Archive for July 11, 2025

Friday, July 11, 2025

Apple vs. the Law

James Heppell (via Hacker News):

A week ago today I had the pleasure of attending both the Apple and Google DMA compliance workshops in Brussels. More detailed articles on the questions and answers, technical and legal analysis etc will be published over at the OWA blog, where we’ve just done the first write-up on the Google part. Here though I’d like to focus more on my own experience and personal opinions, and how I feel about some of the gatekeepers’ approach to the law…

[…]

John and I asked a couple questions on Apple’s process, specifically on why the absolute best tracker system they could come up with in ~6 months was a link to a static, once-a-week-updated PDF, hidden behind an Apple developer account. They assured us it was all that they could do in time to meet the EC’s specification, ignoring the part asking why they didn’t simply use GitHub or Bugzilla like in their other projects.

[…]

Roderick asked about Apple’s absurd requirement that anyone who wants to ship their own browser engine has to release it as a new app, and so re-acquire all their users. Mike from CODE (Coalition for Open Digital Ecosystems - 13 members including Google, Opera, Qualcomm, Meta) asked why Apple doesn’t provide a system prompt to switch default browsers, and why they’ve placed so many onerous contractual requirements around launching an alternative engine.

[…]

The TLDR is users with “Age Restrictions” parental controls (11-15% of EU users) can only use Safari. All browsers - including Safari - get a 17+ rating on iOS. Which makes no sense, as the separate “Web Content Restrictions” manages all web content on iOS. […] I followed up asking Apple why they don’t allow web developers outside the EU to test 3rd party browser engines on iOS, bringing up their own point that EU iOS will “experience unique vulnerabilities and bugs”, and so it’s crucial that all web devs serving EU users can test the browser engines currently unique to it, to not put them and their users at a disadvantage compared to Safari.

Apple apparently accused multiple groups who have nothing to do with Spotify of receiving funding from them.

Something which was very hypocritical of Apple is that, despite making a lot of noise about some of their competitors being in the room, and insisting on all questions having a person and organisation, there were a lot of people attending who were paid to be there by Apple. Last year the EC did an investigation into this after the workshop, found there were a lot of hidden links, and so said that this year everybody had to disclose if a gatekeeper or other relevant party funded them. Unfortunately though it wasn’t always enforced. The most notable example of a pro-Apple group was the App Association

[…]

John brought up data portability, how Apple Photos doesn’t do proper photo export - except with Google Photos, and how it doesn’t allow users to choose which cloud provider they want to store their data with.

Previously:

Using “tmutil associatedisk” With APFS Destinations

I recently got a new SSD on Prime Day to replace one of my main hard drives. As this drive was included in Time Machine, I wanted the SSD to “adopt” the hard drive’s backup history. This way I could avoid recopying lots of data that was already backed up, which would also require pruning older snapshots.

When you get a new Mac and want to adopt the old Time Machine backup, you want tmutil inheritbackup. When you keep the same Mac but get a new source drive, you want tmutil associatedisk.

The command is documented as:

tmutil associatedisk [-a] mount_point snapshot_volume

The -a tells it to find all the snapshots for that volume on the destination, not just the specific one that you pointed it to.

mount_point is just the source volume’s path (in /Volumes, not the device path).

snapshot_volume is the destination within your Time Machine backup. The example shows this as being within the Backups.backupdb folder, but there’s no such folder when using an APFS destination. My first thought was to drag the latest snapshot from Finder into Terminal:

sudo tmutil associatedisk -a /Volumes/Aux /Volumes/.timemachine/C2E8322E-A7EA-44F8-904F-3232671E1412/2025-07-11-091237.backup/2025-07-11-091237.backup/Aux

This does not work. Instead, you need to find the path using Terminal:

sudo tmutil associatedisk /Volumes/Aux /Volumes/TM\ 7/2025-07-11-091237.previous/Aux

It’s important not to have any trailing slashes. And, also, it will fail if you use -a with an APFS destination. But I guess that’s OK because there’s only one .previous folder to point it at, anyway, and APFS itself should know the chain of parent snapshots…

Previously:

macOS Tahoe’s Folder Icon Customization

William Gallagher:

It’s not like it’s going to take you long, since there are just two elements to this:

  • Changing a folder’s color
  • Adding either an icon or an emoji to the folder

In this case, icons and emoji don’t sound all that different — whichever you choose, you end up with a symbol appearing on the folder. But there are differences, and at the least, having a choice of both gives you scope to go crazy with customizing everything.

Sam Henri Gold:

Figured out how to apply any arbitrary SF Symbol to a folder in Tahoe.

xattr -w 'com.apple.icon.folder#S' '{"sym":"camera.viewfinder"}' some/folder/here

This also works with private symbol names.

also because emoji labels are just handled as strings, you can put anything in the emoji config thing.

For example:

xattr -w 'com.apple.icon.folder#S' '{"emoji":"HIMOM"}' some/folder/here

Previously:

Apple Wins Dismissal in Payments Conspiracy Lawsuit

Hartley Charlton:

Apple has successfully secured the dismissal of a federal lawsuit accusing it of conspiring with Visa and Mastercard to suppress competition in the payments network industry and inflate merchant transaction fees (via Reuters).

[…]

The plaintiffs claimed that Visa and Mastercard made ongoing payments to Apple, described as “a very large and ongoing cash bribe,” to ensure Apple would not build its own rival payment network.

[…]

The court concluded that the plaintiffs had failed to provide sufficient factual allegations to support their claims, saying that they were largely circumstantial and speculative. The judge noted that Apple’s existing agreements with Visa and Mastercard included language that explicitly preserved Apple’s right to compete with them.

I’ve thought all along that the 0.15% is a really sweet deal for Apple. As far as I’m aware, Google Wallet gets 0%. Of course they wouldn’t put the no-compete stuff in writing, just as the Safari agreement with Google doesn’t specifically prohibit Apple developing its own search engine. In both cases, it probably doesn’t make sense for Apple to do it, and they’re getting paid—one oligopoly to another—for the status quo, so why bother?

Previously:

Copyright © 2000–2025 Michael Tsai.