Apple has a history of bad faith & malicious non-compliance, what they "think" is pretty much irrelevant at this point. We know what the spirit of the regulation is, and I trust that the EU regulators are interested in effecting those changes, otherwise what's the point of this entire ordeal if Apple only has to pay lip service to anti-trust intervention?
I am getting the same vibes from this as I did when Google was found guilty of abusing monopoly power. People lost their minds because “Apple is so much worse!” Never mind that the two lawsuits filed by Epic against Google and Apple were over different things and had different results because of it.
The DMA targeted different companies in different ways all under the rubric of combatting “gatekeeping.” They then went on to say how different companies were guilty of that crime in different ways. It would not surprise me at all if Apple has complied with what the EU singled Apple out for. It also wouldn’t surprise me if casual observers have conflated all the different flavors of gatekeeping that the DMA has directed at all companies.
Apple has probably calculated the risk of a legal challenge as 99%, the risk of losing it is 80%, but they expect a small/affordable penalty and at least a couple of years where they can hold onto their rent seeking in the iPhone space.
I think this is another classic case of people getting mad over what they think the law should be vs. what the law actually is.