iOS 26.3 Brings AirPods-Like Pairing to Third-Party Devices in EU Under DMA

I have no doubt that Gruber will find reasons why the EU is bad and regulation is bad. At this point it's rather amusing how Daring Fireball (and many other American media) rants against regulation, and in another post complains about how companies exploit users.

Regulation is unfortunately necessary: the market isn't as magical as we would like it to be and competition is not a magic wand that makes everything good for users. Companies either become dominant, or universally screw over their users. Users either have no choice, do not understand the choices, or simply don't care.

I am glad the EU tries to do something. They aren't always right, but they should be trying. As a reminder, one of the biggest success stories of EU regulation: cheap cellular roaming within the EU. It used to be horribly expensive (like it is in the US), but the EU (specifically, Margrethe Vestager) regulated this and miracle of miracles, we can now move across the EU and not worry about horrendous cell phone bills.

It’s fascinating the kind of cool features we can have when products are made to be useful, with their target user in mind. Go EU!

Three months ago a commenter here on HN claimed to me that this will be bad for Apple users:

> There is simply no good way to make the API public while maintaining the performance and quality expectations that Apple consumers have. If the third party device doesn’t work people will blame Apple even though it’s not their fault.

And, competition probably can’t build for it anyway:

> It’s impossible to build Apple Silicon level of quality in power to watt performance or realtime audio apps over public APIs.

And:

> […] Apple has to sabotage their own devices performance and security to let other people use it. The EU has no business in this.

Well, I look forward to next year when we’ll have the receipts and see!

Got a MacBook for work recently, paired it to my AirPods I had for months, and it was funny noticing you could enable FindMy for them from the settings but they wouldn't show up in my devices on the map. Indeed, for this you need to pair with an iPhone or iPad. However it did enable the beacon on the airpods as the next day AirGuard notified a device was following me. And since, I can't disable it, the switch in the settings doesn't disable the beacon AirGuard still detects them. Even within their ecosystem they'll punish you for not being fully "part of the familly".

Recently bought an apple watch for my mom and got it set up with her iphone. Almost instantly she notices that she cant accept WhatsApp calls on her watch, and after looking into it I found out that it was another one of those apple things where they assume youre obviously using facetime so that functionality isnt available for any other app. For context, in europe Whatsapp is the dominating messaging app and alot of people use it for calling as well as messaging. The apple watch is, as far as I can tell, a simple Bluetooth wearable with a speaker and a microphone, so the only reason its like this is that apple has a concept of how the device is "supposed" to be used and only lets you use it that way. After that experience I fully support all the regulations the EU is putting on apple to open up.

Apple should dump their Product Managers and hire the EU bureaucrats directly then we will finally see improvements and innovations again.

Currently, on the AirPods side and not iOS side like the article covers, Apple breaks Bluetooth feature parity with other devices by not sticking to the Bluetooth spec with AirPods themselves.

For example, you need to root and patch your Bluetooth stack on your phone if you want to use all of your AirPods features on Android, and not because Android is doing something wrong, it's because the Android Bluetooth stack actually sticks to the spec and AirPods don't.

And even when you do that, you can't do native AAC streaming like you can with iOS/macOS. Even if you're listening to AAC encoded audio, it'll be transcoded again as 256kbps AAC over Bluetooth.

Even no name earbuds on Amazon manage to not break Bluetooth and can offer cross platform high quality audio over Bluetooth.

So this tap to pair won’t work in the US? The side loading stuff I can understand to restrict to the EU, but this just seems like a nice feature for everyone

I wonder, could this means we get better support for things like sending messages from Garmin smartwatches?

Previously, this was available on Android but not iOS as Apple didn’t expose the APIs for watches other than their own.

Where there's a will--or a law--there's a way. Hallelujah!

FTA: “The changes to proximity pairing and notifications are only available for device makers […] in the European Union.”

Will that mean we’ll see some last step assembly move into the EU, or does it only require legal presence?

Would this include the UK I wonder?

Wow, it's almost as if regulations were necessary to curtail the worst excesses of capitalism and steer it towards user interest instead of maximal exploitation...

EU gave up non working AI in exchange for something useful.