What factual objections do you have? Apple can control the safety of their SW and cannot vouch for not-their-sw, so from Apple's point of view this is 100% accurate.
The DMA introduces zero risk. Users are absolutely able to use the Apple App Store, Safari/Webkit, etc like this as they did before.
So no, Apple isn’t factually correct.
In fact, it’s very possible that Gecko or Blink have more secure engines than WebKit. It’s very possible someone can create an App Store that is even more vetted than Apple’s and eliminates scam apps and games whose only purpose is to separate you from your money.
So it’s not only not accurate, it’s probably diametrically the opposite of accuracy and is false.
You need to think about this more carefully: there absolutely is an increase in risk by allowing other parties to run native code on your devices. This guarantees that people will be socially engineered into installing malware, intrusive vendors like Facebook will try to force users to add their stores to bypass privacy restrictions, and employers/schools/etc. will try to force their users to use their spyware for similar reasons.
Now, a not unreasonable position is that this is acceptable but that should be an honest discussion starting with accepting the risk so you can gauge whether it’s a reasonable trade off or whether there are other mitigations. For example, notarization is a useful way for making it harder to install code on someone’s device which the OS vendor cannot see if it’s later associated with malware or which cannot be traced back to a source developer. The next time someone is breached, it’s useful to be able to tell whether the Firefox.app they have installed is an official Mozilla build or pretending to be one.
But the worry here is that you can be tricked into installing all sorts of dangerous malware. Especially now that casual users have been trained to believe that apps are safe.
The DMA absolutely opens up all sorts of new vectors of attack. The question is ultimately a philosophical one -- whether you think the increased freedom is worth the increased risk. Not just for yourself, but for the average non-tech-expert consumer.
You might think the tradeoff is absolutely worth it, but that doesn't mean that it still hasn't significantly increased security risks.
Let’s not forget. This is also the exact same argument Apple used for not having an App Store in the first place and only allowing web apps.
The chutzpah of using this argument to keep the App Store locked down when Apple used the same argument to not have an App Store in the first place is incredible.
These EU laws start with the current circumstances and motivation why the law exists. An objection to why DMA is bad can be found in the first two recitals:
> (1) Digital services in general and online platforms in particular play an increasingly important role in the economy, in particular in the internal market, by enabling businesses to reach users throughout the Union, by facilitating cross-border trade and by opening entirely new business opportunities to a large number of companies in the Union to the benefit of consumers in the Union.
> (2) At the same time, among those digital services, core platform services feature a number of characteristics that can be exploited by the undertakings providing them. An example of such characteristics of core platform services is extreme scale economies, which often result from nearly zero marginal costs to add business users or end users. Other such characteristics of core platform services are very strong network effects, an ability to connect many business users with many end users through the multisidedness of these services, a significant degree of dependence of both business users and end users, lock-in effects, a lack of multi-homing for the same purpose by end users, vertical integration, and data driven-advantages. All these characteristics, combined with unfair practices by undertakings providing the core platform services, can have the effect of substantially undermining the contestability of the core platform services, as well as impacting the fairness of the commercial relationship between undertakings providing such services and their business users and end users. In practice, this leads to rapid and potentially far-reaching decreases in business users’ and end users’ choice, and therefore can confer on the provider of those services the position of a so-called gatekeeper.
It's a bit long for HN comments (although 257 words is about a minute of reading) but I didn't really know what could be fairly cut out
