All of this is to say that you can believe two things.
On one hand, the principle of Apple’s sandboxed, managed, curated system (across both the OS sandbox and the store) is great for almost all developers, and users, and Apple. (Apple may or may not see things in that order.) Something over a billion people have an iPhone, and though we sometimes call it ‘closed’, it has millions of apps and billions of downloads: iOS is the largest open software ecosystem in history. The App Store model is not some kind of aberration incidental to the success of the iPhone: it is a core part of how Apple delivers the promise: a phone that just works and apps that just work.
But, on the other hand, Apple has sometimes also used the control inherent in that system to do things that are actively bad for users and developers and good only for Apple.
There are some theories of competition law that point out that Apple is far from a monopoly (especially outside the USA) and that the only necessary response to Spotify’s complaints is ‘tough’, and other theories that say that this calls for intervention: we can debate those in a bar, but meanwhile, the EU has intervened. So what happens next?
Let’s go back to the regulators’ problem – that ten year time lag. The EU’s attempt to solve this is to write laws of broad general principle that will cover new problems that might occur in the future: some of the DMA’s broad general rules address issues that only apply to Apple, but they’re still broad and general. Instead of banning particular things that Apple does, the EU has tried to redesign the entire system so that Apple doesn’t have that kind of control to abuse.
Hence: Apple uses its
