I can see why Apple might want to request an 18 month exemption, there's clearly extra work required to comply with EU regulations. But on the other hand it also feels like a straightforward play for consumer sympathy: let them get used to using it every day for 18 months, then pressure the EU to let it continue or you rip the feature away and anger users (who you then point to the EU as the problem)

It's not as if Apple doesn't have the money to dedicate a team to matching the EU's requirements on a deadline. They just choose not to.

Sure, there's a messaging component to this. However, any company that isn't trying to just skirt the law will aim to do this sort of thing correctly, and it's an enormous effort.

I know it’s not quite as simple as that but I do think it shows Apple are more interested in blaming the EU than reducing the potential issues ahead of time.

This slows down deploying the system globally. Particularly if the target is moving, it may make sense to build lightly so one can pivot, and then build in the compliance stuff after you know you have a winning configuration.

The EU has its laws. Apple has its strategy. The only thing I fault anyone on is the public bickering.

DMA was designed to be a comprehensive regulatory suite. Lawmakers knew it would be onerous; that’s why it only applies to large companies.

Also, the DMA’s interoperability requirement creates external partners. Let’s face it, Apple’s track record with Siri sucks. If they launch a system and it is crap again, they may not now want an entire ecosystem of folks who will cry foul if they dump the API and start over.

> Do what you have to do to comply with the law and release, as always

Just follow the law. If that means not releasing in a jurisdiction, do that and then don’t tweet snotty things about it. (Siri AI isn’t launching in China, either. I don’t see PMs complaining about that in public.)

Everyone constantly does!

At what cost? This is Apple’s second bite at AI. Giannandrea fucked up the first time. I’m honestly with Cupertino on not over complicating it the second time around. If they found the right mix of features and architecture, great, then work to port it to high-bar jurisdictions.

I totally agree with you in principle here, but Apple have a pretty large vested interest in not supporting interoperability here (and in the other cases, like Mac mirroring) so I honestly don't see that happening at all.

This is purely a lobbying move against the EU to get EU citizens/politicians to complain about the laws and get an exemption.

And to be fair, Apple's business model is currently structurally incompatible with a lot of the DMA (which I personally think is a good thing), so they kinda have to fight it for a while.

Laws vary from country to country, state to state, and they vary tremendously. Laws are also changing all the time. There's literally no way to predict what rules will be in place at any given time.

Also, adding code to meet some government regulation takes time and effort that (form the company's perspective) could be better spent building a product and making money. No one would "choose" to implement some random compliance rule unless they're forced to.

Bad comparison. Launching with GDPR compliance isn’t particularly taxing if you’re already complying with California’s CCPA. (You need your twenty-eight EU law firms on retainer, but the big firms package that conveniently.)

Copyright theft in AI, on the other hand, is a global phenomenon.

DMA is most akin to the U.S. system of designating financial institutions SIFIs and then putting a bunch of extra requirements on them. It’s absolutely onerous. But I think, in the long run, it probably benefits European consumers and developers. In exchange for being late to the party they get a chance at Apple’s profits.

For example, with Copilot, you get a contractual pinky promise that they cannot access your data.

Can engineers really not access ? Can the police really not access ?

It's like AirTag for example. Apple cannot access it because it's scientifically "impossible" by design, but if they sign-in to your account, well it's over.

Once Apple fills the right audit / certification / paperwork they will be able to enable that feature. It could also be a negotiation lever.

Isn’t this less about privacy than competition?

Let's call it how it is: Android phones allow every competitor to run their chatbot in place of Gemini. Want Perplexity instead of Gemini? You can have it. Samsung launches with Perplexity as of late.

Apple? As always, went into "ay mate, too integrated, can't give the same APIs to competitors" lame excuse.

Weird to say it but the only assistant with any guarantee for privacy by design is Siri at the moment.

That's not how the deal was announced. You don't pay Bs / year for a licence to gemini to send them your data. You pay that to run it on your own hardware, in your own garden, so the data stays put.

I know the internet is always anti big companies, but this is likely a "not worth it for now, we'll eventually do it" effort from Apple. The EU AI act is a mess, and the effort to simply know what they have to do to comply with it is likely going to take armies of people (not devs) and a lot of time, as the OOP said.

And the saddest part about it, is that Apple has the money and resources to sink into this. Think about all the small players that don't. This is yet again a miss for the commission, with the end result being an insidious form of regulatory capture. It sucks for those of us running small companies. Oh well.

Or never. Like the majority of Pixel 10 on device AI features (image editing, magic cue).

I have not been able to switch language in Sheets since 2018, and I've changed any possible setting (even account language).

All guides are in English and I'm stuck with Sheets in Italian.

https://www.business-standard.com/technology/tech-news/googl...

I run Perplexity in place of Gemini, but I can also run Claude and others.

[1] https://i.imgur.com/BgvxqQQ.png

Apple is just being the usual Apple being both an hardware vendor and giving it's own software advantages that competitors don't have and using the security bogus argument as always.

And yet, people believe that crap and jump into defending Apple as if being an Apple user is their identity, sad.

And yet Apple had no major issues complying to the draconical demands of the CCP to sell and operate there. Weird.

Also, it's not like Apple can't afford the manpower for this. They're not a hole in the wall mon & pop shop.

At the same time, this potentially opens up the entire worldwide market (imagine EU iPhones being imported into US to use with OpenAI or Claude Cowork), and they probably made the estimation that keeping EU out is still better value (70% of the market all to themselves) than fair competition in the 100% of the market (I guess they estimate they might get less than 70% in that case).

Or they are hoping that EU customers will want Siri AI enough to campaign for a change, but I'd find that highly unlikely.

That's not the case. it's merely software (exactly like my iPhone 16 lacking the promised AI features claimed at WWDC24).

Anyway as I'm now within the EU with phone I bought before moving to the EU, regional features (or restrictions) depends on the logged in account and device regional settings. Except physical considerations (eSIM design, actual radio transceivers). The hardware is the same thank god.

If Siri wants to be seen as anything it should first support every EU language and they can work from there.

They may also not want to commit to a platform play until they find what works. Siri has been an albatross for Cupertino. If they launch a full platform, they may have to maintain it. If this Siri iteration is another flop and they’re in control, they can pivot more easily.

This is true of most things that involve legal. Laws are not code, in basically any jurisdiction they are subject to interpretation, and just because you've dotted your Is and crossed your Ts, doesn't mean an enterprising enforcement agency won't still come after you

The only difference that I can see here is that the standards layer hasn't solidified yet.

But Apple's position here is actually really wild: Apple claims to protect user privacy all the time. But they can't offer a product in a major jurisdiction that has actually meaningful privacy laws? Didn't they consider that while designing the product?

This is quite the contradiction.

Complying with complex privacy laws is surprisingly orthogonal to making a product with good privacy.

In another regulatory area (not privacy, but something more historically regulated) we ran into strange situations where complying with the letter of the law would require us to walk back things that we had done in a better way. The laws are not simple and they're not written by engineers or even people who understand what future product needs look like.

Tax laws are also quite easy, tax lawyers are only needed if you want to NOT pay what the country you're operating in is owed.

There's entire industries of experts who work on these tasks, and they don't just work for people trying to skirt the rules. I've hired people for both tasks and the reason was specifically to comply.

Privacy isn’t complex, compliance is.

> Tax laws are also quite easy

Yet audits are still a pain.

> tax lawyers are only needed if you want to NOT pay

This is nonsense. Tax lawyers are sometimes used to skirt the law. They’re much more often there to help prove you followed it.

Someone has to understand the codes and how they might be applied to a specific project, and direct a project such that the outcome will comply.

Codes dont provide a blueprint for a house or a bridge. They stipulate features and properties that it must have. Design resides with the firm.

Here's their argument in their own words: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/06/due-to-dma-siri-ai-de...

Lemma 2: you are obliged by other regulation to offer equal access to user data to third parties, so others can build equivalent functionality (DMA).

Lemma 3: malicious third parties will absolutely try to abuse the access and trick the user into sharing their data by all means possible. You will be held responsible in court of public opinion at minimum and legally at maximum if/when a malicious third party abuses said access.

This is a hard, possibly technically unsolvable problem no matter how much money you might have, because the root issue is not technical, it's the fact that you legally have to give third parties access and no way to control what they do with it - and as others have mentioned in the threads, it's exacerbated by the fact that the regulation doesn't say "this is okay and this is not", it is vague and judges things "by outcome", so you may spend all the time in the world implementing a solution you think will work, and then get hit by fines/lawsuits because the implementation is judged as not sufficient after the fact.

According to GDPR, the app developer is the "data controller" and thus ultimately responsible. Only in the case where Apple knowingly participated in unlawful behavior is it likely to be held accountable, and even then, in addition to the app developer. Obviously, if we are not talking about leaks from the actual App Store system (eg. Apple account logins and user data).

So while it sounds plausible, the legal framework is exactly not what you describe here — Apple can claim to want better protection for customers by not allowing third party apps, but EU rejects that (it can similarly extend to app store itself) and pushes for competitive landscape with DMA instead.

I don't think you can call the process unrelated to the mother or the baby, they're both pretty important throughout the whole thing.

The one legacy in Apple that Steve Jobs left behind is their distaste for taking risks that lose them money (ChatGPT was going to be their AI core... but then they had Altman ousted, so they backed away and partnered with Google instead), and spending money. I think they're still the only company with a kitchen in the valley that still makes employees pay for their own lunch, and the reason is the most BS reason that Steve Jobs pulled out of his rear end. It's so the employees appreciate the lunch, really?

I’m not saying I believe that’s the real reason here. But it is broadly true. Ask any company that offers a free tier where most of the complaints and problematic customers come from.

People can also appreciate things they get for free though. I'd appreciate a free lunch, most places I've worked at, actually nowhere I've ever worked, EVER has given me a free lunch. Now if its a difference of paying for a quality lunch at a reasonable price, and not paying for lunch but its mediocre, then yeah, seems like a no-brainer.

I wouldn't be surprised if Steve Jobs implemented was a way to get them back into the green.

Also, TIL:

> Jobs, who notoriously took a salary of only $1 a year, used to "scam" Apple out of free lunches by scanning his badge alongside colleagues and insisting on paying for everyone, knowing the charges would just default back to Apple.

The requirements are not onerous, it is the basic preemption of monopolist behavior.

Qualifying "random apps" is something that is a true challenge, but that holds regardless of the API being offered — the problem is that Apple saves some programming API only for themselves, instead of introducing acceptable & objective market terms to be met (if deemed unsafe, they could require companies to demonstrate compliance with things like CRA to get access to these APIs).

This is the bit that's likely hard, because generally keeping safety and privacy guarantees as data flows through the system is extremely hard, and Apple would not be able to guarantee it for other products without large review investment.

But ultimately, they probably just do not want to do it until Siri AI gets a decent marketshare first, so competing agents would have to both build new solutions for the platform once open, but also deal with an incumbent dominant player already on people's phones.

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This reads more like a tabloid headline than the first sentence of a Reuters article.

If I was more cynical I would suggest that this is being used as an end-run around encryption, since the encryption doesn't have backdoors for the government but this gives you access to all the same data.

When this backdoor is inevitably exploited in some very public fashion, it won't be the EU regulators that required the backdoor to exist who will be blamed.

The way Apple Health exchanges data with 3rd-party trackers (Fitbit, Garmin, etc.) is very well built and a good model of how other components in iOS could allow data exchange with very granular permissions.

Apple touts the "Private Cloud Compute". If they found a way to share your personal context to process on their cloud in a private and anonymized way, there is no reason the same process couldn't be used to handoff data to a 3rd party AI provider.

One of the issues here is that there are many people with strong opinions that don't understand the thing they have strong opinions about. Which is the normal state of human affairs.

It looks like Apple is framing this as a privacy issue as a marketing tactic so that consumers will blame the EU when Apple COULD implement it without endangering privacy.

Have some dignity. We all deserve the right to fully own our general compute devices.

Zero idea if its true tho.

the core technology fee is a big obstacle to alternative app stores.

openclaw is massively popular. there is a lot of diversity in "persona" agents, which are different than coding agents or the agent apple demoed. they're not all the same.

i don't know, i don't think you have any idea what you are talking about.

I don’t know why the EU allowed Apple to intermediate other browser engines with BrowserEngineKit, which is unacceptable, while blocking it here where it is reasonable.

EU has the right to privacy.

Apple also has the right to not conduct business in EU.

If EU doesn’t like it, they can build their own sovereign software.

Oh come on. Apple doesn't want to give up control. That's what this is about. The privacy thing is just to make them look good

The DMA mandates that Apple allows for competition, which (if you believe in capitalism) is good for the market overall. It's essential to stop big tech from abusing their market dominance. However Apple would prefer to not allow competition for their digital products on any of their hardware.

Apple wants to implement features that access data locally. It doesn’t want to allow competition for offering those features, but if it did, competitors may use that access to local data to exfiltrate.

So it is about both competition and, as a result of creating competition, privacy.

If you want to you could still use Apple or another provider you decide to trust - or even one that does everything locally. The competition would still have to follow GDPR after all.

While I can appreciate the reason for the DMA, people don't have to buy Apple devices, they can buy any type of phone they want and just use the ecosystems provided by these phones.

Apple is free to do what they want. The EU can go and try and build their own iPhone (good luck with that).

Do you really? The only two types of operating systems for phones that you could reasonably use are iOS and Android. So it's either Apple or Google.

Imagine a world, in which you could only consume Apple or Google services on those phones. No more Netflix or Disney+ on iPhones - only Apple TV Plus because the streaming video API is not available to third party apps. I think there are plenty of other examples to demonstrate the point.

A free market doesn't work if you have a duopoly. A free market requires the freedom to choose between different services, which Apple is trying to limit by only allowing Siri AI to access specific OS interfaces.

Not sure why some people on hackernews support more locked down operating system.

Apple came out of nowhere and invented the smartphone because the existing system was controlled by the telcos and horrible phone technology. The same thing can easily happen again.

It makes no sense to limit Netflix on phones and people would probably stop buying iPhones.

If the EU wants an "open" phone ecosystem, they should foster real innovation in their space and build it themselves.

Furthermore, if we lived in a world where the two main OS's were locked down to an insane degree, we would also have plenty of alternative operating systems. The reason we don't today is because we don't really have a need for it, in the same way linux has a monopoly on servers and nobody really cares.

Those make up 0% of the market [1], which classifies Apple and Google as gatekeepers.

[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/europe/

If you have a market with a handful of companies producing good products, and a handful of companies producing shit products nobody wants or buys, you cannot claim that the companies producing the good products are "gatekeeping", and that's the reason why nobody buys the shit products.

It doesn't matter how they became gatekeepers.

To follow along that line of thoughts, the requirements they are actually asking for proper DMA compliance would probably go right in that direction tbh.

I, for one, am happy Apple is taking a stance, and, as an European would really much like my government to stop asking ridiculous things that do not profit the consumer.

They already claim to care about your freedom and privacy. Now they can prove it.

Does this mean the service will not be available to EU accounts, or will they geoblock access from within the EU altogether?

https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_stgb/englisch_st...

Mistral. I’d bet my bottom dollar that the French are the reason the EU is holding firm on its position.

Apple frames this as a privacy issue when it's only a brand/control issue.

Apple themselves have claimed recent EU compliance has led to over 600 new or changed APIs in the OS.

I've spent a fair amount of time with my iPhone in both the EU and the USA, have local cell service registered in both regions. its nothing as simple as a geo-location check anymore. It's a problem that has grown more complex over the decades too, as more and more countries implement their own slightly differing legislation.

These concepts are so outdated it's not even funny. Let's say I have several citizenships, live mostly in the EU, but currently stay in Japan, do I get the features or not?

Like app store regional gating and DVD regions, these restrictions are dinosaurs of the past.

Given that our share of global GDP has dropped from 25 to 17 per cent in twenty years, with a steady downward trend, I am not convinced that this principle will hold for much longer, and this case of Siri may be one of the canaries in the coalmine.

If/when we drop to single digits, many vendors won't likely care anymore.

I don't know about every vendor, but Apple probably doesn't want to lose 27% of their sales.

They’re not going to over a single unproven feature.

Like when the UK banned encryption I wish Apple would have just disabled iMessage entirely there. Show a message saying that due to UK law, they cannot operate an encrypted messaging service there any longer. The backlash would get that law changed pretty quick.

Instead they disabled encryption for the UK, making all of us less secure.

Sometimes a company's incentives are going to be aligned with their users, but a lot of the times they won't and consumer protection regulation is useful.

Sometimes a government will have the good of their citizens in mind, and a lot of the times they will seek money and power just like companies do. Lobbies, fines, overreaching regulation.

The UK (and EU's attempted Chat Control) is some fascist bullshit. But allowing you to own the device you paid for and use it as you please (including letting you install whatever software you choose to) isn't.

The one that’s so secret it’s not in any of the treaties that the sovereign nations that comprise the EU signed up for and implemented in line with their own democratic processes

That agency

Meanwhile they struggle to put together a border patrol, but advanced pan European surveillance apparatus that isn’t run by the US. Yeah bro

This is why the EU is destined to lose and run itself to zero.

Compliance with DMA would have Apple hand over system-wide access to AI features to third parties, which could compromise user privacy and security.

I don't think there's a clear good guy/bad guy here.

* If you allow the user to grant those privileges to third-party applications, they can grant it to applications that abuse it, resulting in security and privacy risks. You might even be blamed for allowing them access (e.g. the famous Cambridge Analytica scandal).

* If you don't allow the user to do that, third-party tools won't be able to serve those needs, which can be considered anti-competitive preferential treatment of your own tools.

Of course, as usual they use their PR machine to blame the EU, whereas they really just want to abuse their platform's position to shut out competitors.

I have been a decades long Apple user, but their anti-competitive behavior, pushing ads into the OS and apps, and their treatment of developers (who made the iPhone big) is just gross.

Apple says hey so we're going to need some time to figure out if we can do that in a way that won't completely fuck over our users.

Very different than the narrative you're pushing