Because it requires the devotion of Apple's resources to supporting non-Apple things. It will necessarily degrade certain experiences away from those that Apple would provide without the regulation.
Why do there need to be new customers? If you didn't like the product before, you can look elsewhere (or look within). Seems pretty messed up to ruin the experience for those who have been enjoying the products as is for years.
How would opening up the API and payment system ruin the product? I want to buy audible books from the audible app on my phone but I can’t do that. I want to subscribe to Netflix from my phone but I can’t.
Seems to me that opening this stuff up would make our phones better, not worse.
Ah, yes, if only Apple Computer could have borrowed the wisdom of the famously prescient and tech literate European Union, it might have seen its way to these changes and new customers alone.
Apple has a bajillion dollars and cheats their own engineers.
> Apple is the world's largest technology company by revenue, the world's largest technology company by total assets,[454] and the world's second-largest mobile phone manufacturer after Samsung.[455][456]
> In its fiscal year ending in September 2011, Apple Inc. reported a total of $108 billion in annual revenues—a significant increase from its 2010 revenues of $65 billion—and nearly $82 billion in cash reserves.
> In re: High-Tech Employee Antitrust Litigation (U.S. District Court, Northern District of California 11-cv-2509 [10]) is a class-action lawsuit on behalf of over 64,000 employees of Adobe, Apple Inc., Google, Intel, Intuit, Pixar and Lucasfilm (the last two are subsidiaries of Disney) against their employer alleging that their wages were repressed due to alleged agreements between their employers not to hire employees from their competitors.[11][12] The case was filed on May 4, 2011 by a former software engineer at Lucasfilm and alleges violations of California's antitrust statute, Business and Professions Code sections 16720 et seq. (the "Cartwright Act"); Business and Professions Code section 16600; and California's unfair competition law, Business and Professions Code sections 17200, et seq. Focusing on the network of connections around former Apple CEO Steve Jobs, the Complaint alleges "an interconnected web of express agreements, each with the active involvement and participation of a company under the control of Steve Jobs...and/or a company that shared at least one member of Apple's board of directors." The alleged intent of this conspiracy was "to reduce employee compensation and mobility through eliminating competition for skilled labor."
And do you really think they've "seen the light" since then?
> the entire tech industry was colluding on salary and comp?
And BTW it pretty much was the entire tech industry, it came out in the court proceedings: "Dozens" of other major tech companies were involved. Pando Daily had good reporting but they closed but you can still read up on it through the Archive.
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The OP said:
> Because it requires the devotion of Apple's resources to supporting non-Apple things. It will necessarily degrade certain experiences away from those that Apple would provide without the regulation.
The first point (about Apple's war chest) is that they have plenty of resources.
The second point (about how they conspired to cheat their own engineers despite having more money than Scrooge McDuck) is just to remind everyone that these are amoral money-grubbing bastards who will do pretty much anything they think they can get away with to make a buck.
The idea that opening up their walled garden to competition will "degrade certain experiences" is laughable.
I kinda get your point that Apple will have to devote some more resources, but it will only be slightly more: All the API are already there and being used by Apple apps privately and they just have to make it open to everyone. That's not really a huge overhead for someone of Apple's size - they'll just need to publish / update documentation and increase their developer support teams and that doesn't cost 10's of millions of dollars (which is again peanuts for Apple).
Private apis are nothing like public. You can’t just document them and toss em out the door because Private means you can change and break them every release without concern because you control all the consumers. You can also start using incomplete ones before the contract is solidified. Public means they are in use and shouldn’t change much, and if you do you need to announce a deprecation and then slowly deprecate. Not that apple has to do that but generally that is the rather large difference and you know the moment they break one everyone will be scream at them for that.
This is really not how it works. Private APIs are usually poorly designed for general use — safeguards for excess power consumption, etc, often don’t exist.
Many things will need to be rewritten; this legislation will result in significant delays in shipping new end-user features, if Apple doesn’t simply pull out of the EU, since the EU is demonstrating with this legislation that they don’t care about end-user privacy/security.
> This will have an extremely high cost to Apple if it’s implemented.
Come on, do you really expect us to be sympathetic to a trillion dollar company if its profit margin reduces? (Which any way may not happen - realistically, they'll just pass on the cost to us consumers).
How? If someone installs different app store and it breaks, they just don't handle the requests regarding 3rd party apps, just like now. What extra resources you're talking about
