The goal from the EU was clearly to make iOS have an android level of openness, and it seems to have failed at that and apple has made the experience altogether worse in retaliation.
For the record - I’d love to have side loading on my phone. I’d love to be able to load IntelliJ on an iPad, but it is not the place of a government to regulate how a company is able to use their own platform that they developed with their own money and tools. It is not a monopoly, android exists so there is still user choice. Are we going to start worrying about the inability to download doom to your Samsung fridge because it doesn’t offer user choice?
I’d argue that this isn’t a good example of an effective anti monopoly regulation, it’s a good example of how government regulation tends to just result in things being worse and more complex as everyone enters a race to sidestep.
Umm, yes it is. There are plenty of government regulations of companies that are like this but you're so used to it elsewhere that you don't notice or think about it.
If Apples decisions were truly so anti-consumer, then consumers would use a different platform, such as android. This is as a developer who has to pay the App Store fees.
All this regulation has done is make the app acquisition experience on iOS worse as a whole and laid a minefield of vague legal regulations and lawsuits yet to come.
And if I’m reading it right, both apple and the eu (and its citizens) can share a cake happily - a nonprofit org can create an app store without any fees (f-droid alternative), where end-users can safely install actually free and not freemium software, while meta/google will be blocked from leeching on the platform due to their network effect, at least doing free apps as a for profit company (aka, where the user itself is what gets sold) will not be financially sensible way, so they have to play by apple’s ways (which is again, both a win for apple and the end-users for stricter privacy regulations).
Also, I do think that certain specialized, commercial software may find its niche on alternative stores, and that’s also a win for everyone - they surely calculated that transaction costs not going through apple is better for them even with the cost.
So, I don’t see the problem.
If regulation is supposed to help consumers, and a large percentage of consumers have chosen the non-Android option, why was any regulation needed? No one was being forced onto iOS.
I think the (supposedly approved) rules ended up convoluted because many (most?) users are perfectly fine with iOS when given the choice, and the EU had to accept that fact.
I'm sure there will be a way around this geoblock in no time. It may be as simple as changing the country in your Apple ID — just put a random address from that country in there and you're done.
I know better than to say there will never be a way around it but you’ll probably have to be able to fool it while entirely in airplane mode, without SIM, while also finding a way to actually download what you want to install.
But even if you do want to pay for things, I suppose you can make a second account for the desired country, activate your iPhone and set up alternative app stores with that, and then log into your real one.
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