If Apple is so pro-privacy like they claim, then they'd look for the most strict international privacy laws and abide by them. Then they could feel safe in knowing they could release the product anywhere. The fact they want to make the product available under the "rules" of the least privacy protecting countries first says a lot to me

Laws and strategy are not fixed, and public bickering is part of how they get optimized.

Then don’t deploy it for Pete’s sake if you can’t guarantee basic privacy.

I imagine complying with all kinds of laws and regulations slows releases in some way or another and having none of them would allow people to ship faster, so what makes these EU regulations so distinct? Do what you have to do to comply with the law and release, as always.

[dead]

So whats the issue delaying a few more months for a worldwide release?

The only reason for this is to take a swipe at the EU and try to push some bad opinion on to them from their customers.

> As a small developer, the cost to support something like this would be so overwhelming I wouldn’t consider supporting the EU officially.

As a small developer, you wouldn't fall under the DMA.

> 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.

I’m happy to not have it if it’s not compliant, yes.

> 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.

They have already launched two years late. Remember when we all had to buy an iPhone 16 to get Apple Intelligence?

Besides that, Google has shipped many (not all) similar features to Pixels in the EU and have been for years.

> At what cost? This is Apple’s second bite at AI. Giannandrea fucked up the first time. I’m honestly with Cupertino on not over complicating it the second time around. If they found the right mix of features and architecture, great, then work to port it to high-bar jurisdictions.

I totally agree with you in principle here, but Apple have a pretty large vested interest in not supporting interoperability here (and in the other cases, like Mac mirroring) so I honestly don't see that happening at all.

This is purely a lobbying move against the EU to get EU citizens/politicians to complain about the laws and get an exemption.

And to be fair, Apple's business model is currently structurally incompatible with a lot of the DMA (which I personally think is a good thing), so they kinda have to fight it for a while.

The cost is almost certainly in time, not staff

But EU has a pretty uniform laws, so this comes to just one issue: time. Did Apple start working on this feature before EU implemented the law? This might be the case, but even if it was after, they could start working on implementing that sooner.

It would be good for US companies to know that EU laws are not "guidelines", just as US enforces their laws on companies from outside.

Sure but we're talking about the unified law of almost an entire wealthy continent here. It's EU ffs. Not some small island country in the middle of the ocean.

This looks to me like yet another bet from Apple: "they'll buy iPhones anyway, let them wait".

> Let's say if ChatGPT was launched respecting GDPR, or respecting copyrights

Bad comparison. Launching with GDPR compliance isn’t particularly taxing if you’re already complying with California’s CCPA. (You need your twenty-eight EU law firms on retainer, but the big firms package that conveniently.)

Copyright theft in AI, on the other hand, is a global phenomenon.

DMA is most akin to the U.S. system of designating financial institutions SIFIs and then putting a bunch of extra requirements on them. Almost intentionally onerous. Hence ringfenced to select large companies.

What is the source of this claim that this is the reason?

> Data that Gemini see goes straight to Google.

That's not how the deal was announced. You don't pay Bs / year for a licence to gemini to send them your data. You pay that to run it on your own hardware, in your own garden, so the data stays put.

I know the internet is always anti big companies, but this is likely a "not worth it for now, we'll eventually do it" effort from Apple. The EU AI act is a mess, and the effort to simply know what they have to do to comply with it is likely going to take armies of people (not devs) and a lot of time, as the OOP said.

And the saddest part about it, is that Apple has the money and resources to sink into this. Think about all the small players that don't. This is yet again a miss for the commission, with the end result being an insidious form of regulatory capture. It sucks for those of us running small companies. Oh well.

Former, you mean?

100%, it's been almost 2 years that you can choose whatever you want.[1]

I run Perplexity in place of Gemini, but I can also run Claude and others.

[1] https://i.imgur.com/BgvxqQQ.png

Apple is just being the usual Apple being both an hardware vendor and giving it's own software advantages that competitors don't have and using the security bogus argument as always.

And yet, people believe that crap and jump into defending Apple as if being an Apple user is their identity, sad.

Some features don't land in Europe because US companies can't handle the amount of languages. For them it is English and maybe Spanish or Chinese because they don't care how heybmake money.

I have the AI image editing features on Pixel in Europe.

Or really anywhere, since it comes out in Fall. Unless you count developer betas as available of course.

Because Siri is the brand and other competitors will dilute the brand with their inferior products, is the line of reasoning, I'm sure. I'm unclear on why apple is branding the AI launcher or whatever if it's just going to be a wrapper for a third party product, however.

Functionally the EU is requiring that Apple dramatically RELAX their privacy and security postures.

I’m sure Apple doesn’t want to cave and give OpenAI free access to the spotlight semantic db, the ability see what’s on your screen at all times, etc.

Which I would argue is HARDER to do while preserving privacy.

I think you should elaborate a bit on that because to me it seems that EU privacy laws are actually fairly good at protecting privacy.

EU has some of the best consumer protection and privacy laws on the planet.