Tim Cook has shown everybody what he is good at. It’s not running a user-first computer company. It’s time for him to be shown the door.

Can’t even scroll right in the text editor. Trillion-dollar company.

There are zero mentions of Cook in that thread.

Nonono, you have to tell MacRumors that Bloomberg reported that it was Tim Cook’s boot in this week’s Power On newsletter.

Then that floor will be so clean you could do open heart surgery on it.

Notarization means they still have a say on which app is allowed to run or not.

This goes against the spirit of the DMA, which was supposed to 'open up' 3rd party stores.

The European Commission does not seem to care atm that Apple is still the gatekeeper.

> This is one of the funniest headlines I've seen in a while RE: “ahead of regulatory deadline”, because deadline is the new year.

So you are saying that headline is funny because it is correct?

Services are super high margin (twice that of hardware), growing quickly year over year, and now make up a big fraction of Apple's overall revenue. Sadly, I think, the days of Apple having the incentives and motivations associated with being primarily a hardware company are well past us—we're at the stage where hardware and OS product decisions reflect a need to drive services revenue, rather than simply making something great that people want to buy.

Services are the second largest revenue steam for Apple, after the iPhone. All other hardware they make is way further down. There's a relevant discussion at [0].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45764986

They have such a moat that if they open sourced their entire OS stack today nobody would be able to do anything with it except by buying their hardware.

That doesn't make much sense, XNU and the layers above it are very portable, they went PowerPC -> x86 -> x86_64 -> ARM64 after all. They also supported multiple different GPUs in the Intel era.

If the entire OS stack was open sourced today, we would have forks running on standard Intel/AMD CPUs in a week. They wouldn't have the same optimized power management, etc. But I think it would have a good chance of wiping out desktop Linux within a brief period.

macOS/iOS are part of the moat.

Their services revenue this quarter was their second largest business segment (iPhone #1), but experienced more growth than any other segment (~15% iirc, iPhone was more like 6%). Many onlookers see "Services" and think "Oh wow Apple TV and Apple Music must be doing really well", and that's exactly what Apple wants you to think. In reality, these services are doing good, but my understanding is: that category is utterly dominated by tolls. Their toll-taker position in controlling App Store sales, the fees they charge on Apple Pay transactions, and their revenue from their part in the Apple Card system.

Their genuine services, other than maybe iCloud storage, are small businesses. Consider this: Apple reports $28.7B in quarterly services revenue. Spotify reported $3.8B in quarterly revenue directly from their 281M premium subscribers ($4.3B total) (AM has no free tier). Spotify is, in all likelihood, quite far ahead of AM in subscriber counts; estimates put AM at ~100M. AM also gives away a ton of subscriptions likely at a bulk discount (its included with some Chase credit cards, Verizon Wireless plans, etc); it would surprise me if total AM revenue is higher than $1.5B/q.

This is very true, and this is why we need freedom for our phones. Sadly, the best way of running free software on a modern and feature-complete phone at the moment is to buy a Pixel and flash Graphene.

According to the first Google result they had a revenue of 10 billion dollars in app store fees in 2024.

Apple complied but maliciously in the EU making it very difficult and very expensive to offer apps on alt stores. They also made sure to add scary warnings so one can never offer a normal onboarding flow.

> Apple’s App Store for security

The App Store doesn’t do anything to protect you in that sense. It’s easy to circumvent and these days it’s cheaper to just buy an iOS exploit than go through the trouble of making a shady app.

I have Alt, Epic, and Setapp installed. Setapp is something I had to stop paying for while unemployed, but has good stuff if you can afford it. Alt is mostly empty, but now lets you add multiple sources for more sideloading options.

Basically the market is still in an alpha stage. My next app will be on Alt just because I want to support the idea. Hopefully more apps gets on these stores, for now it's mostly nice to have for games, emulators, and some dev tools.

Apple didn't make it friction-free either, but it seems the issue is lack of user demand and/or lack of supply.

If you want to try it for yourself, you can. https://downrightnifty.me/blog/2025/02/27/eu-features-outsid...

Requires an EU apple account, a faraday bag, two esp32 boards (or other way to spoof hotspots), a VPN with an endpoint in the EU, and an iOS device with a supported OS version.

I hate the security argument when it comes to third party stores or apps. No one is putting a gun to your head to install these things. Imagine trying to apply the same logic to macbooks and not let them install from the web or homebrew.

> Is Apple really going to keep playing this game of gatekeeping until legislation forces them not to?

By this point it seems pretty clear that they will, at least while Tim Cook is in charge. Other higher ups, specifically Phil Schiller, knew this was a bad idea but were overruled.

https://www.macrumors.com/2025/02/25/apples-phil-schiller-co...

Yeah, the fragmentation that is caused by Apple's behaviour is insane.

You can set a different email client globally, but a different default Messages or Maps app? That only works in some regions. In-App payments? You can now basically do whatever you want in the US, in the EU you can opt-in into a different regime, in other regions it's staying the same but who knows for how long.

By fighting this everywhere they're basically losing control over the outcomes and will end up with lot's of different regulations everywhere. Instead of doing the sensible thing and opening up their platform before they're being forced to do so.

> Is Apple really going to keep playing this game of gatekeeping until legislation forces them not to?

Is Apple going to kill the golden goose unless it is literally forced to? Of course not.

Apple, together with Google, get a cut of 15% to 30% of all mobile app revenue. They have the entire market captured. They will only give that up when they're forced to.

They all will try to gatekeep as much as they can. Google's move made this pretty obvious. They don't need free market and open platform. This is something for some nerdy enthusiasts. Funny that all the new device that are being released lately, like Sidephone or Light Phone; they all do the same thing. And not only they lock you into their OSes, but they even restrict the software that you are allowed to use.

Presumably they did a cost/benefit analysis and think it is more profitable this way?

Tim Cook must go: he failed at preserving their gatekeeping, and failed at opening it in an honorable manner.

Apple makes over $10B from App Store commissions in the US alone, why would they reduce their profits unless forced to do so?

Even if alternative app stores are opened up, there are enough limitations that severely impede the device for me as is. You can't use a VPN and at the same time do service discovery on your local network, for instance. For some services, anyway.

What incentive does Apple have to comply in advance? Every government wants to have their stamp on it, trying to build ahead of the specifications risks building something that is not compliant.

Is Apple really going to leave all that money on the table until obligated? No.

> I've considered an iPhone due to the recent Google announcement w.r.t. code signing

You might want to get informed about the hurdles Apple puts in your way first.

On the other hand if long ago they backed down and lowered fees and allowed more control, aside from the potential security and privacy concerns that could negatively affect the brand, companies would have just then wanted more. As Epic has said they think they should have to pay nothing for all that Apple provides. So not saying all Apple’s choices and timing were right or best, but giving up previously wouldn’t have prevented all of this but rather just lowered the bar and making it easier for companies and countries to make it easier to lower it even further.

Do you 'really not understand' that they only want to maximize profit?

Cigarette companies do this everywhere

And they’re just the most visible

Everything banned in the US is still offered as soon as you step across a border, every gross visual warning mandated in those countries is not implemented in the US

The current system gives Apple a 30% cut of every transaction that happens on iOS. Did you really think they'd voluntarily give that up just to be nice?

> They need to open up access to third party stores and third party browser engines.

Here in EU they did allow third party stores and all we got were shovelware sites with subscriptions. It added even more friction an shadiness to acquiring apps.

We need to sop pretending iOS third party stores are anything like what we envisioned them to be. They are not f-droid or anything even half as good. Apple complies with this impotent law because the law changes absolutely nothing for end user.

There are end user benefits to apples approach too, due to better governance and control over what apps are available. Governments also have incentive to maximize their power and are not benevolent actors in this scheme.

Those comments are still plentiful on MacRumors.

Still, 'Why not create your own operating system'?

Here are people documenting what they had to do for this, in both cases it necessitated the use of Faraday cages:

https://downrightnifty.me/blog/2025/02/27/eu-features-outsid...

https://lagrangepoint.substack.com/p/airpods-hearing-aid-hac...

If it’s like for other region-locked features, you’ll need a Japanese Apple account (formerly Apple ID), which likely means a Japanese payment method and/or billing address, and you need to set your iPhone region to Japan. Furthermore, whatever Apple uses for geolocation (it will include mobile cell and wifi metadata) needs to not indicate a location outside of Japan most of the time.

A VPN doesn’t cut it.

there's an entire daemon dedicated to making sure you're not trying to bypass apple's business model, using every phone sensor possible

just a VPN alone won't fool it

Open a terminal on your Mac and type `man 8 countryd`. Apple documents the daemon for determining your country.

Maybe another solid gold statue to the administration could make that pesky lawsuit go away, though. I'm hoping that shift doesn't come into effect until 2028 to avoid it being mangled or declawed entirely.

This is technically possible in the EU (through web distribution[1] of Apps), but intentionally made impossible to actually use by Apple. They require the developer to have had an Apple Developer account for at least 2 years and at least one App with more than 1m annunal downloads in the App Store.

[1] https://developer.apple.com/support/web-distribution-eu/

> I can't just install Fortnite.

You couldn't install it at all on iOS for 4 years.

To your point, you were fine with that, you'll be fine with forgoing anything that's not in Apple's AppStore.

Isn't this same as Fortnite windows situation?; windows allows exe but Epic still forces the store.

Sometimes you need to take a step backward to go forward. By 'going back' to allowing third party stores and apps, you have introduced competition, and realistically, one of them becomes the defacto one that is easy for both developers and users. On my android, I have lots of sideloaded apps that come from different sources, however since F-droid allows you to connect lots of 'stores' to it, I only have one app store app, as I have connected 5 app repositiories to F-droid. This is a huge win, because most of my apps come from F-droid, but there are those few that require different repos to get, as well a the few that I can install without a store at all, by just installing the APK I grabbed from the official site. Apple's store could allow these features, but since it undermines their anti-competitive practices, law has to come in to temporarily inconvenience you, so that your and everyone else's lives can be better. It'll just take some time though, because Apple goes out of their way to conform to new regulations as minimally as possible, to the point of completely missing the point of the regulation when possible.

It seems Apple have added support for shipping alternate browser engines in the EU, and could in theory be sold using Apple's own store there, as well as third party ones:

https://developer.apple.com/support/alternative-browser-engi...

FWIW, it does look like Apple have made it pretty hard to qualify to ship one though! To best of my knowledge, no one has actually shipped one yet in the EU.

> https://open-web-advocacy.org/blog/apples-browser-engine-ban...

The people who want to prostrate themselves for tech giant "security" paternalism can still use the first-party app store. The people who don't want to give up freedom for security should have the choice not to do so.

It also helps the developers of apps that Apple can't or won't approve. Apps like ICEBlock could still work just fine using alternative app stores that have backbone.

Actual security / privacy person here. The iOS ecosystem is much much much worse than people currently think of it as. This is primarily due to adware SDKs and in-app browsers that Apple has done absolutely nothing to address.

I see someone really gulped down that Apple kool-aid.

Your life is absolutely untouched by having other store options. And privacy is maintained by the granularity of the permissions, the manual review process is generally a joke and it changes like the weather.

Helping tens of thousands and developers sounds like a good trade.

You are free to no use third party app stores. No need to stop others from using them.

Don't worry, Google is making the opposite move to lock down Android, whereby now app developers have to get notarized and anyone who distributes apps Google doesn't like gets fucked.

Personally, every time I hear Apple fans talk about Android users "trying to turn their iPhone into Android because they bought the wrong device", I groan. Because over the last ten years, while Apple has more or less hasn't budged on their shitty security policy[0], Google has been stumbling head over heels trying to turn every Android into a shittier iPhone.

As for the "race to the bottom malware ecosystem", you don't need to sideload at all to get pwned on Android. That's enabled by Google themselves, because Google Play - what is supposed to be the vetted and secure place to obtain software - is absolutely chock full of scamware. If the app store is the "default", or only option, its business model doesn't actually punish the store for failing its users' trust.

In fact, while Google is demonstrably worse at every aspect running an app store, Apple's own store isn't much better. Sure, Apple can stringently review and deny app submissions from a new developer, but large established megacorporations get all sorts of special treatment on Apple devices. Think about how they made an example out of Tumblr, compared to how they manage Reddit, Twitter, or any Facebook-owned[1] app. Or how Apple blatantly violates their own ATT guidelines by not letting us turn off their own first-party tracking[2]. Or worse, how Roblox's core business model violates basically all the App Store rules and nobody at Apple seems to care, even though that app is basically a child predator's best friend. The iOS App Store is also a race-to-the-bottom malware ecosystem.

[0] To paraphrase, "Users can't be trusted not to fall for scams, and also they will rape developers, so we should have total control over their phones".

For the record, "rape developers" means "modify software in a way those developers don't like", which is "rape" in the same sense that your VCR is a home-invading rapist.

[1] It is always ethical to deadname corporations.

[2] In fact, this is so blatantly anti-competitive, the EU is mulling over - I shit ye not - forcing Apple to get rid of opt-in consent to level the playing field. Which itself sounds like a GDPR violation.