Sometimes you choose the tech news and sometimes the tech news barges into your room

Apple finally addressed the question of what its compliance with the EU’s Digital Markets Act rules will look like. And the answer is malicious. I was hoping it would be delicious, but we’re close. I mean, it sounds good at first. Apple announced that iOS will support third-party app stores (they call them marketplaces), as well as third-party payment systems and browser engines other than WebKit, so you can actually use a browser that isn’t just Safari covered in Chrome spray paint. But then you realize these “delicious” treats are only coming to the EU because they’re actually really dangerous, and you’re not sure you want them anymore anyways because you think you saw Apple spit on them before handing them out.

Malicious Compliance

Alternative app marketplaces must be authorized by Apple, and all the apps that they host must be “notorized” – a perfectly dystopian-sounding Apple-ism for reviewed by bots and humans. While many are rejoicing claims that iOS will support side-loading (installing standalone app packages outside of any app store) like you can do on Android, Windows, Linux, and macOS, it won’t support that.

And it only gets wilder. In order for developers to distribute their apps on alternative app marketplaces or use third-party payment processes, they need to accept the new business terms. That includes paying a lower 10% cut of the App Store revenue or 15-30% for digital goods and services plus an extra 3% to use Apple’s own payment system. But the new terms also include Apple’s own version of Unity’s scandalous per-install fee from last year. Once an app hits 1 million installs, its devs will have to pay a “core technology fee” (CTF) of $50 for every new user who installs it annually. For some devs, this could see Apple taking something like a 60% cut of their app revenue.

Apple’s Explanation

Apple explained that it’s only making the new features available in the EU because they’re actually super dangerous, and in the EU, they can take that weird, soft and vulnerable. The app store’s harsh protections blocked $2 billion worth of fraudulent transactions in 2022, the same amount that Google blocked in the same year on the far less restrictive Play Store.

Good News for Game Streaming Platforms

Apple announced one thing that appears to be just straight up good news – game streaming platforms like Nvidia’s GeForce Now and Xbox Cloud Gaming can now submit a single iOS app with the capability to stream their entire library of games, which is again how things already worked on other operating systems but not on the minimalist Fisher-Price of phone OS’s.

Epic Games’ Response

Epic Games, which has been locked in a legal battle with Apple over its app store policies, plans to finally launch the Epic Games Store and Fortnite on iPhone, even though Epic boss Tim Sweeney thinks the new rules are “hot garbage.”

Now it’s time for quick bits, brought to you by Manscaped.

Beeper Cloud and Microsoft Teams Outages

Users of Beeper Cloud, the service that lets you route iMessages to your Android phone through your Mac, reported that Apple was blocking them from using iMessage even on their Macs. Microsoft Teams also experienced a widespread outage, with nearly 15,000 reported outages as of noon Pacific Time.

Florida’s Social Media Ban

Florida’s House of Representatives has passed a bill that, if signed into law, will ban children under 16 from social media platforms that track users’ activity and use that information to provide targeted content.

Google’s Lumiere and Meta’s Reality Labs

Google has released a research paper and a demo video for Lumiere, a space-time diffusion model which is an impressive text-to-video and image-to-video generation tool. Meta’s Reality Labs has created a way of allowing VR users as well as virtual characters and experiences to appear to manipulate real-world objects.

Come back on Monday for more tech news. No nudes, they’re not nudes.