> Compared to politics in general, this is a very niche topic.
Most of what government do is reasonably niche. Like, this obviously gets a lot of attention on HN, but it's only a very small part of the stuff that the EC does.
There have been very significant changes to legislation, which forced Apple to change their practices. This isn't an issue where one company over reached and was forced to change their behavior. This is a long running process by the EU.
>Most of what government do is reasonably niche. Like, this obviously gets a lot of attention on HN, but it's only a very small part of the stuff that the EC does.
Yeah. The US approach is, generally, to try to address novel issues in court, essentially creating new rules via the courts in areas which currently have poor coverage (US agencies do also create new rules via devolved powers, or via legislation, but the US system leans more on the courts). The EU tends to legislate, by preference, and then enforce the new rules (at which point they're challenged in court, typically).
Currently, the US is addressing this via the US v Apple, US v Google etc cases (applying existing law and precedent to a novel situation), while the EU is addressing it via the DMA and DSA (new laws intended for this sort of situation). To some extent this is just a difference between common law and civil law practices (strictly speaking the ECJ isn't civil law, it's its own thing), though the US does lean more heavily on litigation vs legislation than even other common law countries.
From a purely selfish and practical view, that goes against my ideology, it’s already difficult enough to keep my elderly relatives keeping their iPhone free of scam apps. Opening it up will make it even worse.
If you live in the EU, reach out to your representative(s) and share your perspective. I don't agree with that some group should suffer because another gets value from a locked down device, but I still believe your voice should be properly heard.
I don’t think it’s quite there yet, but the iOS Assistive Access mode is a step in the right direction. Eventually phones will have to have an “old people” mode, right? I especially worry how my grandparents will comply with 2FA requirements, passkeys, etc.
One thing I have been considering for my immediate family, and possibly my parents, is setting up a small MDM. This seems more in line with allowing power users to do powerful things while keeping the less savy users from totally blowing up their devices with malware. I've never run an MDM though, only on the receiving end for work devices, so I'm not too sure about the complexity involved.
Well smart phones have been out for almost twenty years now. Maybe we should stop structuring our society around people who refuse to learn new concepts. What were they doing 11 years ago on the third Tuesday of March? In know they weren't working, they weren't raising children; they have unlimited free time to teach themselves something new.
There could still be a technical solution whereby ios is made open in general, but has a hardware-dependent flag that locks it down. And then we can see who prefers to buy these locked devices.
In general I think the EU has quite mixed results. Some things they absolutely did get right, but others were complete failures.
reply