The EU was actually on the path to forcing everyone to use micro-USB. Thankfully Apple (and others) pioneered USB-C (bringing what it learnt from developing the lightning connector) in the time it took the EU to go from making all of the phone makers sign a Memorandum of Understanding to making it legislation. Now the EU is frozen in time, stuck on USB-C for the forseeable future. The economics to make a device dual port (USB-C and something new) aren't there, so we're not likely to ever see an improvement on USB-C... in an alternative timeline, we could have been stuck on the even worse micro-USB.

Bringing it back to the topic on hand, this is very much an area I wouldn't want to see a heavy handed EU legislate something that just further cements the incumbants and makes everything worse forever... just like mandatory micro-USB would have been. I can totally see the EU legislating something like a mandatory Meta communication protocol with compulsory attestation from Meta servers.

Apple changed to USB-C after Lightning was ten years old, exactly as they promised ten years before. The EU regulation didn’t force Apple to do anything, its deadline was a couple years after Apple switched, and Apple assisted in the creation of USB-C and after they had already switched their laptops.

Consider the opposite direction: what if you want to message someone? What if you haven't messaged them in a while? Imagine you have seven messaging apps installed, some of the names you've forgotten ("Discord", is that obviously a messaging app?). Imagine you know that they're reachable somewhere just not exactly where.

And what if you want to contact someone? Are they on signal or WhatsApp or telegram? Or is it discord? Which server? How can I find that thing someone sent? Let me just open all those apps and start searching

I think you underestimate how little tolerance the average person has for this kind of friction. These huge platforms win because everyone is on them and it all just works.

You are speaking as someone who gives a shit about technology. Many people don't. "Just another account" is a big ask for many, as lots of people don't have password managers. There are a whole shit ton of people who want to use as few apps as they can. Even lots of tech-savvy people, myself included, feel this way.

> After that you forget it exists until someone messages you.

Until you get a random notification asking you to take steps to keep your account active or whatever. You may not care about this, but many people get stressed out about this kind of thing.