Okay? I don’t see the problem, these requirements are known from the beginning so if complying wasn’t planned and requires re-architecturing the software to make it happens that’s on the engineering org not on the EU regulator. Unless I’m missing something?
The point is complying with the DMA from the outset could mean having to launch a year later everywhere. Skipping the EU makes sense in a fast-moving market (if you’re designated as a gatekeeper).
> Skipping the EU makes sense in a fast-moving market (if you’re designated as a gatekeeper).
Skipping the EU makes sense if the company doesn't want to comply with regulations aimed directly at it.
> complying with the DMA from the outset could mean having to launch a year later everywhere.
Oh no! Anyway...
Once upon a time, companies delayed launches specifically so they'd launch a better product. That seems to be gone these days and end-users have garbage products as a result.
If, like me, you specifically do not want third parties inside the Apple ecosystem, Apple has done a great job. I totally hate the EU's insistence of tearing down Apple's walled garden. That is a huge reason I like their products so much.
Interoperability only requires Apple to allow third parties to have the same capabilities that Apple does on your device. It doesn't require you to purchase or use a third party service or device. It merely allows you to have that choice in the first place.
> Skipping the EU makes sense if the company doesn't want to comply with regulations aimed directly at it
It makes sense if you’re prioritizing time to market and agility. Once you’ve nailed down your product, you can make it compliant for more-onerous jurisdictions. You see this in finance all the time, where the U.S. tends to have the tightest rules around e.g. betting and crypto.
> Once upon a time, companies delayed launches specifically so they'd launch a better product
Because software shipped in a box. Also, compliance is orthogonal to how good a product is. Siri AI might be crap. It might be great. It might be almost perfect and then made great on second release. Everything slows down if the entire development process has to deal with open APIs and lawyers at every turn.
It’s perfectly legitimate to say we’ll develop this in other markets and ship it to the EU when it’s fully baked.
> It’s perfectly legitimate to say we’ll develop this in other markets and ship it to the EU when it’s fully baked.
It's also perfectly legitimate to legally require business to slow the fuck down and consider how the thing will be used or abused, to make the product not crash for even just basic usages, and to put real safeguards in place against problematic scenarios.
But no, move fast and break things wins the day every day in the US.
Whatever Apple is cooking and however long its taken them, the DMA is not a surprise and they could well have been taking it into account from the very beginning.
These are relatively recent and may have come into force after development began, definitely after Siri development an initial integration into personal data.
I suppose if you think these rules are reasonable, you’d be happy to not have this functionality. The rest of the world will be happy to not allow third parties access to our data.
As a small developer, the cost to support something like this would be so overwhelming I wouldn’t consider supporting the EU officially.
> These are relatively recent and may have come into force after development began,
If it were the case, Apple would just say it (with receipts).
> I suppose if you think these rules are reasonable, you’d be happy to not have this functionality.
As a European Apple user I am absolutely OK with not having these functionalities, which I am 100% sure would not even work as advertised given the company track record.
> These are relatively recent and may have come into force after development began, definitely after Siri development an initial integration into personal data.
The DMA was substantially finalised by 2020, and came into force in 2023. Apple's AI thing was developed with the full knowledge that it existed. The issue isn't personal data here (that'd be the GDPR, and maybe to some extent the AI Act). The DMA is about _competition_. The EU's issue here is that Apple is giving its own AI thing a level of access unavailable to other vendors' AI things, I'd assume.
> As a small developer
You are not covered by the DMA. You'd need an EEA turnover of 7.5bn and/or a market cap of 75bn, for a start. And you'd also need to be a _platform_. The DMA only really applies to a few companies.
AS we all have complained, Apple has been working on Apple Intelligence for, roughly speaking, forever. Their private compute cloud thing and the protocols that protect it have, I bet, been in place for years. That's what you are missing.
