I hope this will make Apple finally comply with EU law and allow app side loading on iOS. Real side loading, not the joke they implemented since iOS 17.

Isn't it just in the name of competition, i.e. alternative app stores? Or is sideloading an explicit goal of the EU's efforts?

> They are adept at malicious compliance.

They just got fined 500 millions for failure to comply so I'm not sure adept is the adjective I would use.

Perhaps "compliance" is the wrong term, but surely such a tiny fine will do little to convince them to comply.

How much additional profit have they made based on their malicious compliance? I bet it dwarfs this fine.

That is not so clear. Appstore revenue is ~ $100 billion/y, but Apple makes less than 30% from that.

So the question is: Would more convincing compliance have cost Apple more than single digit percentage decreases in Appstore sales? Comparing the F-Droid vs Playstore situation, this seems unlikely to me.

Apple’s take is 30%, but they have expenses that have to be covered by that. The profit if any would be much less than $30bn.

Whether it's adept or not depends on what would have happened if they actually complied.

Sure, a half a billion fine sounds like a lot, but if you don't have another number to compare against, you can't tell if it was clever or not.

500 million is like half a days revenue.

The actual fines for this moving forward are up to 10% of a companies global revenue. The EU made a big point to say that this is the first time they are issuing those fines and as a result they are smaller than they otherwise would be especially in the case of repeat offenders.

The EU should instead set targets.

Ie. "More than half of users have installed at least one app from a non-apple affiliated store by Jan 2026 or you shall pay a fine of $10 per month per iPhone in use in the EU".

That’s a terrible idea. How would they have any control over that. I think you are way overestimating the amount of iOS users that want to use software from outside the App Store.

That really depends on the store. If Value made a Steam store, or Nintendo made a Nintendo store with Nintendo exclusives I'd expect millions of installs.

Maybe but that is also not within Apple's control.

If 3rd party stores didn't charge the Apple tax, I think you'd find plenty of apps moving to other stores, and within a matter of weeks more than half of users would have used a 3rd party store.

That’s my worst nightmare. On my iPhone I want the equivalent of Spotify, not Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, Max, etc.

I want the equivalent of a shops in the real world. One shop doesn't carry everything. Even Spotify doesn't carry everything. For one, Apple doesn't allow adult content apps. Steam does. I'm sure there's a market for adult games on iPhone as Steam's success there would seem to suggest. I don't think Apple should be required to sell adult games but I also don't think they should get to dictate that people can't use their phones for adult games. So, more stores would great.

It's a bit of a false comparison, since you wouldn't have to pay monthly subscriptions to others stores as you have to for streaming services.

Yeah but I would have to deal with multiple app stores of varying security, quality control, resource usage, and other annoyances. No thanks.

Agreed, the only realistic way they could hit such a target is to shut down their own app store...

> Apple faces a €500 million fine for breaching the regulation’s rules for app stores, while Meta drew a penalty of €200 million for its "pay or consent" advertising model,

> The procedural fines fall short of the two giant penalties issued by the EU executive under its antitrust laws last year: €1.8 billion to Apple for abusing its dominant position while distributing music streaming apps, and €797 million to Meta for pushing its classified ads service on social media users.

Really honest questions: are those fines actually paid, in practice ? Is there a way for a citizen to know ? (As in, do they appear in the public budget of the UE ?) Or are they somehow deducted from subsidies, added to taxes, etc... ?

I know who collects taxes in France ("Le Tresor Public"). I don't know of a EU version of a treasury. Is it collected by one of the member states (Ireland, I would guess ?)

> Fines imposed on undertakings found in breach of EU antitrust rules are paid into the general EU budget. This money is not earmarked for particular expenses, but Member States' contributions to the EU budget for the following year are reduced accordingly. The fines therefore help to finance the EU and reduce the burden for taxpayers.

This quote is re: anti-trust, but likely generalizes.

https://competition-policy.ec.europa.eu/index/fines_en#:~:te...

Please, enlighten me how exactly is the EU not democratic.

I am very sure you have excellent arguments to support this claim.

We can't elect an official from one day to another to reverse and destroy decades of work, I guess that makes us non democratic.

This is a recurring Russian propaganda point, now amplified by the new US Administration. I am curious about the basis for this.

Could you explain further from your perspective how you came up with this conclusion?

Those pesky Russians and common sense of using #964B00 in your navbar then getting hit for 500 million is stupid.

It doesn't strike you odd that these claims pop up out of the blue when certain subjects are brought up?

The answer could simply be: "oh it's just ignorance at play, and some people just repeat what they heard and made them feel good because it helped them cope/made them resentful/.."

100% of the time I had these engagements, these folks didn't even know what the EU was. Donald Trump is a great example of this, he has no clue what the EU is, nor how it came to be lmao

> "pay or consent" advertising model,

Wait, so the EU has made it illegal to sell a paid service while also offering an alternative where the user pays via seeing ads?

It's not the ads you are consenting to, its the personal data collection and targeting.

You could have non-personalized, or contextual ads. But those are much less effective.

No, the EU has made it illegal to extort payment before allowing people to opt-out of data collection or profiling.

Extortion is a stretch. Nobody is being forced to use these services.

Tell that to the embedded Facebook trackers ubiquitous throughout the web

Except for newspapers

Under the GDPR, it’s illegal to treat PII like currency. You can’t gate a service behind PII consent.

> somehow deducted from subsidies

Do you think the EU subsidizes Meta/Apple.

No but the EU does subsidize Tesla.

No. The EU subsidizes electric vehicles. Not the same thing.

> while Meta drew a penalty of €200 million for its "pay or consent" advertising model, which requires that European Union users pay to access ad-free versions of Facebook and Instagram

Wait, isn't pretty much all web content is like this nowadays? You have to buy youtube premium to avoid ads, how is it different?

YouTube allows you to disable personalized ads.

https://www.youtube.com/intl/en_us/howyoutubeworks/user-sett...

Pay or have your information harvested and sold. Its extortion.

You’re missing a third option there, which makes it not extortion.

If the third way is "don't use the product" facebook have that covered too... they will harvest and sell your personal information.

I may be misreading it, but I believe the third option the EU is expects from Meta is non-targeted advertising.

It’s not about being shown ads, it’s about collecting (and sharing to third parties) private information that goes beyond the technically required amount to use the service. GDPR says companies need to get my consent in order to do that, that I am free to not give this consent and that a service can’t not be provided to me just because I don’t give this consent. Facebook and a bunch of other companies said “aha! We’ll just create a paid alternative!” but this doesn’t comply with the law. It just took a while to take this through the courts but if you read the law it’s clear they just stalled for time on this one.

Thanks for clarifying, it was confusing to figure that out from the article

> You have to buy youtube premium to avoid ads

Or you can block the ads in the browser for free. In this case, you have to consent being tracked (or pay) or otherwise the page will not display.

Duplicate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43770337

The EU Comission press release: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_25_...

It’s funny to see a “share this page on Facebook” option at the bottom of the press release.

At least they seem to have their own system in place for displaying those share buttons, as there are no requests to 3rd party domains on page load, everything loads from *europa.eu. Could have been worse :)

EU comission has been fined for breaching GDPR they designed themselves

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/first-eu-court-fines-eu...

Which shows that they're not discriminating. TikTok is missing, though.

It shouldn't be funny, social media isn't doing the world any favor, they gotta behave

“Not funny haha, funny weird”

Is this a fine the companies can appeal, or is this a final decision?

They can appeal.

They will appeal to Court so that they win another 2 years.

Because the fine is exactly about giving people a more fair chance to vote with their wallets.

This is from the Yahoo article:

"The EU competition watchdog said Apple must remove technical and commercial restrictions that prevent app developers from steering users to cheaper deals outside the App Store."

You can buy an android or huawei phone. Just because the ecosystem you like to use doesn't have certain features doesn't make it a monopoly.

Setting aside that this is looking at the wrong side of the market like often happens in these discussions, what do you as a consumer do when Android or Huawei do something else that's a deal breaker for you?

But this is exactly the argument against forcing Apple to change. The reason I use iOS is because of the App Store. If meta create a meta store for Facebook and Instagram, and pull it from the App Store, then the platform that I use for that feature is no longer viable for me, and neither is the competing platform. Right now you have a choice, as do I - an open ecosystem on android or a closed ecosystem on iOS. By forcing iOS to open up, people who actively choose the closed ecosystem for guaranteed compatibility, tighter integrations and a less customisable ux are removed of their option.

To use the sandbox analogy, there are two sandboxes. A lets you bring your own toys, B only lets you choose from the toys they provide. I choose to go to B because of the toys they provide and because I don’t want to deal with the toys other people bring. People from A like the look of my sandbox so the rules get changed, and now there’s two sandboxes with the same rules, you have two choices and my preference is gone.

Stop using them. What do you do if every car manufacturer does something that's a "deal breaker"? Don't make a deal with them by not buying a car.

> What do you do if every car manufacturer does something that's a "deal breaker"

Sane societies recognize the problem and regulate it out of existence.

You can leave the market if you dont like the rules of the market.

Consumers should have greater and greater access to markets with more favorable conditions. It’s not acceptable to have consumer hostile markets in many respects e.g. healthcare. It would behoove us as consumers to demand access to markets as mundane as cellular phones. Accepting market manipulation by oligopolistic companies to reduce choice and walking away from phone ownership altogether seems counter productive for everyone.

Or I can buy an iPhone and Apple doesn’t break the law :)

Apple can also exit the EU market if they don't want to comply with the law.

Just because the regulation doesn't suit its business model doesn't make it mandatory to be present in a given market.

Switching from one duopoly to another isn't choice.

The irony is that smaller American companies stand the most to benefit from EU DMA, including startups. Stripe could offer deeper payment integration without the Apple cut. You could start an indie game store. And Garmin can make better sport watches with better integration.

The first beneficiary is likely to be Epic, since this is basically what they were asking for in the Fortnite lawsuit.

Literally every single company that transacts with consumers through digital purchases currently subject to Apple/Google tax is a beneficiary. If you believe in the power of the free market then lower fees for them will mean lower prices for us.

Because in a case of monopoly, the people can not vote with their wallet.

Except the smartphone market isn't a monopoly.

20 years ago Europe had a thriving phone industry. Now it's just gone, and they want to blame everyone else for this, and fail to reflect on why it happened.

Except this has nothing to do with some monopoly on the smartphone market, but with Apple not allowing application developers to enable their users to vote with their wallets on payment methods. From the press release:

> Under the DMA, app developers distributing their apps via Apple's App Store should be able to inform customers, free of charge, of alternative offers outside the App Store, steer them to those offers and allow them to make purchases. > > The Commission found that Apple fails to comply with this obligation. Due to a number of restrictions imposed by Apple, app developers cannot fully benefit from the advantages of alternative distribution channels outside the App Store. Similarly, consumers cannot fully benefit from alternative and cheaper offers as Apple prevents app developers from directly informing consumers of such offers. The company has failed to demonstrate that these restrictions are objectively necessary and proportionate.

This has nothing to do with smartphones specifically, it applies equally well to anything in the AppStore ecosystem.

This is like arguing McDonalds has a monopoly over food sold in McDonalds outlets, when you have a choice to not go into McDonalds.

This is:

1. Not about any monopoly (in fact the word "monopoly" does not appear in the press release at all).

2. Nothing like McDonalds, whose business model is completely different from an app store's.

3. Not about Apple can do to consumers who aren't in the Apple ecosystem but about what it can do to developers who wish to sell their applications and services for Apple devices.

If you really insist on making an analogy that involves McDonalds: that's like arguing that McDonalds should not be allowed to prevent Coca-Cola from telling Coca-Cola customers that they can buy Coca-Cola in places other than McDonalds. Which, yeah, they're not allowed to.

> If you really insist on making an analogy that involves McDonalds: that's like arguing that McDonalds should not be allowed to prevent Coca-Cola from telling Coca-Cola customers that they can buy Coca-Cola in places other than McDonalds. Which, yeah, they're not allowed to.

Neither the App Stores or McDonalds have any control over what you do outside of them. That's your problem, individually and collectively.

Except Apple tried to exert control over that, which is exactly what they got fined for, because it's illegal.

They did the equivalent of saying to Coca Cola if you discover a customer via the App Store then we get a cut of it, which is a very normal and common arrangement, even if disagreeable.

No, they did the equivalent of saying to Coca-Cola if you discover a customer via the App Store then you cannot tell them they can buy Coca-Cola from outside the App Store, too, a decidedly anti-competitive practice that also happens to be illegal in just about every European country, even without EU intervention.

You cannot tell them _within the app_.

You absolutely can tell the customer via your website or any other means you use to communicate with them.

Do you expect Amazon marketplace sellers to be able to link to their items being on ebay or shopify from the actual Amazon website?

> Do you expect Amazon marketplace sellers to be able to link to their items being on ebay or shopify from the actual Amazon website?

From the Amazon website? No. From the products they're selling? Yes, absolutely, and lots of them do, I get one of those business cards with "Find us on Amazon/Ebay/Shopify/whatever" in the box with almost every purchase.

Same with apps. I obviously don't expect them to link to items from other stores from their App Store description pages. But from their application? Yes, I totally expect that.

That's how marketplaces everywhere work, including IRL. Go to any farmer's market and most sellers will give you a business card with their website or phone number so you can also order from them directly, or from their Amazon/Shopify/whatever page.

Edit: not to mention that this is 2025, the distinction between "within the app" and "via your website" is pretty meaningless in a bunch of cases.

> From the Amazon website? No.

Why not?

A major detail you are ignoring here is Apple are the merchant of sale for everything via the App Store (Google at least were not for the Play Store at launch, I do not know if this has changed) so your comparisons do not make sense. The native app universe on iOS is closest to being an Apple run Costco.

I would be very surprised if a fulfilled by Amazon order for a third party seller contained any extra promo materials in the box for similar reasons.

> not to mention that this is 2025, the distinction between "within the app" and "via your website" is pretty meaningless in a bunch of cases.

To you. Not to your end users, and most definitely not to the platform owners.

Nope. That's a lie. You're a liar. They didn't start out like that all, and to pretend otherwise is lying.

Yeah, keep slinging the insults.

You are perfectly free to have a website where you list your prices at one price point, and then have them different in the app because of the 30% cut, and that's very normal practice, even if everyone does complain about it.

Btw Google do exactly the same thing.

> [the App Stores does not] any control over what you do outside of them

Well, we are talking about Apple's App Store, not just an App Store, and in that case, it's Apple. So, Apple wants to exert control over what you as an app developer do outside of the App Store. That's the problem. The fact that you think that's not happening means you know it's wrong.

No, it's within the App that is distributed on the App Store.

Plenty of companies will charge you different prices for things based on whether you get them via the App Store or their website.

The whole point of the DMA is clarifying that from the point of view of the European Union, operating a digital market on a platform is not actually like going to a McDonalds.

There is no argument to be made by analogy here. The DMA always was clear regarding what constitutes a digital market and what the obligations of the companies operating them would be. If Apple is unhappy about that, they are free to stop operating the App Store in the EU.

The EU would have a lot more sympathy for this if there were any non trivial digital markets that originated in the EU, with the closest being Spotify, which they somehow claim is not a gatekeeper in the music industry.

They aren't being a decent regulatory body on this one, given they have not reflected on why they are in this position, nor are they being fair with applying their rules. (The same comment can be made about the ludicrous variation in applying the GDPR).

> The EU would have a lot more sympathy for this if there were any non trivial digital markets that originated in the EU

Why should that be a prerequisite?

The EU is sovereign. They are free to do whatever they want with their law. Let's not forget we are talking about the second consumer market in the world. There will be a lot more space for homegrown solutions or companies ready to comply if the foreign companies currently profiting decide to leave.

> There will be a lot more space for homegrown solutions or companies ready to comply if the foreign companies currently profiting decide to leave.

The core of what I'm trying to communicate is this is backwards.

If you took the Europeans out of Apple and Google they'd never have been able to build the iPhone or Android, or their associated stores. (And you could say this about other regions where the staff came from too). Why did those Europeans that helped the US leave the EU to do so? Because the companies in the US rewarded them as they recognized the explosive potential as the market developed.

The underlying problem is EU regulation is shortsighted, and always fighting the previous battle when it's been lost. They had every opportunity to lead this from the start. I namedropped GetJar earlier, but there was Jamster/Jamba and various services which the phone companies would subcontract to to run their own store fronts. I know of several aborted Android app stores and subscription services from the 2010 era, including those from Switzerland, Belgium and a certain large French company, and there are almost certainly more.

The time to address this was 15 years ago. Now their only viable path forward is to effectively fork Android and encourage adoption of their fork, much as the Chinese have. Their problem is they have to leave things like WhatsApp available, or their citizens will go nuts, and they will resist rewarding anyone involved with the technical side of the work, so it won't happen. They just want to punish the americans for having had the foresight that led to their success.

As an example, just look at how the europeans have failed to come up with something equivalent to WhatsApp, Signal or even Telegram. The closest is matrix and element, but again without the associated rewards for working on them they just aren't going to get up to the standards people expect, and so they languish with absolute idealists and those forced to use them.

> Their problem is they have to leave things like WhatsApp available, or their citizens will go nuts

WhatsApp would be displaced in a matter of days if not hours if made unavailable. You are far overestimating the amount of disruption a closure would provoke.

> They just want to punish the americans for having had the foresight that led to their success.

This is not about punishment. The DMA is about setting ground rules for a level playing field in the digital market space. It is at its heart a law about competition.

Europe wants the American companies to stop abusing their dominant positions and the closed markets they built. This is a prerequisite to a competitive market as it's basically impossible to foster competition when a few players have spent a decade entrenching themselves and building barriers to entry.

Thankfully, there are no rules which say American companies should reap unlimited benefits from their market manipulations and the overall laissez-faire attitude of the American regulator.

> As an example, just look at how the europeans have failed to come up with something equivalent to WhatsApp, Signal or even Telegram.

All of them have ready to use Asian competitors which would be more than happy to work with European regulators if American companies won't.

This is a HUGELY popular position the EU is taking WTF are you taking about?

It's admittedly popular with a certain demographic of would be app developers that either think the fees are what is stopping them being successful (they're not, although admittedly they are anachronistically high at this point) or they want to scam people.

There's no evidence that it is popular beyond that, especially among people that choose to use iOS.

This metaphor doesn't quite work because McDonalds aren't a marketplace. But the closest I can think of is if McDonalds sold the best hamburger boxes that people want to use at home, but then added a mechanism that only lets you put a burger in that box if whoever made that burger bribed MacDonalds, regardless of what's good for you as the burger consumer.

McDonalds are not responsible for what people do outside of McDonalds. If the entire potential customerbase decides to show up at McDonalds and exclusively eat there for five years bankrupting everyone else and McDonalds had behaved legally throughout then how are they the problem?

As I mentioned elsewhere, just look at the idiotic way Europe embraced WhatsApp. They genuinely believed it was free, and a huge proportion of users still don't understand it's attached to Meta and Facebook. They are so susceptible to product dumping by tech companies because they are astoundingly cheap and short sighted, and they will not pay for an alternative when the "free" version exists.

Except that there are hundreds of other food options while there are only two realistic options for smartphones, neither of which is cooking at home. The tight control has benefits - Apple’s App Store is much safer than letting your parents install stuff they find on the internet - but there’s a real downside which needs regulation to balance.

So we want to punish people that choose that option?

Europe could easily have had a homegrown alternative to the Play Store on Android. In fact at one time it had several, only the users had no interest at all, and this was before Google went through their phase of locking things down more.

The vision for what became the Play Store was born from ex GetJar, and I was told by several Googlers at the time that they were amazed by the lack of serious competing stores that people were running. Many threatened to do so (including my employer) but it was, from the business side, pure bluffing.

In China the android market does not rely on the Play Store, so we have definite proof it can be done.

> Europe could easily have had a homegrown alternative to the Play Store on Android. In fact at one time it had several, only the users had no interest at all, and this was before Google went through their phase of locking things down more.

So why should users not have the option anymore because years ago the existing options were worse than Google's?

Should you be forbidden to buy an iPhone because you used until Androids until now and passed on iPhones?

The problem is European users are too cheap, and European regulators too short sighted. It makes them hilariously prone to product dumping, where WhatsApp is "free" of course, except it isn't. They then mass adopt the "free" option and act surprised pikachu when it's not actually free.

What you are advocating is forcing a market option to change what it is, when a critical mass of their customers have chosen it precisely because of what it is.

> The problem is European users are too cheap, and European regulators too short sighted.

This seems to be a common issue for all countries, the US included.

(See the Chrome spin-off talks currently taking place.)

> What you are advocating is forcing a market option to change what it is, when a critical mass of their customers have chosen it precisely because of what it is.

Incorrect, users have chosen it for what it precisely was. After a certain size that choice does not exist anymore and the option is also very different compared to the initial choice (between the different app stores available at the time) made by users.

You're also mistaken in thinking that the hardware should automatically imply a specific software. This is not the case and we're going to slowly move to a place where the hardware is independent of the software and vice-versa for smartphones.

> This seems to be a common issue for all countries, the US included.

The US is much more resistant to it, which is a major factor in iOS share being higher and WhatsApp being an almost complete non event.

Similarly those same users bought into the iOS option entirely because of the better privacy enabled by not being "free" in the price sense. In a very real sense Apple are the regulators of their platform in that they define and execute the policies. People buy into it because they like that aspect of things, and prefer the Apple regulations to those created by their governments. The EU want to override the regulations of the platform, except being short sighted they don't appreciate the effects of their suggestions, and so they're being played particularly by Meta.

> This is not the case and we're going to slowly move to a place where the hardware is independent of the software and vice-versa for smartphones.

People have been saying this from the start, but if anything it's now diverging faster than before. If you launch a service today and have no native app presence you will not be regarded as credible in the marketplace.

> The US is much more resistant to it, which is a major factor in iOS share being higher and WhatsApp being an almost complete non event.

iOS has a larger market share in the US because iPhones are a status symbol in America whereas Europeans couldn't care less.

Which in turn makes iMessages market share larger in the US than in Europe.

iPhone market share is also pretty stagnant since 2023 in the US and way down worldwide since then.

If anything, I would consider the US WhatsApp user base numbers (~64M users) to be much more impressive than the iMessage user counts (~130 iPhone owners) because WhatsApp is not installed by default.

> People buy into it because they like that aspect of things, and prefer the Apple regulations to those created by their governments.

This very much has yet to be proven since "those (policies) created by their governments" has not been made possible by Apple yet. If Apple is so confident in their software quality, this additional competition should not be an issue for them.

> If you launch a service today and have no native app presence you will not be regarded as credible in the marketplace.

I meant that you'll buy the hardware but will then have the choice to install different operating systems and app market places. The same way computers have worked for the last 30 years.

> iPhones are a status symbol in America whereas Europeans couldn't care less.

Europeans absolutely could, they're just too tight fisted to actually spend money on things like protecting privacy which is a major part of the whole problem.

They are perfectly fine spending money on luxury cars.

> Europeans absolutely could, they're just too tight fisted to actually spend money on things like protecting privacy which is a major part of the whole problem.

Users in the US don't care about protecting their privacy either.

Examples:

1. Google Chrome market share in the US

2. GMail market share in the US

3. Google Search market share in the US

> Users in the US don't care about protecting their privacy either.

They absolutely do, you just like to dismiss it as being about status.

It was similar when RIM were on top in north america. The status came because of their association with business because they provided secure messaging. High status people care about privacy and security.

> They absolutely do, you just like to dismiss it as being about status.

No, they don't. I just gave you three counter examples.

Why is it that iPhone users prefer GMail over iCloud Mail?

Source: https://www.statista.com/chart/34197/share-of-us-respondents...

> The status came because of their association with business because they provided secure messaging.

Users have no understanding of security. High status or not.

The United States regularly spies and throws federal lawfare at European companies.

E.g: Alstom

So I wouldn't consider the playing field to be fair in the first place.

With a lot of help/pressure from banks and rich traitors/politicans (https://www.marianne.net/economie/economie-francaise/dans-le...).

They mostly use our corruption against us, whis seems fair since it appears a big part of our population like protecting corrupt politicians/criminals

30 years ago maybe. 20 years ago there was a European monopolist which was killed off by Microsoft alumni who sold it to Microsoft.

No, Sony Ericsson was way more successful than the attempts to revise history like to portray.

The vision of what to do with the more powerful technology was also better than Nokia, though still not as good as Apple. The whole direction Nokia kept dragging Series 60 in was a dead end, almost from the very start.

Edit to add: example of what I'm referring to with S60 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_3650 . Just complete madness. Who would waste time on this?

I mean microsoft paid off the CEO of nokia to sink it.

Nokia was worthless by that point.

Even had they run with a wild pivot to Android it would have required the strategic vision to also build an Android app store, which would have upset the various European telcos that made a few extra euros that way.

If Apple don’t like the EU regulations, they’re free to vote with their wallets and stop selling their products there.

The problem is if you go for a free market "vote with their wallets" approach, you end up with a problem like the US did with Microsoft having too high of a market share and control on browsers, media players and operating systems.

Customers can only really vote with their wallets when there is choice and no de facto standard. On top of that, many consumers don't really understand that things like their privacy and and choice has been taken away from them.

I do not agree with all parts of the DMA and I think it's overbearing in some areas but also lacklustre in others but I do think it's important that we don't let monopolies control our lives.

> if Europe actually produced a company with the innovation and scale of Apple.

Except a functional society does not need companies "the scale of Apple" to work.

In fact it's probably the opposite : nobody can beat Apple or Google because they already have too much power worldwide.

Even in the US, where is the free market ? Nobody can create a company that will compete with Apple or Google. Sure, there was an open window for new competitors in the capitalism game in the 90-2010 era with the rise of the home computing but now everything is locked up again.

A functionnal society doesn't need huge actors, it only needs an environment where companies that win the capitalism game don't become trusts and where small companies can shine.

I don't want an european alternative to Apple, I want an ecosystem of companies that specializes in what they are good at and that are forced to work together to be interoperable.

It's hard to make informed choices and vote with your wallet when you're unaware of alternatives. Apple's ban on even mentioning competing options tries to preserve this information gap to the detriment of its customers.

Do you realize that the smartphone revolution started here with Nokia?

Well.. ish. But really it started with iPhone. I've used those Nokia "smartphones". They were less the start of the smartphone revolution than PalmPilot or the IBM PC.

It didn't start with the iPhone. What the iPhone brought was a different interface and user experience.

For the rest, Nokia's "dumb phones" already had MP3 players and all sorts of media (games, videos), downloadable apps, access to the internet, photos, and video recording. They only lacked touch interfaces.

Of course, this was done along with other manufacturers like Sony Ericson, Motorola, Samsung etc.

The behavior of people walking around with media in their phones and using their phones to consume media, capture media and access the internet on-the-go was built by those brands, not by the iPhone.

And this demand and behavior wasn't built with anything like Palm Pilots or the IBM PC, but with regular popular phones - for example, the Motorola Razr line, the Nokia Xpress line, and the Sony Ericson Walkman were products that were launched around 2003-2006, which built these social behaviors.

Things like capturing photos/video, sharing photos and music, and playing multiplayer games were the standard thing to do in my teens with these devices. I only got my first modern smartphone around 2012/2013.

It's undeniable that the iPhone broke the mold with its user interface and experience, which became the standard for UI/UX, but the demand and consumer behavior weren't built by Apple, not even close. They just surfed the wave with a better product.

These fines make sense. The EU is driving a pro-competition capitalist model. American companies will have to compete, and not just entrap users.