Apple on the Digital Markets Act

Friday, 26 September 2025

Apple, “The Digital Markets Act’s Impacts on EU Users”:

The DMA requires Apple to make certain features work on non-Apple
products and apps before we can share them with our users.
Unfortunately, that requires a lot of engineering work, and it’s
caused us to delay some new features in the EU:

• Live Translation with AirPods uses Apple Intelligence to let
  Apple users communicate across languages. Bringing a
  sophisticated feature like this to other devices creates
  challenges that take time to solve. For example, we designed
  Live Translation so that our users’ conversations stay private — they’re processed on device and are never accessible to Apple — and our teams are doing additional engineering work to make
  sure they won’t be exposed to other companies or developers
  either.

• iPhone Mirroring lets our users see and interact with their
  iPhone from their Mac, so they can seamlessly check their
  notifications, or drag and drop photos between devices. Our
  teams still have not found a secure way to bring this feature to
  non-Apple devices without putting all the data on a user’s
  iPhone at risk. And as a result, we have not been able to bring
  the feature to the EU. […]

We’ve suggested changes to these features that would protect our
users’ data, but so far, the European Commission has rejected our
proposals. And according to the European Commission, under the
DMA, it’s illegal for us to share these features with Apple users
until we bring them to other companies’ products. If we shared
them any sooner, we’d be fined and potentially forced to stop
shipping our products in the EU.

Live Translation with AirPods and iPhone Mirroring are both amazing features. And EU users are missing out on them. I think Apple structured this piece exactly right, by emphasizing first that the most direct effect of the DMA is that EU users are getting great features late — or never. And that list of features is only going to grow over time.

Under the section “Is the DMA Achieving Its Goals?”:

Regulators claimed the DMA would promote competition and give
European consumers more choices. But the law is not living up to
those promises. In fact, it’s having some of the opposite effects:

• Fewer choices: When features are delayed or unavailable, EU
  users don’t get the same options as users in the rest of the
  world. They lose the choice to use Apple’s latest technologies,
  and their devices fall further behind.

• Less differentiation: By forcing Apple to build features and
  technologies for non-Apple products, the DMA is making the
  options available to European consumers more similar. For
  instance, the changes to app marketplaces are making iOS look
  more like Android — and that reduces choice.

• Unfair competition: The DMA’s rules only apply to Apple, even
  though Samsung is the smartphone market leader in Europe, and
  Chinese companies are growing fast. Apple has led the way in
  building a unique, innovative ecosystem that others have copied — to the benefit of users everywhere. But instead of rewarding
  that innovation, the DMA singles Apple out while leaving our
  competitors free to continue as they always have.

This is all true. But I have a better way to put this. If Apple were to just switch the iPhone’s OS from iOS to Android, these DMA conflicts would all go away. Apple’s not going to do that, of course, but to me it’s a crystallizing way of looking at it. The DMA is supposedly intended to increase “competition”, which in turn should increase consumer choice. But the easiest way for Apple to comply with the DMA would be to switch EU iPhones to Android — which, by a significant margin, already has majority mobile OS market share in the EU. Here’s a link to StatCounter’s mobile OS stats for Europe (which is not the same as the EU, but as good a proxy as I could find). It’s two-thirds Android, one-third iOS — a 2-1 ratio.

If Apple just shipped all EU iPhones with Android instead of iOS, all of their DMA problems would be off the table. EU iPhone users would lose all iOS exclusive features and Apple device Continuity integrations. EU consumers would effectively have no choice at all in mobile OSes. They’d just get to choose which brand of Android phone to buy.

How in the world would that increase competition? iOS’s unique and exclusive features — which, yes, in many cases, are exclusive to the Apple device ecosystem — are competition.