DMA Compliance: Watch and Headphone Interoperability
The EU has followed up on its Digital Markets Act specification procedures for Apple regarding the iPhone’s interoperability with third-party connected devices like smartwatches and headphones, as announced last fall.
Today’s announcement details exactly what third-party integrations the EU commission expects Apple to implement. This includes giving third-party devices access to iOS notifications, as well as way for companies to make like-for-like competitors to AirDrop file sharing, AirPlay streaming, and much more.
The list of features that the EU commission has ordered Apple to implement is vast, as well as signalling that any future Apple features with first-party hardware integrations must also be made available to third-party companies.
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Headphone makers will be given access to system features that support AirPods, like proximity auto-pairing and automatic audio switching.
“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. “It’s bad for our products and for our European users. We will continue to work with the European Commission to help them understand our concerns on behalf of our users.”
“Europe forces Apple to compete by actually innovating, rather than holding back competitors through their monopoly” doesn’t make as good a sound bite, I guess.
Previously:
- Apple Restricts Pebble From Being Awesome With iPhones
- DMA Compliance: Default Maps App in EU
- Meta’s iOS Interoperability Requests
- European Commission Specification Proceedings
- DMA Compliance: Interoperability Requests
Update (2025-03-24): See also: Hacker News.
Why should Apple, a platform maker, have to do all the work of making a platform?
My interpretation of the adopted decision is that the EU is requiring Apple to treat iOS like a PC operating system, like MacOS or Windows, where users can install third-party software that runs, unfettered, in the background.
There is a free market argument that can be made about how Apple gets to design its own ecosystem and, if it is so restrictive, people will be more hesitant to buy an iPhone since they can get more choices with an Android phone. I get that. But I think it is unfortunate so much of our life coalesces around devices which are so restrictive compared to those which came before.
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The iPhone repositioned that in two ways. First, the introduction of iCloud was a way to “demote” the Mac to a device at an equivalent level to everything else. Second, and just as importantly, is how it converged all that third-party hardware into a single device: it is the digital camera, the camcorder, and the music player. As a result, its hub-iness comes mostly in the form of software. If a developer can assume the existence of particular hardware components, they have extraordinary latitude to build on top of that. However, because Apple exercises control over this software ecosystem, it limits its breadth.
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Even if you believe Apple is doing this not out of anticompetitive verve, but instead for reasons of privacy, security, API support, and any number of other qualities, it still sucks. What it means is that Apple is mostly competing against itself, particularly in smartwatches.
It’s like I said. What matters to Apple isn’t the products. What’s matters to Apple… is Apple.
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Then they should make it a standard, document it and build it in, because that’s what it means to be a platform. That’s what it means to care for and about the user. That’s what it means to be a technology company working not for technology’s sake, but for the betterment of the world.
But they sat on their hands and acted like a monopoly. They let sales and marketing make product decisions. They listened to users and developers ask for the same thing more evenly distributed, and they called them names, or dismissed their wishes as lunacy.
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As a user, I would have preferred that Apple would just have done the right thing from the beginning. As a user, I do not prefer that this is what happened. Much like, as a user, I do not prefer that car manufacturers are legally held to emission standards, or that factories are forced by regulation instead of driven by ideals to not pollute – or that governmental agencies step in, in the face of monopolistic practices screwing the customer. The world would be much better if there would have to be no intervention at all. Compliance is seldom as passionate and genuine as drive and goals.
Update (2025-03-25): Victoria Song:
For years, I’d ask device makers why this feature wasn’t available. Every single time, from companies large and small, the answer was that Apple didn’t allow it. So, I was hardly surprised when Android smartwatch makers started kissing iOS goodbye in 2021 with Wear OS 3. In the years since, the number of platform-agnostic wearable makers continues to dwindle.
This is a big reason why it’s a good thing that the European Commission recently gave Apple marching orders to open up iOS interoperability to other gadget makers. You can read our explainer on the nitty gritty of what this means, but the gist is that it’s going to be harder for Apple to gatekeep iOS features to its own products. Specific
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These days, I receive far more queries about smart rings and smart glasses — because everyone knows that if you have an iPhone, you get an Apple Watch, and if you have an Android, you get a Galaxy Watch or a Pixel Watch. (Maybe a OnePlus Watch 2 or 3 if you really care about battery.) If you’re an endurance athlete, you get a Garmin. There’s not much incentive for any of these companies to zhuzh up designs or think out of the box when ecosystem lock-in all but ensures they don’t have to. There’s no urgency. The result is smartwatches have become boring as we wait for the next Big Health Feature to get FDA clearance.
Can you imagine if your expensive Mac desktop had, say, some latency if you decided to enter text with a non-Apple keyboard? Or if the USB-C port only worked with proprietary Apple accessories? Clearly, those restrictions would be absurd on computers that cost thousands of dollars. And yet, similar restrictions have long existed on iPhones and the iOS ecosystem, and it’s time to put an end to them.
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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.
Whatever I may quip on the subject, Amy Worrall already said it better and more succinctly.
Regarding LocalSend: its workflow may be a bit slower than AirDrop's, but as someone with multiple devices from multiple platforms, having the ability to seamlessly exchange files e.g. from an iPhone to a Windows laptop, from my Nothing Phone 2a to my iPad, from a ThinkCentre to one of my Macs or another PC running Ubuntu, etc., all with AirDrop-comparable transfer speeds is really useful and definitely quicker and simpler than any other sharing solution coming to mind.
Let’s say a somewhat market-based economic system should allow a company to create a product and corresponding accessories by themselves, and only allow subjectively vetted third-party players to participate in a very controlled manner. This is done all the time. For example, car manufacturers are not required to allow and facilitate, at their own expense, installation of third-party engines and dashboards. They can, but they are not required to.
So there are companies that make open platforms with a slew of third-party options, and there are companies that want to provide their customers with a complete solution.
So now Apple is successful at what they do. I don’t think that forcefully making them change products will be an overall benefit for their users. Then again, unless they feel some legal pressure, they often delay features that benefit users too—like the USB-C transition.
> This is done all the time.
I'm going to need a citation for that one as the following car example is bunk.
Car makers don't need to let you install a third party engine in your car in their shop, but can't bar you from having someone else do it or even doing it yourself.
Yeah, the car example was poorly chosen. I thick John Deere are trying to emulate apples business model, with fierce anti right to repair lobbying and remote killswitches for anyone who tries to do repairs on their own.
I find it so strange that Apple game want that from Apple.
