While I can sympathize with the desire for interoperability (I too pine for the days of Adium/Pidgin), the EU’s approach to all of this feels needlessly and potentially harmfully heavy-handed.

They basically make it an existential risk to build your success on anything nicely and neatly tightly vertically integrated. Everything must be dragged down to mediocrity by the unavoidable slippage between mandated abstraction layers and avoidance of features that can’t be easily or safely generalized.

It’s conflicting. Is Apple abusing its role in some cases, such as the App Store, and in need of some reigning in? Sure, but some of this goes too far and essentially requires them to strip their products of a portion of their appeal.

Even more frustrating is that nobody seems to be willing to discuss the issue with any level of nuance. It’s nearly all binary EU good/Apple bad or the reverse.