Apple on the Digital Markets Act

Friday, 26 September 2025

Apple, “The Digital Markets Act’s Impacts on EU Users”:

The DMA requires Apple to make certain features work on non-Apple products and apps before we can share them with our users. Unfortunately, that requires a lot of engineering work, and it’s caused us to delay some new features in the EU:

• Live Translation with AirPods uses Apple Intelligence to let Apple users communicate across languages. Bringing a sophisticated feature like this to other devices creates challenges that take time to solve. For example, we designed Live Translation so that our users’ conversations stay private — they’re processed on device and are never accessible to Apple — and our teams are doing additional engineering work to make sure they won’t be exposed to other companies or developers either.

• iPhone Mirroring lets our users see and interact with their iPhone from their Mac, so they can seamlessly check their notifications, or drag and drop photos between devices. Our teams still have not found a secure way to bring this feature to non-Apple devices without putting all the data on a user’s iPhone at risk. And as a result, we have not been able to bring the feature to the EU. [...]

We’ve suggested changes to these features that would protect our users’ data, but so far, the European Commission has rejected our proposals. And according to the European Commission, under the DMA, it’s illegal for us to share these features with Apple users until we bring them to other companies’ products. If we shared them any sooner, we’d be fined and potentially forced to stop shipping our products in the EU.

Live Translation with AirPods and iPhone Mirroring are both amazing features. And EU users are missing out on them. I think Apple structured this piece exactly right, by emphasizing first that the most direct effect of the DMA is that EU users are getting great features late — or never. And that list of features is only going to grow over time.

Under the section “Is the DMA Achieving Its Goals?”:

Regulators claimed the DMA would promote competition and give European consumers more choices. But the law is not living up to those promises. In fact, it’s having some of the opposite effects:

• Fewer choices: When features are delayed or unavailable, EU users don’t get the same options as users in the rest of the world. They lose the choice to use Apple’s latest technologies, and their devices fall further behind.

• Less differentiation: By forcing Apple to build features and technologies for non-Apple products, the DMA is making the options available to European consumers more similar. For instance, the changes to app marketplaces are making iOS look more like Android — and that reduces choice.

• Unfair competition: The DMA’s rules only apply to Apple, even though Samsung is the smartphone market leader in Europe, and Chinese companies are growing fast. Apple has led the way in building a unique, innovative ecosystem that others have copied — to the benefit of users everywhere. But instead of rewarding that innovation, the DMA singles Apple out while leaving our competitors free to continue as they always have.

This is all true. But I have a better way to put this. If Apple were to just switch the iPhone’s OS from iOS to Android, these DMA conflicts would all go away. Apple’s not going to do that, of course, but to me it’s a crystalizing way of looking at it. The DMA is supposedly intended to increase “competition”, which in turn should increase consumer choice. But the easiest way for Apple to comply with the DMA would be to switch EU iPhones to Android — which, by a significant margin, already has majority mobile OS market share in the EU. Here’s a link to StatCounter’s mobile OS stats for Europe (which is not the same as the EU, but as good a proxy as I could find). It’s two-thirds Android, one-third iOS — a 2-1 ratio.

If Apple just shipped all EU iPhones with Android instead of iOS, all of their DMA problems would go away. EU iPhone users would lose all iOS exclusive features and Apple device Continuity integrations. EU consumers would effectively have no choice at all in mobile OSes. They’d just get to choose which brand of Android phone to buy.

How in the world would that increase competition? iOS’s unique and exclusive features — which, yes, in many cases, are exclusive to the Apple device ecosystem — are competition.