It will be to prevent access to third-party app stores as both the EU and Japan legislated they must be allowed.
> In a support document about alternative app marketplaces in the EU, Apple explained that “device eligibility for alternative app marketplaces is determined using on-device processing with only an indicator of eligibility sent to Apple.” In practice, iOS users in the EU who want to install alternative marketplaces will need to set the country or region of their Apple ID to an eligible country or region. Moreover, they will also need to be physically located in supported EU countries.
> In the case iOS users in the EU leave eligible regions, Apple will offer a “grace period” until apps downloaded from alternative app stores can no longer be updated. “If you’re gone for too long, you’ll lose access to some features, including installing new alternative app marketplaces. Apps you installed from alternative app marketplaces will continue to function, but they can’t be updated by the marketplace you downloaded it from,” the company explained.
It is wild that Apple finds it cheaper to build and maintain different App store behaviors than to simplify and make alt app stores available in all markets. Other governments/markets don't care?
It's a very slow process, first there is investigations, then legislation, then enactment, then enforcement which is separately a very slow process. It requires a lot of willpower to get and keep the ball rolling and in fact nobody has even achieved the full extent of what they require yet! The EU may still be years away from meaningful compliance, Japan has only taken baby steps forming a new bureau just to enforce compliance of two companies widely accused of malicious compliance.
And then there is additional discouragement and pressure in the form of sanction and trade deal threats for regulating American tech platforms.
It's vastly more profitable to maintain their monopoly on iOS apps and the 30% cut than to allow users to stop paying apple a cut of their transactions.
The requirements for the third party app-stores are completely ridiculous and unreachable by 99% of the individuals and organisations out there. In practice, only vetted partners with huge resources can operate one.
As someone using AltStore PAL to install some third-party apps that would never be allowed on the App Store (such as emulators and manga readers), I heavily disagree.
Everything that didn’t turn out exactly like some people wanted is useless or the Worst Thing Ever — which is a boring and cringe rule of the internet.
I don’t think the cookie banner is useless. It’s annoying the hell out of everyone which is creating political demand for another round of legislation that should solve the issue properly.
It was a relatively easy fix which didn’t fully solve the issue but made the very real issue of pervasive tracking visible to everyone.
In addition to the third-party installation capability mentioned by siblings, Japan also has a regional capability for reassigning the side button to a third-party voice assistant (`com.apple.developer.side-button-access.allow`).
Xiaomi phones support it in all regions. Think about it, a company famous for putting ads in system apps has the feature but "privacy conscious" Apple literally put in extra work to disable it everywhere it's not legally required.
That iOS toggle isn’t about privacy but about mobile data usage. Users with data caps can limit the usage for non-essential or high data volume apps (streaming or cloud storage apps come to mind).
This is a strong indicator that Apple's privacy claims are little more than a virtue signal. Network sandboxing an app is arguably the strongest privacy protection measure possible.
That would surprise me. I don't recall having to change my iPhone's region after moving to Japan. Transport IC cards in Apple Pay have "just worked".
I am vaguely aware that some phone manufacturers silently remove certain NFC hardware (or disable some driver) in order to avoid paying Sony patent fees. Apple doesn't seem to do that, though.
Companies have never been “democracies”. Most companies are more like dictatorships internally (for employees) and past a certain size also externally (for customers). Everything is dictated by a small group of leaders and shareholders not chosen by either employees or customers.
If you really want to imagine them like democracies, you are voting with your wallet. Maybe you’re just in the minority.
Nobody said companies _are_ democracies ... you're reading something that is not there.
The point is that Apple thinks it can somehow bend the rules of the EU that were established democratically. As if users are better off with Apple's rules.
> bend the rules of the EU that were established democratically
EU might occasionally get some things right but saying it's rules are "established democratically" is a slight stretch. It's a sort of a third degree democracy (that parliament is mostly imitative, has no real power and is easily manipulated) with all implementation details and most decision making being done by unelected bureaucrats.
Yes it is not perfect, but a company telling us where democracy is functioning or not is not a solution and if a company suggests it, that is arrogant and dumb.
Fun fact that is in Russia major banks are sanctioned and had their apps removed from App Store and Google Play so banks forced to keep mobile optimized and fully featured web portals for iOS users.
Actually for any VPN apps that support per-app split tunneling, excluding a given app while vpn lockdown is enabled causes the app to be blocked. So you can have both.
You know how fractional reserve banking can create money out of thin air? In theory, the stock market can be used in the same way. Which is what the AI providers have been doing.
I agree to pay you within 90 days of receiving the product, which you'll send me in 6 months. You get to count this promise as income i've paid you right now. 9 months later I might or might not have the money to pay it for real.
The principle works for stable regular businesses where invoices do get paid, not for bubbles.
I'd argue the opposite: It works even better for bubbles.
Stable, regular businesses generally don't take on massive amounts of debt as a matter of accomplishing their value proposition. Maybe they take on the debt as a part of an expansion into a new geographic market or on developing a new product, but they typically have cash reserves to help fund those things. Accordingly the debts are relatively small and there's at least some collateral to secure them.
Any kind of bubble, on the other hand, is, by definition, financially massive. People taking on debts take on huge debts with the hopes of huge rewards. The problem is, the debts are so huge that neither the debtor nor creditor can allow them to go unpaid.
When you reach the scale of debt that you see for AI - literally trillions of dollars - the creditor isn't just a bank or a few investors, they're entire segments of the economy. The debtors can use that as leverage to get what they want. The Great Recession is a prime example of this. You had the US government print out or borrow $700 billion-ish dollars to absolve financial institutions of the toxic mortgage-backed securities on their balance sheets. Now, could they have simply declared bankruptcy and had the assets on their balance sheets claimed by other parties? Maybe, but that would have taken too long for most people's comfort and, moreover, would have been embarrassing for the country's monied elite. There had to be a bailout to keep a bunch of things solvent in the near-term, and they got one.
You could see this here: AI companies have everyone on the hook for their bets, and if it doesn't work, you can't simply write off the value of shares of everyone who has backed the bet.
They're too big to fail. If you owe the bank $1 million, you have a problem. If you owe the economy $1 trillion, the economy has a problem.
I'm curious what are these checks
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