen?
You're seriously comparing the nuisance-level of a popup on a monthly iOS software update to a popup on every non-shady website you encounter as you browse the web? Ok.
No, iOS is not perfect when it comes to privacy. It is, however, better than the competitors (like where is Android's setting to turn off cross-app tracking? hmmmm). As I noted earlier, nothing online or with digital technology is perfect when it comes to privacy. The second you get a smartphone or log onto the Internet, you are making trade-offs with your privacy. Just like every time you walk outside your apartment/house into the open air.
It's not so bad, because I usually visit the same websites over and over. Most ad-supported sites will save your preference for your next visit. I almost don't notice the cookie banners anymore.
I've wished for years that the EU would just standardize their own government systems on Linux, and work to make it more user friendly. The cost of that would likely be much less than trying to sue and regulate other companies, and providing an actual competitive product without the hidden agendas would benefit everyone. Malicious compliance is a useless tool against a better product.
Now I'm not saying that the EU would magically have better programers than Apple/Google/Microsoft. But having different objectives would make all the difference. Big corporations don't want a free market. They want captive markets. That is why so much consumer hostile design exists. When Apple was trying to be the good guy, they almost went out of business.
Now I'm not saying that the EU would magically have better programers than Apple/Google/Microsoft. But having different objectives would make all the difference. Big corporations don't want a free market. They want captive markets. That is why so much consumer hostile design exists. When Apple was trying to be the good guy, they almost went out of business.