As a distraction from the soap opera of will he/won’t he be leaving SMG, I thought it might be good to brain dump a few ideas about Apple’s recent woes involving the EU DMA and the US DoJ anti-trust suit.
Firstly, Apple looks to be stagnating. While it’s doing very well on the Apple silicon front, making impressive leaps in performance with each generation, the iPhone has started to feel less like a phone and more of a glorified Oojamaflip. Its cameras are undoubtedly brilliant, and a supporting operating system for managing photos, music and other consumable media – also brilliant. It runs third party apps that can extend the use of the phone to do practically do whatever you want it to do. Except you can’t.
It’s just not flexible. At least for developers.
The ecosystem is essentially a for-profit prison in which you’re told what you can and cannot do because security. But the truth is that when I’ve tried to find an app (that usually doesn’t exist – yet), I’ve come across loads of fake, duplicate, cheesy crap which could well be hiding all manner of things. I do not honestly believe as a gatekeeper, Apple is doing that good of job. Quality over quantity? Nope.
The main reason I switched from an iPhone 15 Pro Max to a Pixel 8 Pro is that the raw phone component of the iPhone is utter crap. It has the most basic call handling and filtering that I’ve come across. Third-party apps don’t help – and they’re restricted to what they can do. But the Pixel 8 Pro with Android 14 has more useful tools built-in that it doesn’t require any third-party utilities. It can call screen and transcribe, provide a visual display of a call centre to speed things up, and can notify you when a person has picked up the phone when on hold. It recognises business names and numbers, can filter known spammers and nuisance callers, and you can contribute to that by reporting numbers too. It can also transcribe voicemail, but EE doesn’t support it. Android allows for far more customisation, and makes repetitive tasks substantially easier.
The big bugbear that both the EU and DoJ have is iMessages. It’s an Apple-only feature, but the argument is that why should you have to buy an Apple to have its security functions. You could argue there are alternative options like WhatsApp, Telegram and others – but the point they’re trying to make is that you shouldn’t have to be limited by the hardware or operating system to be able to send secure messages (except when the government objects to it – oh, the irony).
I think it’s about time that Apple concentrated on making more of its services cross-platform – in the same way that Apple Music works on Android and Windows 11 (though the Windows 11 Apple Music app is buggy – it’s enough to make me want to move to Spotify, but Spotify has to do better in some areas first – that’s for another post). I can’t watch my purchased Apple movies and TV shows on my phone – I have to use a PWA (progressive web app) and that only allows me to use Apple TV+.
The only three things that I have which are Apple: iPad Mini 6, HomePod mini and the Apple TV 4K (64Gb). Everything else has recently been replaced: M2 MacBOok Pro was sold and replaced with a Dell Inspiron 16 Plus (highly recommended), the iPhone 15 Pro Max replaced with a Pixel 8 Pro, the Apple Watch Ultra 2 replaced with .. well, that’s a difficult one and again, will be another post – but essentially I’m sticking with the Garmin Instinct 2 Solar for now. I’ve replaced the AirTags with Tile Pro products.
Given everything that’s gone on in the games industry recently, Apple has a snowball’s chance in hell of ever making the Mac suitable for playing triple A titles. It is possible, but many developers aren’t going to spend limited development budgets on converting existing titles or establishing new titles for the Mac. Apple would need to essentially partner with or take over a game studio in order to establish greater dominance in that area.
Apple’s behaviour with Epic Games has been atrocious. I was highly critical of Epic when they deliberately broke Apple’s rules with Fortnite, but Apple has since behaved just as badly – if not more so – when it’s come to the DMA’s rules. All in the name of “security”. Security shouldn’t cost the Earth, for starters. I firmly believe good security shouldn’t be priced out the reach of the ordinary consumer or business.
It’s a complete mess, and it’s not hard to see why both the EU and the US DoJ have had to step in. The next few months are going to be interesting.