Posted by thm 9/11/2025
It's not technology that's being blocked here, it's uncompetitive commercialisation that is (at least in the EU)
But honestly, I do not believe GDPR is the reason here. Apple is also very privacy focused.
GDPR does grant it rights to EU citizens everywhere in the world but also other nation citizens in EU. I personally like GDPR a lot but I understand that people are complaining about this part
I’m an Apple user since mac OS8 and I’m fully immersed in the apple ecosystem system. But my next phone will be an android.
I’m sorry, but it turns out regulation with punitively high fines attached to it creates massive regulatory risk for public companies that have a duty to shareholders to take them extremely seriously, and document everything along the way. Otherwise they don’t just get in trouble with regulators, but end up in endless litigation with shareholders.
How you can believe creating an extremely nuanced set of holes, that if stepped in, results in billions of fines won’t delay new launches (and innovation ultimately) in the EU is just astonishing to me. The fun part is all the traps that open due to the combination of different regs interacting and new interpretations due to actual court cases.
Please don’t turn this into another “malicious compliance evil-corporate conspiracy” meme like GDPR is on this site. It doesn’t cultivate intellectual curiosity, just flame wars, and is making me want to not hang out here anymore.
Two things can be true: big fines risk slow launches, and companies also use that friction to shape narratives and sequence rollouts.
> regulation with punitively high fines attached to it creates massive regulatory risk for public companies that have a duty to shareholders to take them extremely seriously
There were multiple cases where this didn't stop Apple from keeping anti-steering rules long enough to get a €1.8B fine (music streaming), eating €50M in Dutch penalties over dating-app payments, delaying Apple Intelligence/Phone Mirroring in the EU citing the DMA, and then getting fined again under the DMA for App Store steering.
There are strict rules in China as well. Apple just plays a different game there. In China it's rapid, quiet compliance with content/data controls. In the EU, the DMA forces structural changes that touch Apple's model, you see legal fights, staged rollouts, and public messaging (e.g., delaying Apple Intelligence/Phone Mirroring).
If Apple were doing that, it would be telling us why it wasn't supporting this feature in the EU, putting anti-DMA ads out, open letters, etc. But it's not. It's clearly doing the opposite and trying to stay out of the narrative.
And all of the fines you point to are exactly why Apple is now exceedingly cautious. The fines are working. They've changed Apple's behavior because they're an established proven risk now.
You contrast China with the EU and claim Apple is playing a different game, but it's not. The types of regulations are what's different. Chinese regulations have mainly been about requiring Apple to block certain features or content, which is easy, and Apple complies. The EU is demanding Apple build a lot of extra stuff to enable third-party interop or else not release a feature at all... and Apple is complying by not releasing features because the interop is hard and takes much longer and delays features for the rest of the world and might not be worth the effort at all.
Apple itself publicly tied EU delays to the DMA ("regulatory uncertainties") when it postponed Apple Intelligence/Phone Mirroring/SharePlay in the EU.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/a...
> And all of the fines you point to are exactly why Apple is now exceedingly cautious. The fines are working. They've changed Apple's behavior because they're an established proven risk now.
After the €1.8B music-streaming fine, the Commission still found Apple in breach of DMA anti-steering in 2025 (additional penalties), and Dutch courts upheld ACM's earlier finding in the dating-apps case. That looks like an ongoing contest, not just "we complied and moved on.". So no, not really.
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_25_...
> Chinese regulations have mainly been about requiring Apple to block certain features or content, which is easy, and Apple complies.
Apple doesn't only "block stuff" in China. It made major engineering/process changes (moved Chinese iCloud keys to a state-affiliated host) and shipped region-specific feature behaviour quickly (AirDrop "Everyone for 10 minutes").
https://www.reuters.com/article/technology/apple-moves-to-st...
https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/09/apple-limits-airdrop-every...
I never said Apple "complied and moved on". I said they're being cautious. Nothing is black and white. I honestly don't know what you're arguing. That because they've been fined in the past... they ought to release the translation feature and get fined again?
And I said Chinese regulations have been mainly about blocking features. I didn't say exclusively. But the overall asks from the EU and China have been very different qualitatively. Adding a timer to a feature is orders of magnitude easier than designing and building a performant third-party real-time API that needs to be supported for presumably decades to come.
You are accusing me of a grand narrative, so let's quote it: "Two things can be true: big fines risk slow launches, and companies also use that friction to shape narratives and sequence rollouts."
That was the "grand narrative": that both things can be true. That nothing is black and white...
Before replying, please first read, and if you still insist on writing something, talk about facts, not vibes.
So far I'm the one who has provided sources.
They don’t care about Apple’s global business, only Apple inside of China.
Agreed. No matter which side of the issue one is on, the fact you and everyone else who explains the incentive structure is getting downvoted to hell and receiving eloquent responses like "Bull fucking shit dude" is really pathetic.
Is HN really just another emotionalist monoculture echo chamber now? We're downvoting everything we disagree with whether it's true or not? Count me out.
This is the company that is trying to subvert the DMA with Core technology fees that they're not entitled to, and notarization which allows them to retain the gatekeeping power that they're not entitled to. That's the same company that attempted to maliciously comply with a US court order which forced them to allow developers to provide external payment options by instituting a new imaginary 27% fee on external payments, making alternative non-viable.
This is the same company whose internal memos filed in court document their malicious compliance strategies.
> In Slack communications dated November 16, 2021, the Apple employees crafting the warning screen for Project Michigan discussed how best to frame its language. Mr. Onak suggested the warning screen should include the language: “By continuing on the web, you will leave the app and be taken to an external website” because “‘external website’ sounds scary, so execs will love it.” From Mr. Onak’s perspective, of the “execs” on the project, Mr. Schiller was at the top. One employee further wrote, “to make your version even worse you could add the developer name rather than the app name.” To that, another responded “ooh - keep going.”
> [...] The designers’ discussions contextualize their use of the word “scary” to indicate its ordinary meaning and, most applicable here, indicate the goal of deterring users as much as possible from completing a linked-out transaction. Apple repeatedly acted to maintain its revenues and stifle competition. This was no exception. His attempts to reframe the obvious meaning of these communications do not persuade. All of this was hidden from the Court and not revealed in the May 2024 evidentiary hearing.
Apple are grand masters of malicious compliance. Attempting to portray this fact as a "meme conspiracy" is intellectually dishonest bordering on gaslighting, and weaponizing your paper thin veil of "intellectual curiosity" to attack this criticism makes me not want to participate. But I will continue, precisely because of people like you who try to use an aura of intellectually superior and rational "intellectual curiosity" to push false narratives.
> In its notice of compliance and at the May 2024 hearing, Apple claimed that restrictions on link placement protect against “security risks.” Again, Apple attempted to mislead. Mr. Schiller asserted that having an external link appear on the same page as IAP can increase the risk of a user’s exposure to fraudulent conduct. [...] Given the lack of any document identifying this alleged concern, the Court finds these justifications pretextual; said differently, the proffered rationales are nothing more than after-the-fact litigation posturing or outright misrepresentations to the Court.
> At the end of the day, Apple’s internal documents reflect the underlying motivation to stifle competition by cabining developers’ ability to attract users to alternate payment methods: “How much can we limit what devs do with the text and links?
> In other words, to stifle competition, Apple was modeling the tipping point where external links would cease to be advantageous for developers due to friction in the purchase flow
> Apple willfully chose not to comply with this Court’s Injunction. It did so with the express intent to create new anticompetitive barriers which would, by design and in effect, maintain a valued revenue stream; a revenue stream previously found to be anticompetitive. That it thought this Court would tolerate such insubordination was a gross miscalculation. As always, the cover- up made it worse. For this Court, there is no second bite at the apple.
[1] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.36...
Although the US has the lead on that.
Not only is this disingenuous but also incredibly stupid. They are using their users just like parents would in a divorce to get leverage. As if the kids had anything to do with the parents' issues and had enough power to make a difference.
Even if their customers were to loudly complain, the regulations do not apply to just Apple, so they are asking for preferential treatment in return. Other companies have been able to offer similar features to their customers while complying with the regulations just fine, why can't Apple do it?
The good thing is that they make it easy to not buy and not recommend their devices to anyone in the EU, no matter how good their technology gets. Their features were already often requiring a new device purchase (even when there was no technological need) but now they are also locking stuff because of politics.