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. ★

Friday, 6 September 2024

The iOS Continental Drift Widens

Friday, 6 September 2024

At the end of August, Apple announced several more DMA compliance changes. They are worth examining in detail.

Changes to the Mandatory Browser Choice Screen

Developers of browsers offered in the browser choice screen in the EU will have additional information about their browser shown to users who view the choice screen, and will get access to more data about the performance of the choice screen. The updated choice screen will be shown to all EU users who have Safari set as their default browser. For details about the changes coming to the browser choice screen, view About the Browser Choice Screen in the EU.

Some of the choice details of the new changes:

All users with Safari as their default browser, including users who have already seen the choice screen prior to the update, will see the choice screen upon first launch of Safari after installing the update available later this year.

The choice screen will not be displayed if a user already has a browser other than Safari set as default.

The choice screen will be shown once per device instead of once per user.

When migrating to a new device, if (and only if) the user’s previously chosen default browser was Safari, the user will be required to reselect a default browser (i.e. unlike other settings in iOS, the user’s choice of default browser will not be migrated if that choice was Safari).

I get it that the entire point of this mandatory choice screen is that because iOS is, in DMA parlance, a designated “gatekeeping” platform, the presumption is that Apple has unfairly advantaged Safari by bundling it with the OS and making it the default. So, from the European Commission’s perspective, some significant number of iOS users are using Safari only because it is bundled and default, and would prefer and/or be better served — or even just equally served — using another web browser as their default. Thus, Safari gets treated differently. It’s not just another browser in a list of 11. It’s the only browser whose users will be forced to choose again even if they’ve already chosen it in iOS 17.4 or later. It’s the only browser whose users will be forced to choose again whenever they migrate to a new iPhone or iPad. What exactly is the point of forcing this screen per-device rather than per-user, other than to repeatedly irritate Safari users who own multiple iOS devices?

At what point do these restrictions punish Safari users who want to use Safari? I’d say the EC has crossed that point by forcing these rules on Apple. Another detail:

Users will be required to scroll through the full list of browser options before setting a browser as default.

You know how in certain “terms and conditions” agreement screens, you can only “agree” after scrolling all the way to the bottom of the legalese that almost no one actually reads? That’s how the browser choice screen must now work. Almost nothing in iOS works like this, and I suspect more than a few users who spot their preferred browser above the fold in the randomized list will find it very confusing that after selecting their browser, “nothing happens”. This is legally-mandated bad interaction design.

If Safari is currently in the user’s Dock or on the first page of the Home Screen and the user selects a browser that is not currently installed on their device from the choice screen, the selected browser will replace the Safari icon in the user’s Dock or in the Home Screen.

For 17 years, the iOS Home Screen has been consistently spatial. Wherever an app is placed on your Home Screen, it stays there. Now, obviously, the EC’s objection is that Apple has unfairly privileged Safari with default placement in the user’s Dock, and they are seeking to remove this privilege for any user who chooses a browser other than Safari on the choice screen. But surely some number of users will regret their choice. Or simply seek to open Safari while trying some other browser as their new default. But now, unlike the way iOS has worked for 17 years, the Safari icon won’t be where they left it. It’s also worth noting that apps in the iOS Dock don’t show their names, only their icons. There surely exist many satisfied Safari users who don’t even know what “Safari” is — they only know the blue-compass icon. And they know that whenever they open URLs from an email or text message, those URLs open in an interface with which they’re completely familiar. The browser choice screen does, of course, show the browsers’ icons, but still. This is legally-mandated confusion.

The list of browsers presented to users remains mostly unchanged from Apple’s previous browser choice screen: the 11 most-downloaded browsers in each member state of the EU. So each of the 27 EU nations has its own list. Apple lists the current browsers, per country, at the bottom of their support page.

Here is a single list of all included browsers, sorted by how many of the 27 EU nations they’re included in. For the 9 browsers included in all 27 countries, I’ve randomized the order:

Chrome, Google LLC (27)
Edge, Microsoft Corporation (27)
Opera, Opera Software AS (27)
Brave, Brave Software (27)
Safari, Apple (27)
DuckDuckGo, DuckDuckGo, Inc. (27)
Aloha, Aloha Mobile (27)
Onion Browser, Mike Tigas (27)
Firefox, Mozilla (27)
You, SuSea Inc. (23)
Ecosia, Ecosia (17)
Vivaldi, Vivaldi Technologies (13)
Web@Work, MobileIron (10)
Web, AirWatch LLC (5)
Want, Qwant (3)
Browser, Maple Media Apps LLC (3)
Access, BlackBerry Corporation (3)
Seznam.cz, Seznam.cz a.s. (2)
Presearch, Presearch.org Global Limited (1)
Avast Secure Browser, AVAST Software (1)

I was familiar with most of the 9 browsers included in all 27 countries, and you probably are too. But I’d never heard of Aloha or Onion Browser — and Onion Browser in particular stands out for coming from an individual developer, Mike Tigas. (Onion Browser also stands out for being open source.) Both Aloha and Onion are advertised as “privacy focused”, which seems particularly true for Onion Browser, which is connected to Tor. Aloha includes built-in ad-blocking and a geo-fence skipping VPN.

So 9 of the 11 spots are occupied by the same popular browsers across the entire EU. Of the other 11 browsers, the only one I’d ever heard of was Ecosia, which, like DuckDuckGo, is better known as a search engine (and, like DuckDuckGo, is on the very short list of search engines Safari offers in most countries around the world).¹

Did you know that BlackBerry made an iOS browser, and that it’s oddly popular in Ireland, Poland, and Sweden? I did not. (Did you know that BlackBerry still exists? I did not.)

The entire point of this mandatory browser choice screen is to reach Safari users and make it as easy as possible for them to switch default browsers. But how many such users are there, who should switch? How many users are there who understand what a web browser is, what a default web browser is, are currently using Safari by default, but who see this choice screen and think “Oh this is great, I had no idea I could switch to one of these other browsers, I’ll do it...”? I’m sure there exist some such users. But I’m also sure there exist other users who don’t quite know what a web browser is, don’t know that the browser they’re currently using — and perhaps have been using for over a decade — is named “Safari”, and won’t know how to undo a mistake they might make on this browser choice screen. Users who already know how to change their default iOS web browser don’t need this mandatory choice screen; users who don’t know how to change their default browser might be stuck with a mistaken or regretted choice. Pick Safari and you will see this browser choice screen again; pick anything else, perhaps as a lark, and you’ll never see it again.

My guess is that, perhaps counterintuitively, the single biggest beneficiary of this mandatory browser choice screen will be Google Chrome, which I consider the single most dominant software monopoly in the world today. Users who already know they want to use a non-Safari browser and have set one as their default won’t even see this screen. Users who want to use Safari and know they want to use Safari will merely be annoyed by this screen (repeatedly). But non-technical users who are confused by this screen — and I guaranteed there are millions of such users in the EU alone — will surely just pick a browser they’ve heard of and hope they’ve made the right choice. Chrome is by far the most-used web browser in the world, and for some number of users the only one they’ve ever heard of.

Shortly after iOS 17.4 shipped in March — the first version with DMA compliance features, and thus the first with a mandatory browser choice screen for Safari users in the EU — there were a few stories about third-party browsers seeing an uptick in users. This one from TechCrunch is perhaps the best example. The gains were mostly reported in Bezos numbers — relative gains with no absolute numbers. Aloha Browser “said users in the EU jumped 250% in March”. Opera reported “39% growth in users on iOS selecting its browser as their default specifically, from March 3 until April 4” — but that was down from 164% growth the previous month, before iOS had implemented the mandatory choice screen in the EU. The one browser that reported actual numbers was Brave:

“The daily installs for Brave on iOS in the EU went from around 7,500 to 11,000 with the new browser panel this past March,” per a company spokesperson. “In the past few days, we have seen a new all time high spike of 14,000 daily installs, nearly doubling our pre-choice screen numbers.”

Since April, I’ve seen bupkis about any continuing “success” of the browser choice screen for small browsers. I suppose that played a part in the EC forcing Apple into the further concessions — especially re-presenting the browser choice screen to all EU iOS users who selected Safari in iOS 17.4, 17.5, or 17.6 already. But I think the truth is obvious: the vast majority of iOS users use Safari because they want to, spanning the gamut from informed nerds who appreciate Safari’s features, UI, and privacy, to non-technical typical users who just know they like the experience with Apple’s first-party ecosystem of apps and services.

But whatever the effect of this browser choice screen on iOS browser usage in the EU, it’s hard for me to see any way that Chrome doesn’t benefit from it the most. That seems like a perverse outcome for a law intended to regulate “large gatekeepers”. Chrome, with 65 percent market share across all web browsing globally, is a bigger monopoly than iOS, Android, or Windows, and the only other browser with double-digit market share (19 percent) is Safari — the browser the EC is attempting to steer users away from.

‘Default’ Apps

Back to Apple’s announcement on its Developer News site:

For users in the EU, iOS 18 and iPadOS 18 will also include a new Default Apps section in Settings that lists defaults available to each user. In future software updates, users will get new default settings for dialing phone numbers, sending messages, translating text, navigation, managing passwords, keyboards, and call spam filters. To learn more, view Update on apps distributed in the European Union.

Additionally, the App Store, Messages, Photos, Camera, and Safari apps will now be deletable for users in the EU.

Keep in mind that at least since iOS 14 (four years ago), we’ve been able to remove any apps we want from our Home screens. It’s just that certain essential system apps can’t be deleted — when removed from your Home screen, they remain available in the App Library. The App Library was a great addition to iOS, and probably should have come years sooner. But what the EC is demanding from Apple now is the ability to delete these apps. This is particularly tricky with the App Store app, because it’s through the App Store that one can reinstall deleted default iOS apps. Presumably, the App Store app will be reinstallable via Settings, one of only two non-deletable apps.²

What those cheerleading these changes miss is that deleting these core system apps doesn’t magically make iOS a modular system. Apple hasn’t announced any sort of API for third-party apps in the EU to handle SMS (and now RCS) cellular text messaging, and I don’t expect them to. Such an API would be a privacy and security nightmare.³ My guess is that if you try to delete the Messages app, iOS will show you a special confirmation alert warning you of the consequences, and if you proceed, your iPhone will simply no longer be able to send or receive SMS or RCS messages. And, obviously, iMessages. What a great feature.

Likewise, Apple hasn’t announced any sort of API for modular photo storage. Users who delete the system Photos and Camera apps won’t — at this writing — be able to choose some other app to handle photo storage. Photos and videos shot will still go to the system photo library. Images that users have previously stored on their devices will still be in the system photo library. There just won’t be an app from Apple to show the system photo library. My understanding is that, under the hood, neither Photos nor Camera are really “apps” in the traditional sense. They’re just thin wrappers around low-level system frameworks. The same system-level frameworks allow third-party apps to access the system photo library. Apple, seemingly, hasn’t been forced to allow third-party software to replace these low-level system frameworks. They’re just being forced to allow users to “delete” these thin wrappers that present themselves as apps to users. But the actual way that the system photo library works remains unchanged. It’s like if the Mac let you delete the Finder — the file system would still be there, but the user would have no way to browse it.

An OS with a fundamentally modular design, with APIs that allow nearly every system component to be replaced by third-party software, sounds like a great idea. But no major OS is actually architected like that. iOS certainly is not. So requiring Apple to allow apps like Photos and Camera to be “deleted” is purely facile, and betrays the European Commission’s technical ignorance. The EC bureaucrats issuing these dictums clearly have no idea how iOS actually works. They just know what they can see. iOS ships with a bunch of apps. All they care about is that now users in the EU will be able to delete those apps.

Sure, many photographers prefer using third-party camera apps to Apple’s system Camera app. But iOS has long offered rich support for using third-party camera apps, and with iOS 18 that support is getting even better, with users soon being able to configure the Lock Screen button that was previously dedicated only to launch the system Camera app. (Same goes for the button heretofore dedicated to the system Flashlight “app” — that’s configurable in iOS 18 too.) Camera apps added to the Lock Screen even gain special privileges in iOS 18 — for all users, worldwide, not just in the EU. Even the developers of third-party camera apps don’t see any point to being able to delete the system Camera app.

So who benefits from being able to outright “delete” the Photos and Camera apps? As far as I can tell, only people suffering from OCD who are bothered that after removing them from their Home Screen, that they’re still listed in the App Library. It’s unclear to me whether users in the EU will be able to delete apps like Photos and Camera even if they don’t have any third-party photography apps installed, which would leave their iPhone in a state where there is no way to take new photos or view existing ones. This is performative regulation. None of this deletable apps nonsense increases competition; it merely increases the chances of profound user confusion.

To be clear, just like with the browser choice screen, I don’t think these “default apps” and “deletable apps” compliance concessions from Apple are going to matter much. By design, deleting apps in iOS is a multi-step process and requires a long tap-and-hold even to get into jiggle mode. Even novice users don’t accidentally delete apps. But it’s also true that there’s no measurable demand from users to be able to delete essential system apps. So what’s the point of requiring Apple to support this? Just to watch the company dance?

I mean why stop here? Why not require Apple to ship new iPhones with only Settings and Phone pre-installed? Why not mandate that users be allowed to delete the entire OS?

Apple Intelligence and iPhone Mirroring

When Apple announced, a few weeks after WWDC in June, that the two biggest features of the year — Apple Intelligence and iPhone Mirroring — would likely remain unavailable in the EU this year “due to the regulatory uncertainties brought about by the Digital Markets Act”, DMA supporters suspected spite as the motivation. I quoted Ian Betteridge then and will quote him again, because I think his reaction epitomizes this viewpoint:

So, Apple, which bits of the DMA does Apple Intelligence violate? Because unless you can actually tell us — which case we clearly have a bit of a problem with some of the claims you’ve made about how it works — or you’re talking bullshit, and just trying to get some leverage with the EU. Which is it Tim?

I absolutely guarantee that people are going to swallow this “well you can’t make Apple Intelligence work thanks to the DMA!!” line without actually asking any questions about what it violates, because “well Apple said it and they don’t lie evah”

My response to Betteridge in June holds up, and looks even more prescient with these latest concessions from Apple.

As the DMA applies to Apple in particular, where I think DMA supporters go wrong is that they’re not really DMA supporters, but rather App Store opponents. What they feel strongly about is opposing Apple’s tight control over all third-party software on iOS, including, if not especially, control over payments for apps, games, and digital content accessed through native apps. And so they endorse and support the DMA because the DMA breaks that control. Because of the DMA, third-party app marketplaces for iOS now exist in the EU, and apps in Apple’s own App Store are able to opt into new terms to use their own payment processing (in the EU). Thus, from the perspective of opponents of Apple’s App Store, the DMA must be a net good overall, because they see the point of the DMA (as it pertains to Apple at least) as being about breaking up the App Store’s stranglehold over all iOS third-party native software.

But that’s not really the point of the DMA at all. It’s just one byproduct of it. And a very high profile byproduct, because supporting alternative app marketplaces and alternative payment processing were regulations that Apple needed to comply with starting in March of this year. If your personal beef with Apple is the App Store model, it’s easy to see how you could conclude that the DMA is about breaking up that model. And if you think the DMA is mostly about breaking up the App Store model, it’s easy to see how you think it’s nonsense that Apple Intelligence and iPhone Mirroring would raise any compliance issues, and so withholding those features from EU users (along with a third feature, enhancements to SharePlay Screen Sharing) must be spite on Apple’s part.

The thinking, I presume, is that Apple is being spiteful by withholding these features from users in the EU, in the hopes that EU iOS users will turn against the DMA and somehow demand from their EC representatives that it be repealed or amended. But that’s facile. Apple made its case against the DMA, best exemplified by Craig Federighi’s keynote address at Web Summit in Lisbon, Portugal, back in 2021 — to no avail. The DMA passed by an overwhelming margin in the European Parliament: 588 votes in favor, 11 votes against, and 31 abstentions. It’s the law of the continent.

It makes no sense for Apple to withhold tentpole iOS features from EU citizens out of spite. Even if you think Apple is guided by its own self-interest above all else, their biggest self-interest is selling new iPhones. And the biggest new feature in this year’s iPhone 16 models is going to be Apple Intelligence, and the best new feature in iOS 18 is iPhone Screen Sharing. These features will sell iPhones — but not in the EU, at least this year.

The key is that the DMA is not a targeted attack on the App Store model. It’s a sweepingly broad attack on the entire idea of integration. And integration is Apple’s entire modus operandi. The integration of hardware and software designed to work together. The integration between different devices — Continuity — that are designed to work together.

Also: the integration between different apps on the same device. Safari isn’t just a web browser that just happens to be Apple’s. It’s the web browser designed by Apple to do things the iOS way on iOS (and the Macintosh way on MacOS). If, as a user, you do things the Apple way — owning multiple Apple devices, using iCloud for sync, using Safari as your web browser — you get an integrated experience, with access on device A to the tabs open on device B, shared browsing history and bookmarks between all devices, and support for systemwide services and features. The default apps from Apple on a factory fresh iPhone are designed to work together and present themselves consistently. That’s not to say no one should use third-party apps that are alternatives to Apple’s own. Of course not. Surely almost every reader of Daring Fireball uses one or more third-party apps that are alternatives to Apple’s. I use several. But the built-in Apple apps, taken together, constitute the Apple-defined experience. Those really are the apps most non-expert users should use. And the best third-party alternatives — like Fantastical (calendar), Cardhop (contacts), Overcast (podcasts), and Bear (notes) — fit seamlessly within that overall Apple experience. They’re third-party apps that feel integrated with the first-party experience.

From the EC’s perspective, everything ought to be modular and commoditized. That’s their ideal for “competition”. A dominant position in “phones” and “tablets” shouldn’t give the company that makes those devices a leg up in the market for web browsers, email clients, messaging, or camera apps. But from Apple’s perspective, the iPhone isn’t merely a “phone”, a piece of commoditized hardware. That’s why the company generally eschews articles, speaking and writing not of “the iPhone” but just “iPhone”. For Apple, iPhone is an integrated experience, encompassing hardware, software, and services, all designed and engineered by Apple itself.

Now that we have proof that the DMA demands Apple to allow all apps other than Settings (and on iPhones, Phone) to be deleted, and to allow third-party defaults to be set for everything from contactless payments to password management to maps to translation and even to keyboards, it’s obvious that the EC might also demand that users be able to specify a third-party “default” AI language model for Apple Intelligence. Not just the optional “world knowledge” layer that Apple is currently partnering exclusively with OpenAI to provide, but the base layer of Apple Intelligence with semantic personal knowledge. Apple Intelligence isn’t designed that way. It’s not a module or an “app”. It’s a deeply integrated layer of the system software. Faced with a decision from the EC that Apple either make all of Apple Intelligence open to third-party AI (including AI systems unvetted by Apple itself), or never offer Apple Intelligence in the EU, I think Apple would choose never to offer it in the EU.

As for iPhone Screen Sharing, gatekeeping platforms aren’t permitted under the DMA to preference other products or services from the gatekeeper itself. iPhone Screen Sharing only works between iPhones and Macs — computers made by Apple. That’s against the DMA — or, at least, the EC could clearly rule that it’s against the DMA.

If the DMA had been in effect 10 years ago, I don’t think Apple Watch would have been available in the EU until and unless the EC said it was permitted. Same for AirPods, which pair with Apple devices in a vastly superior but proprietary way compared to standard Bluetooth. Any sort of integration between an iPhone and another Apple device that isn’t available to third-party devices could be ruled to violate the DMA. By the letter of the DMA, the EC should, I think, rule that all such integration is a violation.

This uncertainty will likely clear over time. Perhaps the EC will rule that Apple Intelligence and/or iPhone Screen Sharing pose no violation to the DMA, and Apple can make those features available, as they exist today, in the EU. Like, maybe the EC commissioners themselves really just want to break up the App Store model and that’s it. But European Commission vice president Margrethe Vestager clearly believes that Apple Intelligence is anti-competitive and thus a violation of the DMA. Speaking at Forum Europa in July, she said:

I find that very interesting that they say we will now deploy AI where we’re not obliged to enable competition. I think that is the most sort of stunning open declaration that they know 100% that this is another way of disabling competition where they have a stronghold already.

She’s very clear that she believes Apple is “obliged to enable competition” with AI under the DMA. Apple Intelligence enables no competition at all. Something has to give here.

The EC’s apparent expectation is that because the European Union is so large and so essential to the world, Apple — along with the DMA’s other targeted “gatekeepers” — will bend to its will and henceforth design its products and services with the DMA in mind. Modularity over integration, at all layers of the stack. Thierry Breton, the EU internal market commissioner, quipped in July: “Apple’s new slogan should be ‘act different’.”

But the EU isn’t that large or essential. The European Commission is beset by delusions of grandeur. What’s happening with Apple Intelligence and iPhone Screen Sharing this year is what I expect to happen with every new product or service Apple creates that integrates with iOS: they will come late, or never, to the EU. And all new products and services Apple creates integrate with iOS, so almost everything new from Apple will come late, or never, to the EU.

While not the intention, that’s the actual effect of the DMA. ★

The fact that DuckDuckGo and Ecosia are both the names of search engines supported within Safari and web browsers that are standalone alternatives to Safari is surely going to be a point of confusion for non-technical users. I’m not saying DuckDuckGo or Ecosia should not make their own browsers, or should have named them differently, but imagine the confusion if, instead of naming their browser “Chrome”, Google had named it “Google”. ↩︎
The other remaining un-deletable app is Phone, which I believe cannot be deleted to maintain compliance with laws that require all cellular phones, whether they have active SIM cards or not, to be able to place emergency service calls (e.g. 911 here in the U.S.). ↩︎︎
Note too that while Android has always offered APIs to allow third-party apps to handle SMS cellular messaging, popular messaging apps that support secure E2EE eschew it. Signal supported SMS on Android for over 10 years, but announced in 2022 that it was removing SMS support, for the good reason that they wanted to avoid any possible confusion about what was encrypted (all messages using the Signal protocol) and what wasn’t (all messages sent via SMS) within the Signal app. WhatsApp — the most popular messaging platform in most of the EU — has never supported SMS on Android. The remaining third-party SMS apps on Android seem like a mess of shoddy adware and scamware. ↩︎︎

Thursday, 5 September 2024

Wednesday, 4 September 2024

Tuesday, 3 September 2024

Monday, 2 September 2024

Sunday, 1 September 2024

Friday, 30 August 2024

Wednesday, 28 August 2024

Tuesday, 27 August 2024

Monday, 26 August 2024

Sunday, 25 August 2024

Wednesday, 21 August 2024

Tuesday, 20 August 2024

Monday, 19 August 2024

Sunday, 18 August 2024

Saturday, 17 August 2024

The Mac Is a Power Tool

Saturday, 10 August 2024

Back in the day, on classic Mac OS, there were no “privileges” for software. If you launched an app, or installed a system extension, that software just did what it wanted. Something as (seemingly) innocuous as a game or as necessarily powerful as a disk formatting utility just ... ran. If that disk utility had a bug that overwrote every byte of your startup disk with zeroes, well, tough luck. If you were unfortunate enough to install malicious software that spread like a virus, well, even tougher luck. That sounds awful, but in practice, it was fine. I’ve been using a Mac since 1991 and I don’t recall ever once — not once — having a problem with malware or scamware.¹

That was a long time ago.

Such a laissez-faire approach to software privileges obviously wouldn’t fly today. I want most applications on my Mac to run within a sandbox. I want applications to require explicit permission to access the camera and microphone, or to capture the content of my display. I want applications to be cryptographically signed by known developers and notarized by Apple by default. But I also want to be able to grant trusted applications non-sandboxed access to my entire file system, access to cameras and microphones, and the ability to capture my screen.

I posted a spate of links this week about how the anti-malware/anti-scamware protections in MacOS are increasingly crossing the line from “this is a reasonable balance” to “this is infuriating”. It really is turning into exactly what Apple once mocked.

The Mac is a platform where you need to be able to shoot yourself in the foot. Increased protections that make it less likely that you’ll shoot yourself in the foot are, obviously, a good idea. Many of them are downright necessary. But such protections are only undeniably good ideas when they don’t get in the way of sophisticated users using software that requires a high level of system privileges. Then they become a trade-off. There are some power users who’ve been annoyed every step of the way as Apple has increased such protections in MacOS, but I think, until recently, Apple has managed this balance well. MacOS, on the whole, has been welcoming and safe for unsophisticated users while remaining powerful and efficient for experts. But in recent years MacOS has clearly started slipping down the slippery slope of being too protective.

It’s good to be reminded of the software you have installed that requests, or outright requires, access to private data and sensitive hardware APIs. It’s very good to be alerted to any software you might have installed that has acquired such permissions without your knowledge or recollection. (Like, say, if an abusive partner has installed some sort of monitoring software unbeknownst to you.) But it’s infuriating to play whack-a-mole to dismiss a barrage of permission prompts to confirm the same permissions you’ve previously granted to the same software, and it’s even worse when you need to dig three or four levels deep into System Settings to do it.

Consider real-world power tools. No one wants to get hurt. For sure, no one wants to lose a finger. But serious tool users still have holes to drill, wood to cut, and nails to hammer. There’s a fascinating saga around the company SawStop, which invented a technology for table saws that uses capacitive sensors to prevent saws from slicing through fingers (or, say, for demo purposes, hot dogs). As of a decade ago, in the U.S. alone, over 4,000 fingers were sliced off in table saw accidents annually. That’s a lot of fingers. SawStop’s technology prevents almost all such accidents. But also: it doesn’t make table saws worse for cutting wood. The company has a FAQ about cutting wet or “green” wood:

SawStop saws cut most wet wood without a problem. However, if the wood is very green or wet (for example, wet enough to spray a mist when cutting), or if the wood is both wet and pressure treated, then the wood may be sufficiently conductive to activate the brake. If you are unsure whether the material you need to cut is conductive, you can make test cuts using Bypass Mode to determine if it will activate the safety system’s brake. The red light on the control box will flash to indicate conductivity. If the material is conductive, you can choose to operate the saw in Bypass Mode which will disengage the saw’s safety system’s brake feature and allow you to continue cutting the material.

This sounds like exactly the right balance for MacOS — a balance MacOS until recently had achieved. Safety by default, but don’t get in the way of power users doing their jobs. And when the user needs an override for the safety features, there is an override, and the situation will make clear to the user that needing to use the override is justified by the safety concerns. MacOS is veering into the territory of power users needing to flip override switches all the time.

At the two extremes of the Mac’s user base are gullible technically unsophisticated naifs, and skeptical expert power users. It’s fair for Apple to present some protections that aren’t necessary for expert power users, in the name of bolstering the guardrails for the technically unsophisticated. But at a certain point, a hammer needs to hammer whatever it strikes, and sometimes, alas, that’s the user’s thumb. That’s the Mac. It’s a Unix workstation that’s friendly enough to be used by the mass market. It is not an appliance intended to prevent any possible malware or scamware from running.

Apple makes such appliances. They run iOS. I’d go so far as to say that one problem facing the Mac has nothing to do with the Mac itself but instead is a downstream effect of the iPad’s weaknesses. I believe in the 1984 slogan that the Mac is “the computer for the rest of us”, where “the rest of us” is very much inclusive of non-expert users. But there’s a certain point of unsophistication and okey-doke gullibility where the Mac becomes an inappropriate platform for some users. There are many construction-professional power tools that shouldn’t be used by non-expert users, too.

Computers are such an essential part of the modern world — and almost everyone’s daily lives — that computers-that-work-like-computers aren’t for everyone. The world needs locked-down can’t-cut-your-fingers-off-no-matter-what-you-do platforms like the iPad. And Apple sells significantly more iPad units than Macs. But any Mac user who isn’t sufficiently served by the anti-malware/scamware protections already in MacOS shouldn’t be using a Mac at all. They should be using iPads, or something else similarly locked-down, instead. Some of these users are using Macs instead of iPads out of ignorance. Their technical needs could be met by an iPad but they don’t know it. (They are, by definition, technically unsophisticated.) But surely some of them know they’d prefer to be using an iPad instead of a Mac but can’t, because an iPad can’t do one or more things they need to do, or run software they need to run.

Power tools and user-safety features aren’t mutually exclusive. But they need to be in balance. Apple is clearly losing that balance with MacOS, and I think a big part of that is the iPad’s weaknesses tipping the scale. ★

That viruses, malware, and scamware weren’t significant problems for classic Mac OS users doesn’t mean such things didn’t exist. There was, in fact, a spate of viruses in the late 1980s and early 1990s, which were splendidly addressed by a freeware anti-virus system extension called Disinfectant, by John Norstad. But on the whole, the entire two-decade era of classic Mac OS passed without much malware. Part of that was by design, part by security-through-relative-obscurity, and part, perhaps, by good luck. ↩︎