alt Hacker NewsMy hope for laws such as the ones Japan and the EU enacted was that companies would see the writing on the wall and change their practices worldwide, if only for cost reasons (it presumably being more expensive to maintain multiple sets of rules.) However, these companies are now so large that they can choose to absorb any inefficiencies on a country-by-country basis.
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And what's your opinion if the law would oblige the companies to remove features their products have like tracking transparency popups? Two countries' courts already fined Apple for enforcing a popup that warns users about tracking across third party apps (a feature Apple themselves do not use)?
There are many things Apple does that have anticompetitive motivations, but the browser engine doesn't seem like one of them. It's genuinely about security and battery life and standardization. So if cost was never the reason in the first place, cost is not going to be the reason to change.
At a hardware level it seemed to work. Looking at USB-C on iPhones for example.
Software wise? Fail. EEA gets to disable start search in Windows 11. RoW does not. Interestingly EEA membership is decided at install time based on your selection, and is not changeable afterwards.
iPhones on the other hand have a daemon running that checks your location. It's not based on where you set up the phone. So traveling from Europe to somewhere else can actually prevent you from updating apps that you got via an alt-store:
https://www.macrumors.com/2024/03/06/alternative-ios-app-sto...