> that has massive engineering implications for an ecosystem as vast as Apple’s.
That is Apple's problems. All Eu says is "do not deliberatly hamper competition and don't install artificial barriers to differentiate your products".
Apple has had no issues complying with every single request from any government.
> Simple features like Live Translation or iPhone Mirroring become 10x more complex to build when you need to test and support other vendor devices.
You don't have to test and support them on vendor devices. You either provide an API, or let "vendor devices" implement the same features. This has never been such big of an issue.
> In fact some features become downright impossible if you require interoperability.
Then those features are either not needed, or it's Apple's own fault (e.g. for preventing others from building the same feature set).
It's insane to me that Hacker News, of all places, would argue that walled gardens are good, actually. Ponder this article, for example: "Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones" https://ericmigi.com/blog/apple-restricts-pebble-from-being-...
> This is about slowing down the pace of development and adding engineering complexity to everything worldwide
The only ones insisting and making it so are Apple. A great example is this: https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/03/14/dma-compliance-default-ma... Apple lets users in the EU set their default maps and navigation app. But only in the EU. They literally made the whole thing more complex for themselves by restricting this feature just to the EU even though this clearly is a feature that benefits users.
It's the exact same thing with the rest of the "impossible features".
> don't install artificial barriers to differentiate your products
Some barriers are not artificial. I’m am an engineer and many of Apple’s engineering feats are only possible due to highly controlled interfaces. See for example audio applications that have very high performance requirements, such as low latency audio. It is literally impossible to build this on Android due to the interoperability layer being too slow. Many useful features on Apple devices take advantage of the highly tuned performance that can only happen on devices in the same ecosystem. Take for example Live Translation on AirPods. It’s very hard to get the same level of performance over a public API. Lots of Apple Silicon advantages in battery usage come about due to their deep integration with all parts of the hardware stack — that level of performance would be impossible over an interoperable stack. This is not about walled gardens, this is about building better performing devices with better experiences. It is much harder, near impossible, to build Apple-quality experiences over third party hardware.
I am completely against artificial walled gardens and artificial barriers but I believe many of Apple’s strict barriers are real engineering performance advantages.
It’s literally impossible to build realtime audio apps with ultra low latency on Android. People have been trying for decades. Not trivial at all.
Microsoft and Google and open source devs have tried to build something as good as a MacBook Pro for decades and failed. Because the extremely high performance and polished experience comes from the highly integrated hardware and software stack that only Apple has. Precisely because it is not interoperable. I as an engineer prefer to support fewer devices and make the experience with those few devices better rather than support lots of devices and integrations but crappily.
Again, no one expects Apple to build low latency audio for others. Literally no one. Not even EU.
That is not what Apple is told to do.
I've provided two links to examples of what Apple is asked to do, and you ignored both. Just like Apple. Pretending that people are asking it to do impossible and totally unrelated things.
Everything is a revenue calculation
> that has massive engineering implications for an ecosystem as vast as Apple’s.
That is Apple's problems. All Eu says is "do not deliberatly hamper competition and don't install artificial barriers to differentiate your products".
Apple has had no issues complying with every single request from any government.
> Simple features like Live Translation or iPhone Mirroring become 10x more complex to build when you need to test and support other vendor devices.
You don't have to test and support them on vendor devices. You either provide an API, or let "vendor devices" implement the same features. This has never been such big of an issue.
> In fact some features become downright impossible if you require interoperability.
Then those features are either not needed, or it's Apple's own fault (e.g. for preventing others from building the same feature set).
It's insane to me that Hacker News, of all places, would argue that walled gardens are good, actually. Ponder this article, for example: "Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones" https://ericmigi.com/blog/apple-restricts-pebble-from-being-...
> This is about slowing down the pace of development and adding engineering complexity to everything worldwide
The only ones insisting and making it so are Apple. A great example is this: https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/03/14/dma-compliance-default-ma... Apple lets users in the EU set their default maps and navigation app. But only in the EU. They literally made the whole thing more complex for themselves by restricting this feature just to the EU even though this clearly is a feature that benefits users.
It's the exact same thing with the rest of the "impossible features".