Apple said it will not release some planned new features to users in the European Union this year because Digital Markets Act regulations make it difficult or impossible to deliver them to the EU as it would compromise users’ security and privacy.
Edith Hancock for The Wall Street Journal:
The company’s lawyers said on Monday that tools such as a “visited places” service that tracks and records where users have been won’t be rolled out in the EU when it releases its iOS 26 software update later this year.
Apple has routinely criticized that law, saying it degrades the quality of its products, opens users up to privacy and security risks and makes rolling out new software features in Europe more complicated.
“We’ve already had to make the decision to delay the release of products and features, we announced this month for our EU customers,” Kyle Andeer, Vice President, Apple Legal, told a workshop with EU officials and developers in Brussels. Users’ security could be compromised if the company is obliged to open up its ecosystem to competitors, Andeer said.
Andeer also criticized the DMA more broadly, saying that changes the company has had to make to bring its products in line with the rules since last year “create real privacy, security, safety risks to our users.”
MacDailyNews Take: Gee, that’s too bad. Also, marinate in it, EU. You shot yourselves in the foot, so expect some pain.
As we wrote over nineteen (😳) years ago:
[W]e usually prefer the government to be hands-off wherever possible, Laissez-faire… Regulations are static and the marketplace is fluid, so extensive regulations can have unintended, unforeseen results down the road. – MacDailyNews, June 9, 2006
The European Union arose because the Europeans couldn’t compete on their own with the rest of the world, so they each lined up to surrender their national sovereignty, unique cultures, and dignity for an undemocratic, opaque, wasteful, bloated, bureaucratic quasi-governmental blob – and, even with the EU’s thumbs all over the scale, they still can’t compete. — MacDailyNews, March 4, 2024
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It’s refreshing to see Apple show a backbone on this issue. The EU are the villain’s here and has customers begin to complain, Apple can and should double-down and call them out.