AppleZulu

More generally, this should be yet another lesson on why pursuit of market share dominance isn’t necessarily a sound business practice. 

tmay said:

gatorguy said:

You don't know? You must be one of the only members here who doesn't understand what it is.

Assuming you were being honest with the question, It would be better for you, and coming with with less distrust of the messenger, if you looked for yourself. Here's some starting places, first from Apple itself.

What is Apple's brand identity?

Simplicity. Creativity. Humanity. They call these their three lenses, and, according to Tor Myhren, VP of Marketing Communications at Apple, “If a product is not made up of these things, it's not Apple”.

Then these descriptions pertain to how those outside of Apple perceive it:
https://www.bynder.com/en/blog/the-worlds-most-valuable-brand-apples-secret-to-success/
https://medium.com/@hmmd.yousuf/is-apples-brand-identity-a-blueprint-for-modern-marketing-success-cb6c5c5f1d47
https://www.amati-associates.com/digital-products/brand-positioning/apple/

There's a finely crafted and highly favorable emotional connection that I believe Apple management is currently harming. Much, maybe most, of Apple's consumer value is based on brand perception. 

Thank you,

I posted Steve Sinofsky because he had previously dealt with the EU, and understood developing operating systems. 

The EU DMA is arguably not finely crafted, so is anti ethical to Apple.

Steve Sinofsky,

Android has the kind of success Microsoft would envy, but not Apple, primarily because with that success came most all the same issues that Microsoft sees (still) with the Windows PC. The security, privacy, abuse, fragility, and other problems of the PC show up on Android at a rate like the PC compared to Macintosh and iPhone. Only this time it is not the lack of motivation bad actors have to exploit iPhone, rather it is the foresight of the Steve Jobs vision for computing. He pushed to have a new kind of computer that further encapsulated and abstracted the computer to make it safer, more reliable, more private, and secure, great battery life, more accessible, more consistent, always easier to use, and so on. These attributes did not happen by accident. They were the process of design and architecture from the very start. These attributes are the brand promise of iPhone as much as the brand promise of Android is openness, ubiquity, low price, choice.

I give credit to Google for attempting to recreate some of the same brand promise of iPhone with the Pixel.

Steve Sinofsky,

The lesson of the first two decades of the PC and the first almost two decades of smartphones are that these ends of a spectrum are not accidental. These choices are not mutually compatible. You don’t get both. I know this is horrible to say and everyone believes that there is somehow malicious intent to lock people into a closed environment or an unintentional incompetence that permits bad software to invade an ecosystem. Neither of those would be the case. Quite simply, there’s a choice between engineering and architecting for one or the other and once you start you can’t go back. More importantly, the market values and demands both.

That is unless you’re a regulator in Brussels. Then you sit in an amazing government building and decide that it is entirely possible to just by fiat declare that the iPhone should have all the attributes of openness. By all accounts there seemed to be little interest in the brand promise that presumably drew a third of the market to iPhone. In the over 60 pages of DMA, there’s little mention of privacy (just 7 times), security (9 times), performance (3), reliability (once), or battery life (0), or accessibility (just 3).  I would acknowledge one section about halfway through the 100 goals of one part of the DMA there is deference to these issues though note the important caveat about defaults: 

(50) Furthermore, in order to ensure that third-party software applications or software application stores do not undermine end users’ security, it should be possible for the gatekeeper to implement strictly necessary and proportionate measures and settings, other than default settings, enabling end users to effectively protect security in relation to third-party software applications or software application stores if the gatekeeper demonstrates that such measures and settings are strictly necessary and justified and that there are no less-restrictive means to achieve that goal. The gatekeeper should be prevented from implementing such measures as a default setting or as pre-installation.

Sure, nothing bad will happen; the EU has this...

Sinofsky gets at the heart of the issue here. Consumer choice is protected only when the two business models remain available to the consumer. Apple's closed system is a feature, not a bug. The iPhone is the first personal computing device designed to be always connected to the network. PCs and Macs were created prior to the internet, and although Mac was always a tighter, more proprietary system, neither Windows nor MacOS were designed for the kind of security concerns introduced by connecting the device to an always-on, worldwide computer network.

The iPhone was designed with that issue addressed at its core. The original iPhone was such a closed system thst it didn't even include an App Store. There was no way to add third-party software at all. When the App Store was introduced, it was as a tightly controlled, sandboxed and pre-screened portal for the introduction of third-party apps. The design was not a monopoly, it was to create a fully secure networked personal computing device. 

While Android followed on seeking to replicate the look and features of an iPhone, they at the same time chose to follow the MS Windows model of creating an operating system that would run on an unlimited number of third-party hardware devices. That model by default must be open to third-party developers of both hardware and software. That opens the gates for both innovation of new features, bells and whistles and also stripped-down, cost-cutting hardware, but it comes at the cost of lowered device and system security and increased possibilities for compatibility issues, crashes, etc. 

By having both, this offers consumers the choice of which they'd prefer. 

Forcing Apple to become like Android by switching to open architecture takes away consumer choice. The same would be true if regulators looked at Android's security flaws and forced them to close their system so that apps could only go through the Google Play store, and Android would only work on Google phones. Forcing one to become the other reduces consumer choice. Full stop.

9secondkox2 said:

beowulfschmidt said:

9secondkox2 said:

jmaximus said:

Why does Apple assume they have monopoly on security? It is a rather faulty assumption that none else can make a secure or even more secure App Store. 

DMA will overrule this and allow fair competition on the platform. 

LOL. 

Look around. There is literally no one that does what apple does and keeps a commitment to security and privacy. No one. It’s a rather massive deal. 

There never was unfairness in the platform. All the eu is doing is trying to force socialism in a capitalistic company. Recipe for disaster. Robbing the platform provider to pay openly hostil developers is not a viable solution to a problem that never existed. 

More fascist than socialist.  Socialist would be if the EU nationalized Apple and took the company away from the shareholders, making EU the owner.

Requiring a company not owned by the government to do business as the government demands is a hallmark of fascism.  Benito would be proud.

It’s socialist as well. Taking ones hard work and forcibly disallowing them to fully benefit, but instead, give the rewards to others, even those who didn’t take the risks, didn’t do the work, and don’t deserve the reward - all in the name of “equity.” LOL. WHETHER CONTROLLED BY THE MOB OR BY THE GOVERNMENT, that’s what it is. Apple is a capitalist company. It does the hard work and takes the risks and earns its due. The eu gets upset at American success within its borders and steals from them in order to give a free ride to its preferred folks. Sickening. 

Oy. This situation is neither socialism nor fascism. This is the EU implementing poorly thought out regulation, based on an understanding of the term monopoly that's about as willfully misguided as y'all's understanding of the terms socialism and fascism.  

jmaximus said:

Why does Apple assume they have monopoly on security? It is a rather faulty assumption that none else can make a secure or even more secure App Store. 

DMA will overrule this and allow fair competition on the platform. 

Other platforms have prioritized the collection and sale of user data over user privacy and security. Google sells some phone devices, but that's not how they make their money. With an OS that lives on others' hardware, Android's business model continued to be about the collection and sale of user data. 

Apple sells hardware, and iOS only runs on their hardware. As such, their business model is about driving sales of iPhones. To do so, they can position the iPhone and iOS as a secure, privacy-focused platform. They don't need to collect and sell user data to make money. To facilitate this, iOS was created as a closed system, with the App Store as the exclusive entry point for software developers to create applications for that platform. This assures that Apple can establish and police rules that require third-party developers to maintain high levels of customer security and privacy. 

The EU requirement for Apple to allow third-party App Stores potentially undermines all that. In response, Apple created a tight set of rules for third-party App Stores to follow, to still maintain a high level of user privacy and security. A third party operation that chooses to meet and exceed those requirements will mean Apple doesn't have a monopoly on security. That would be a good outcome. 

The problem is that the companies like Epic that pushed for this EU requirement weren't doing it because they wanted to provide customers with a higher level of security. They did it because they want to opt out of Apple's standards so that they are able to collect and sell user data, and to implement exploitative in-app purchase systems that would violate Apple's rules. If the EU forces Apple to allow that, it's not "fair competition," it's companies taking a free ride on Apple's platform in order to exploit their customers. 

avon b7 said:

This doesn't look good for Apple on the face of it.

Apple has the last word on 'trust'?

I can't see that going down well in the EU. 

I suppose Epic will accuse Apple of discrimination. 

We'll see. 

If the iOS platform is to maintain integrity, yes. Epic has a solid history of bad credit. If the EU's intent is to strip Apple of all control of its own platform and to force them to let thieves and child predators set up shop there, then it may come to a point where Apple would be better off withdrawing from that market, and EU can make its own phones.