DMA Compliance: Watch and Headphone Interoperability

Regulating the points of interconnection is the way this will be solved - requiring Apple to have an all dogfood diet, and only able to use the same interconnections they make available to third parties for every form of communication, at every level of their software and hardware stack, will force them to make unambiguously better products on their own merits.

> slowing down Apple’s ability to innovate
They should have blamed the Apple “Intelligence” debacle on the EU.

Apple is already on a dogfood diet. What they’re being told to do is make their internal dogfood available and appropriate for the general public, even if that public is a cat, a spy-mouse, or a robot.

The difference of course is that Apple trusts itself…but is now tasked to make its tech trustworthy for its users (the consumer) even if there are untrustworthy intermediaries (other developers and device-makers).

A potentially difficult thing… perhaps there will just a “we aren’t responsible if the service you use sucks up your notifications and uses them for marketing or AI-training, person-network-analysis, or phishing, etc.” warning that companies will complain about.

Just a thought exercise: What’s the appropriate amount of time (or other criteria) for Apple to solely benefit from its innovations, and when others can ‘free ride’, to use an economics term, on its work?

8 years? (AirPods with their very cool auto-switching came out about 8 years ago)
13 years? (Apple’s Apple Watch and its remote, actionable notifications came out in 2015)
14 years? (Airdrop first came out in 2011 — a huge convenience for quickly sending files)

Well, this seems somewhat similar to utility patents (the US and EU grant utility patents 20 years of exclusive use), but goes further because in this case the inventor now has responsibility to support the utility for public use.

@Someone else I don’t think that “free ride” is really the right term here. In many cases, it’s not really that others want to benefit from Apple’s innovations. It’s that they’re blocked from implementing their own alternative (or from getting there before Apple). With Mac and Windows, Dropbox could just innovate on their own, and their hacked product worked better than the official API that Apple eventually built into the OS. Growl did notifications first and in a more flexible way that could have worked with Pebble. With iOS, everything is so locked down that the only way anything can happen is if Apple specifically anticipates and allows it.

“Today’s decisions wrap us in red tape, slowing down Apple’s ability to innovate for users in Europe and forcing us to give away our new features for free to companies who don’t have to play by the same rules,” said Apple in a statement given to MacRumors.

Stop it! Oh, the schadenfreude!

Is this the beginning of the slightest glimmer of self-awareness? Let's hope so!

Benjamin Mayo in a later “article” (https://9to5mac.com/2025/03/19/apple-says-eu-interoperability-requirements-enables-unfettered-access-to-the-iphone-risks-customer-security-and-privacy/)

“As well as frustrating the development process, it is essentially being forced to give away all of its innovations to others for free.
So far, the European Commission has only used these Digital Markets Act specification tools with Apple. That means only Apple is being forced to comply to this degree, while others can freely leech off of it.”

anyways, remember when folks over at 9to5 got super butthurt about being called an apple enthusiast site instead of journalism or whatever? weird. hard to say why that distinction was ever made. maybe they should try not being a more effective mouthpiece for apple PR than the folks that apple pays exorbitant amounts of money to do just that. only winner here is apple, who gets a huge PR blast for zero dollars.

Of course it's only "used" with Apple; smart-watch and other wearable devices can interact with Android devices to the full extent of the OS and create a competitive product.

Gruber's passive aggressive take doesn't disappoint:

https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/03/19/eu-apple-interop-requirements

> Apple’s core competitive asset — making devices that work better together than those from other companies — isn’t legal under the DMA.

Apple's "core competitive asset" should be the high quality hardware and software, not artificially gating other vendors from competing and calling it superiority when only one device can compete.

@Leo Natan Bingo.

Does anyone think the Butterfly keyboard would have lasted more than 6 months, if Apple was required to provide macOS under FRAND licencing terms to other computer companies?

Does anyone think Macbooks would have notches if Apple was required to FRAND licence macOS to competitors?

Would iPhones still have TouchID if the possibility of consumers demonstrating a preference for it was allowed by iOS being FRAND licenced to companies producing phones with fingerprint scanning?

Apple's ability to tie their software to their hardware allows them to ship worse products than the market would tolerate otherwise.

"as well as way for companies to make like-for-like competitors to AirDrop file sharing"

So we can make a service that randomly fails, has inexplicable speed issues, and offers zero troubleshooting options? Fantastic!

It blows my mind that AirDrop is still so unreliable. It’s faster and more reliable to email a file to myself—routing it halfway around the world—than to use a supposedly “instant” local transfer by a company that claims “it just works.”

How does the multiplatform service/app Local Send compare to airdrop?

I've used it to send files between my MBP and Android without any issues, but I can't compare to airdrop

@Matthew That's strange, because I've found Airdrop to be one of the most reliable things Apple has done in a long time - right after TouchID, and ApplePay in-store.

SMB ethernet sharing between Macs, FaceID, and ApplePay via the web, in contrast, are some of the most unreliable technologies I've ever used.

@Kristoffer Does Local Send rely on using a specific app on the Mac, or does it hook in to the share menus / Finder etc (because that's what I would hope the EU would be mandating).

I use Apple because they control everything, I want something like a washing machine, it just work.
This European law is just making Apple into a babel tower of conflicting devices, software like windows is.
Forever the attack on Apple, is it jealousy ?
What about Amazon, google ?
I do agree that the focus should be on a better relationship between developers and Apple, but to get everything for free ?
Bloomberg API is very costly it is not free

@Someone I never tried that before but this is what I found from my initial test.

I opened a png using the spacebar to open it in preview
I clicked File > Share
Local send wasn't there
So I clicked Manage Extensions and toggled LocalSend
Now I can select LocalSend from the share menu
But the only thing that does is open LocalSend where I have to manually find what I want to share
Plus I need to open LocalSend on my phone in order for LocalSend on my MBP to see it

So there's definitely room for improvement

@someomeelse “ Airdrop first came out in 2011 — a huge convenience for quickly sending files”

In the case of AirDrop, a 3rd party solution would be nice considering AirDrop (like AirPlay) is quite unreliable. It’s like a videoconference, you frequently spend more time trying to connect than you spend sending the file.

"Apple’s core competitive asset — making devices that work better together than those from other companies — isn’t legal under the DMA"

Does Gruber realize what he's saying here? That Apple is no better than any other company, and the only reason they can make better products is their anti-competitive behavior?

@Plume In my opinion (my lawyers advise me), Gruber is saying exactly what he is briefed to say.

Gruber is either an idiot, or deliberately lying to his audience - it's manifestly clear that the reason Apple's services work "better" together, and that competitors' can't do the same things, is because Apple provides infrastructure to its own devices, that it denies competitors, because it has a level of control over the device platforms that allow it to do that.

That is a crime in the EU.

"Apple’s core competitive asset — committing crimes — isn’t legal under the DMA" #FixedItForYou

An example: HomeKit is pretty powerful under the hood, but Apple's stock Home app doesn't offer the user any access to advanced functionality. Luckily, HomeKit is (mostly) open to third-party developers, and developers can join the market, e.g. acasa with their Controller for HomeKit. So having access to the insides of Apple's operating systems is a good thing for developers imho. In this particular case, it resulted in a far superior product, but there are still some minor restrictions: Apple prohibits third-party developers from directly controlling accessories with automations via HomeKit; instead, the only solution is to compose a scene for that one accessory, and automate the scene instead of the accessory directly. So even here there's some room for improvement, and the DMA could help.