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just when the new iphone 16 series is on the market, the eu has once again waved the "digital market act" to "beat" apple. on september 19, a report from bloomberg showed that people familiar with the matter revealed that eu regulatory agencies will, in accordance with the digital markets act,apple is required to strictly comply with relevant regulations and make its operating system fully compatible with other technologies.

according to information revealed in related reports, one of the goals of eu regulators is to ensure that other developers can access key iphone functions, such as siri and nfc. under the digital markets act, apple must provide free and effective interoperability to third-party developers and businesses to use hardware and software functions controlled by the ios and ipados operating systems.

if apple fails to comply with relevant regulations, the eu may launch a formal investigation, which also means that it may once again face the risk of being fined 10% of global annual turnover.looking at the eu's series of operations in the past few years, it is almost obvious that it is unfriendly to apple. after a series of "beats", the lightning interface has completely become a thing of the past and has been replaced by the mainstream usb type-c. the self-contained app store has also ushered in competitors such as altstore pal and other third-party app stores in the european market.

this time, the eu is targeting apple's core ios, which is basically trying to beat the odds.opening up local sideloading is actually not a big deal for apple. after all, the app store is an internet product, and its first-mover advantages and network effects cannot be ignored. what microsoft ceo satya nadella said before is very representative. default settings are a key factor in the network effect of digital products. users may like a product very much, but they will not change the default settings. .

since the app store itself has a large number of existing users and the services it provides are relatively online, even if it is not as free as third-party app stores, there will still be a large number of users who will continue to use the app store habitually.

however, ios is one of the biggest sources of competitiveness in the iphone market today.today is different from the past. the current iphone can no longer compete with android flagships in terms of product strength. even the latest iphone 16 series has been criticized for its lack of innovation and lack of sincerity.

however, it must be admitted that a large part of consumers who will continue to choose the new iphone are attracted by the security, convenience, smoothness and emphasis on privacy protection of ios, which can only be used on the iphone. if the iphone 4 was to protect ios back then, then ios has now become one of the core competitiveness of the iphone. the androiization of ios is definitely the last thing apple wants to see.

but even if ios is "open", it actually has nothing to do with android. because the eu is not planning to let apple open up the licensing of ios, just like former apple ceo john sculley licensed macos to pc manufacturers, but is preparing to achieve equal status between apple and third-party developers in the ios ecosystem. if the eu really intends to force apple to open ios licensing, the latter may choose to withdraw from the european market completely.

you know, this is what steve jobs said about sculley’s macos licensing strategy:"letting other companies use our operating system on crappy hardware and cannibalize our sales is just the stupidest thing in the world." apple has always relied on hardware premiums to "support" software development, which is fundamentally different from the internet backward charging model of domestic mobile phone manufacturers. opening up ios will bring about homogeneous competition, which is not conducive to the premium prices of apple's devices.

this time the eu is not trying to directly turn ios into android, but is cleverly using interoperability as an entry point. the so-called interoperability, also known as interoperability, refers to the ability of different computer systems, networks, operating systems and applications to work together and share information. in ios, there are some functions/permissions that third-party developers cannot use, such as siri, apns (apple push notification service), and imessage.

take imessage as an example. although this feature is highly controversial, apple has always refused to open it. only users of apple devices can experience the "blue bubble", which is the complete imessage function, while the "green bubble" of users of apple devices and android devices only has the most basic text messaging function and cannot display read receipts. in the past, the eu believed that imessage was not popular enough among users and decided to let it go, but now they seem to have changed their minds.

as a result, the eu will most likely focus on imessage this time. after all, this is a feature that competitors such as google and samsung have been calling on apple to open.in order to avoid the continued collapse of the walled garden of ios, apple is very likely to take advantage of the situation.on the contrary, because the interests involved in apns are too huge, apple will most likely not give in, and siri is related to apple intelligence, so it will not easily allow third parties to enter.