The Register has learned from those involved in the browser trade that Apple has limited the development and testing of third-party browser engines to devices physically located in the EU. That requirement adds an additional barrier to anyone planning to develop and support a browser with an alternative engine in the EU.
It effectively geofences the development team. Browser-makers whose dev teams are located in the US will only be able to work on simulators. While some testing can be done in a simulator, there’s no substitute for testing on device – which means developers will have to work within Apple’s prescribed geographical boundary.
… as Mozilla put it – to make it “as painful as possible for others to provide competitive alternatives to Safari.”
Just one more reason to make laws that enforce similarly fair competition in other countries. Don’t let companies get away with this shit!
Can they do that? I’d love it, but I don’t think they can really force Apple, or any company to do something globally can they? (USB C was probably managed this way because of logistic and pricing matters).
I could be wrong, but I believe he meant that other countries themselves should pass similar laws; not that the EU should make laws mandating what Apple does in other countries
Oh, that would make more sense, but if this was a per country decision I’d be fucked here in Mexico lol.
enforcing fair competition is certainly not very American
freedom TO vs freedom FROM
And people ask me why I de-appled…
So who did you go with? Because stock android ain’t much better privacy wise.
I’d recommend using GrapheneOS. (i’m using it, and it is a breath of fresh air)
On what phone?
What phone I have? Pixel 8 Pro (I bought it specifically for GrapheneOS, otherwise I wouldn’t have bought a Pixel, als the original Pixel ROM is laggy as fuck)
Supported Devices are all Pixels since the Pixel 5a. https://grapheneos.org/faq#supported-devices
My Pixel 4a is slower with GrapheneOS than stock. Disabling GrapheneOS’ Secure App Spawning helps noticeably.
With newer hardware it’s likely not noticeable. (The 4a is old and even only receives security updates by GrapheneOS (no firmware updates by Google), so I really should replace it at some point.)
So a 4 year old phone isn’t supported by Google anymore?
Yeah, only starting with the Pixel 8 they promised 7 years of support
no, but on android you have firefox… and you have f-droid with tons of OSS applications - and a lot of them are really good, so you can ignore everything made by google.
GrapheneOS running on Pixel phone.
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I’ll de-apple when we get a viable alternative to Android. As is Google has far too much control over the entirety of that ecosystem to call it workably open, and if I’m going to choose between two proprietary vendors I’m going to choose the more reliable one with a business built around consumer interest instead of ad-company interests.
Try GrapheneOS. It has some quirks but it’s a good alternative. Been using it for two years on a phone and I’m considering getting it on a tablet.
Google still owns the ecosystem. They want to roll a new packaging system that depreciates apks and forces play store installs or Google based certificate pining? They’ll have 90% market capture in a year. It’s like using Opera/Edge/Etc and feeling safe from the decisions Google makes because of it, but they’re writing and designing Chromium upstream so they still own the agency and the choice (See Manifest v3). Given two companies both preventing me from owning agency of my own device, I’ll pick the lesser of the two evils and in my eyes that is currently Apple. I do hope to have a mobile operating system akin to Linux someday, but graphine os or any android dirivitive is not the solution, it just takes away my agency while they further the problem.
Apple scummy once again.
geolocking is immoral. if they’re getting it why the fuck shouldn’t we?
Time to elect better politicians.
Where are they?
And of course with First-past-the-post even if they appear it is harmful to vote for them because you are better to strategically vote for a party that actually has a chance of winning even if they are only marginally better than the other party that is expected to win.
The system is really fucked up top-to-bottom. Very likely on purpose.
Wow making it as pricy as possible for developers to add features thanks Apple.
Only after getting around 20 billion of fine, these old timers will understand how tech works.
That’s one way to stop outsourcing to India and create EU jobs.
Wouldn’t a vpn solve this?
I assume they are doing checks of other things. Local software is not the same as a web service that is checking your IP for your location.
They could use location services, your registration country for your Apple ID, the sale location of your device, and other things. They could even aggregate indicators and use that.
iOS would have root access to aGPS (or even real GPS) to determine location. There’s no easy way to spoof that against a determined asshole actor.
I have the feeling that it would require a GPS spoof
I guess they’ll have something at firmware level identifying the registration location.
Seems like this is just delaying the inevitable - just like using USB-C connectors.
I’m sure Google would love to point out the hypocrisy to get Blink in the US.
This is worse that USB-C connectors. They did launch Lightning first and it wasn’t significantly worse that USB-C for a long time. Sure, they dragged their feet for longer than they probably should have (I think the iPad switched at a relatively reasonable time) but making their users switch connectors is a big change and it made sense to make sure that USB-C was here to stay and whatnot.
This is just 100% user hostile. They are doing more work to keep features from their users. Features that the user can just not use if they don’t want them.
I don’t see third party engines making it to the market unless the US also slams down some regulations. How many Firefox users are there in the EU? How many use iOS, and how many of those are likely to use the iOS version of Firefox? Is it worth maintaining two to four separate apps for this?
How many Firefox users are there in the EU?
More than in the US.
Firefox has a 5.07% share of European users, versus 4.21% in the US.
The population of the EU as per January 2023 is 448.8 million, compared to the 2023 US estimate of 334.9 million.
Well I suppose the question really is; how many Firefox iOS/iPad OS are there in the EU and does that amount of users make it worth maintaining another 1-2 apps for the EU market, while dealing with Apple’s shenanigans? Like Firefox Browser for iOS and iPad, as well as Firefox Focus are already 2 apps, if you want to replace the back-end specifically for the EU you’d have to maintain that back-end, deal with Apple working against you, and maintain separate versions of those apps specifically for the EU.
It’s worth noting that Firefox for iOS is already leaps and bounds behind Firefox for Android in terms of UX. There are features missing that they could add regardless of whether they are using WKWebView or not, but they haven’t, either because Apple doesn’t want competition, or because they don’t consider the Firefox browser on iOS to be particularly high priority.
If the latter, why on Earth would they port Gecko to iOS/iPad OS when a vanishingly small subset of users might use it? I am a European Firefox user, but I don’t use Firefox on iOS because the UX compared to Safari is incredibly lacklustre. Switching the back-end to Gecko wouldn’t do anything to fix that.
I think many Firefox users are tech savvy enough to know that Firefox for iOS is just a reskinned Safari. They know that it isn’t the real-deal and so any stats on who uses Firefox on iOS are kind of misrepresenting the situation.
Yeah. The main reason I could think of is if you use Firefox Sync. I actually do have that on my iPad, though it’s rare that I’ll ever open something on my PC and then resume it on my iPad.
does that amount of users make it worth maintaining another 1-2 apps for the EU market, while dealing with Apple’s shenanigans
I’d say that’s a resounding “no”, but I must admit that basically nothing is worth dealing with Apple’s shenanigans in the first place if you ask me.
Especially when it’s likely that they’ll eventually play themselves out of the European market completely with their anti-consumer bullshit and the EU’s increasing courage in protecting consumers from such abuse as is integral to all things Apple.
That echoes my thoughts.
It’s guaranteed that Google will create a version of chrome of the EU market as well. Yea it’s another big tech, but app devs having the same browser engine working on iOS and droid will be a boon. Since ff has the android app already, it’s also not like they will have a new greenfield development for it.
Google has infinite money to throw at shitty projects, and the more marketshare they control the better for them since that just means more data that they can sell, so I can see that happening. I don’t think Mozilla has the same luxury. I’d sooner stick to Safari than use Chrome.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Apple’s designation under Europe’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) as a gatekeeper for the App Store, iOS, Safari, and just recently iPadOS forced Cupertino to make concessions.
Parisa Tabriz, VP of engineering and general manager of Chrome at Google, dismissed Apple’s rule changes earlier this year.
When Apple announced its plan to make changes in response to DMA in January, developers expressed concern that supporting a separate EU browser might be a problem.
“The contract terms are bonkers and almost no vendor I’m aware of will agree to them,” lamented one industry veteran familiar with the making of browsers in response to an inquiry from The Register.
In March, the European Commission opened an investigation into Apple based on concerns that Cupertino’s “steering” rules and browser choice screen fell short of DMA requirements.
Asked about Apple’s geofencing of devices for development, an Opera spokesperson replied that it hadn’t heard about the issue – but that’s not surprising given that the organization is headquartered in the EU.
The original article contains 817 words, the summary contains 165 words. Saved 80%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
