The iOS Continental Drift Fun Gap

Sunday, 8 September 2024

There’s a scene in Martin Scorsese’s Casino. Gangster Nicky Santoro (Joe Pesci) and two of his goon friends are in a nightclub in the Tangiers casino resort (a fictionalized version of the old Stardust), which is run by Ace Rothstein (Robert De Niro). Santoro and Rothstein, who’d been friends for decades, are now on the outs. The Tangiers is a front for the mafia and the Teamsters. Rothstein, a gambling genius who was born to run a casino, is earning major bank for the bosses back home. Santoro is gangstering up Las Vegas, and is under severe law enforcement scrutiny. They just held a contentious meeting, just the two of them, at Santoro’s request, in the middle of the desert — a meeting Rothstein wasn’t sure wouldn’t conclude with him dead in a freshly dug hole in the sand.

Santoro and his two friends are just a threesome. All men. Morose.

Rothstein comes in with Billy Sherbert (Don Rickles) and a party of half a dozen or so men and women, including Oscar Goodman, famed defense attorney and future mayor of Las Vegas (playing himself), and several women. Everyone (but Rothstein, who’s not much for fun) is laughing. You’d be laughing too if you were out having drinks with Don Fucking Rickles and Oscar Goodman.

Santoro gripes about Rothstein not acknowledging him, and, well, makes some comments that suggest he doesn’t hold Jews in the highest esteem. Santoro’s right-hand man, Frank Marino (played by the great Frank Vincent, of Billy “Go Get Your Fucking Shine Box” Batts fame), dryly observes, “They’re having a good time, too.”

The camera pulls back to show their threesome, alone in their booth, isolated. Santoro, who is absolutely not having a good time, replies, “So are we.”

I’ve been thinking about that scene a lot, lately.

Allison Johnson, in a piece for The Verge headlined “European iPhones Are More Fun Now”:

Whining about stuff is a treasured American pastime, so allow me to indulge: the iPhone is more fun in Europe now, and it’s not fair.

They’re getting all kinds of stuff because they have cool regulators, not, like, regular regulators. Third-party app stores, the ability for browsers to run their own engines, Fortnite, and now the ability to replace lots of default apps? I want it, too! Imagine if Chrome on iOS wasn’t just a rinky dink little Safari emulator!

Imagine if Chrome could deplete your iPhone battery as fast as it does your MacBook battery. Imagine if you were one of the millions (zillions?) of people whose “incognito mode” browsing history was observed and stored by Google and deleted only after they lost a lawsuit. Imagine — and this takes a lot of imagination — if Google actually shipped a version of Chrome for iOS, only for the EU, that used its own battery-eating rendering engine instead of using the energy-efficient system version of WebKit.

Imagine downloading a new dialer app with a soundboard of fart sounds and setting it as your default! Unfortunately, Apple doesn’t seem interested in sharing these possibilities with everyone.

That sounds like fun.

Sure, we’ve got retro game emulators in the app store. And that rules. But that’s only because Apple was worried everyone in the EU was about to download AltStore PAL so they could play Ocarina of Time on their iPhones.

If the benefit of the DMA is allowing emulators worldwide how is that an advantage for people in the EU?

Here’s the thing: wouldn’t it just be good business to offer everyone the same choices no matter where they live? It’s not as if Apple was making two different iPhones to try to appeal to different cultural preferences. It’s making one iPhone that’s more flexible and customizable and one that isn’t.

Maybe, bit by bit, Apple will cave in and offer parity the way it did with emulators. But I think the company should make an uncharacteristic move: drop the charade and let everyone, everywhere have the same iPhone. It would be bold! Courageous, even! But most importantly, it would be a lot more fun.

Yes, let’s allow everyone, around the world, to delete their Camera app. That sounds like fun.

Federico Viticci, on Threads:

My realization in 2024 has been that the DMA fork of iOS is the best iPhone experience. We can finally use our phones like actual computers with more default apps and apps from external sources.

And on MacStories:

It’s still iOS, with the tasteful design, vibrant app ecosystem, high-performance animations, and accessibility we’ve come to expect from Apple; at the same time, it’s a more flexible and fun version of iOS predicated upon the assumption that users deserve options to control more aspects of how their expensive pocket computers should work. Or, as I put it: some of the flexibility of Android, but on iOS, sounds like a dream to me.

Apparently, this thought — that people who demand options should have them — really annoys a lot of (generally American) pundits who seemingly consider the European Commission a draconian entity that demands changes out of spite for a particular corporation, rather than a group of elected officials who regulate based on what they believe is best for their constituents and the European market.

Let’s run a tally. On the EU side, there is Fortnite and other games from Epic, a shady company that was justifiably booted from the App Store for bait-and-switch chicanery intended to provoke a lawsuit in which they got their asses handed back to them. On the rest-of-the-world side we have the imminent release of iPhone Mirroring and Apple Intelligence. I don’t play Fortnite, and even if I did, I wouldn’t on my phone, but I find the latter far more interesting — and fun — than the former.

The non-Epic iOS software available exclusively in the EU is ... well, nothing of interest. Maybe some apps that help with content piracy. Other than that, nothing. Admittedly, the DMA only went into effect 6 months ago. Long-term, maybe there will arise a thriving ecosystem of useful and fun apps and games that are exclusively available in EU marketplaces. Right now, it’s Fortnite. There are a bunch of articles (and surely soon to be more) informing EU citizens how to access Apple Intelligence (by lying about where they are). There are crickets chirping regarding how iOS users outside the EU can cheat their way into the EU’s new DMA rules. No one cares.

Meanwhile no one in the EU will get Apple Intelligence or iPhone Mirroring, both of which features are very useful, and, dare I say, quite fun. Should we judge how much fun each side of the continental divide is having by how much fun they theoretically could be having, or by how much fun they are having?

As it stands, the fun side is not the EU. But hope springs eternal.