If this word salad represents the level of security concern within the EU then the DMA is going to be even worse than I had imagined. And I thought it was going to be bad already. The idea that you can trust every third-party store to protect their customers is ludicrous. As is the idea that the governments in the EU will be able to respond to every malware attack. Every ransomware group out there and the new ones that this will create have to be delighted by the possibilities.
Well, they don't need to force it on Android, what alternatives are there? And what market share do those alternatives have on Android? Apple does not make a multiplatform Safari anyway.
No, it's not a good thing. Web browsers have been slowly converging into a single engine, Chromium. And the EU just kneecapped the second player and only widespread alternative. The marginal benefit of allowing what is now a largely irrelevant browser (Firefox has a 3% global market share now) to expand in a new platform (iOS) is not worth the cost of letting Chrome also expand into iOS. I'm not one to make predictions, but I believe in a decade we'll be remembering this decision grimly.
From experience, this doesn't work. People get angry when your product has issues no matter what caused those issues (not even when they cause the issue themselves!). Saying "it's not our fault" usually doesn't achieve anything. What ends up happening is that you need to invest a lot of time investigating the root cause of the issue (even if it's not within your product) to find workarounds in favor of your clients, who won't be grateful (not even close).
Sure. That's why Apple initially went with a model that allows them to make actual security and privacy protections. But just like when jailbreaking iPhones allowed malware and it got reported, Apple responded by saying we don't support jailbreaking and anything that happens is on the user. I suspect this will be the same. When the inevitable happens, there will be a flurry of press reports and Apple will respond, we don't support those App stores and users are safer just using ours.
Out of curiosity, how would the DMA work on a device that only takes physical media?
Truthfully I’m not sure but one aspect of the physical media era was that it was identical in all the ways supposedly important to the new regulations: no matter where you bought the game from, the console maker always got a significant percentage of the money and had ultimate control over who had access to the console market. Sure there was the veneer of having bought the game from a different store, but you were still really always buying from the console maker. It’s why originally console games even cost more than PC games until it was realized that console gaming had sufficiently anchored the price of buying games in general and PC gaming “caught up”.
I wondered about that. Did Activision pay CompUSA/Egghead to carry World of Warcraft, or did CompUSA/Egghead buy the game at a wholesale rate then sell it at MSRP and pocket the difference?
I *believe* they were bought at wholesale and it wasn’t a “auction of shelfspace”-type deal, which explained some of the dynamics (bargain bins, difficulty for new publishers with no track record getting into the stores, etc.). I remember reading an article that explained it all, but I can’t find it now.
