Apple has announced it’s not shipping three of its tentpole new features, announced during WWDC, in the European Union: Apple Intelligence, iPhone Mirroring, and SharePlay Screen Sharing.
Ever since the introduction of especially Apple Intelligence, the company has been in hot water over the sourcing of its training data – Apple admitted it’s been scraping everyone’s data for years and now used it to train its AI features. This will obviously have included vasts amounts of data from European websites and citizens, and with the strict EU privacy laws, there’s a very real chance that such scraping is simply not legal. As such, it’s simpler to just not comply with such stricter privacy laws than to design your products with privacy in mind.
As Steven Troughton-Smith quips:
How many EU-based sites did Apple scrape to build the feature it now says it can’t ship in the EU because of legal uncertainty?
Steven Troughton-Smith
Other massive corporations like Google and Facebook seem to have little issue shipping AI features in the EU, and have been doing so for quite a while now. And mind you, as Tim Cook has been very keen to reiterate in every single interview for the past two years or so, Apple has been shipping AI features similar to what they announced at WWDC for years as well, but it’s only now that the European Union is actually imposing regulations on them – instead of letting corporatism run wild – that it can no longer ship such features in the EU?
Apple is throwing its users under the bus because Tim Cook is big mad that someone told him no. As I keep reiterating, consent is something Silicon Valley simply does not understand.
This is major for a number of reasons.
First and foremost this is the first major split between the western alliance in underlying (software) technology. While there have been some differences in the past (GDPR), the market has always been unified and there were loopholes and mechanism built it to enable trade to continue uninterrupted.
From this point onwards, Apple’s AI and anything build upon it, wont be usable within the EU. That is Major.
40-50% of the mobile market uses iPhones and (as we know) many apps and services are geared towards it so its not a bit-player.
Now watching Google (Android) and Microsoft (Windows) as to how they will react to the new legislation.
There is no “new legislation”. This is just Apple bitching around the bush.
“Apple Intelligence” is spyware for USA.
“iPhone Mirroring” is spyware for USA.
“SharePlay Screen Sharing” is spyware for USA.
So… nothing lost for the EU. In fact, I’d gladly ban AI that requires sending your raw data (as Apple does) as a whole in all software from all companies.
The only numbers I can find for iOS market share in the EU are ~25%, quite a bit less than 50%. I barely know anyone in Sweden that uses iPhone. Even most Mac users have Android phones.
In the US and A the numbers seem to be around 50% though.
That’s quite funny as this link suggests that it has the highest use of iOS in Europe:
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/iphone-market-share-by-country
To me, as an iPhone user, not having my privacy invaded by Apple is a feature.
What do you mean with this? I honestly don’t understand what this has to do with Apple not releasing new features to Europe?
The DMA is all about giving other app developers equal chances to develop apps, as a way to prevent vendor lock-in.
As I understand it, they want to protect iPhone users from malicious (read: all) third parties that might want to use Apple’s private API calls for their own apps. These Apple Intelligence functions won’t be released in the EU because Apple would have to make these functions available to third parties. If these are privacy sensitive functions, why should I trust Apple and their black cloudy box with these tools and not be allowed to trust a third party of my choice to maybe make better use of them?
These AI functions are a privacy concern, and if Apple doesn’t want to make them available in the EU I consider that a giant red flag.
Indeed, in the WWDC presentation Apple explicitly said that all the new AI API calls would be available to 3rd party developers. It’s a bit weird to now not allow that anymore for EU devs/users.
So Apple choose to rather boycott EU, then to respect privacy.
To me, not having Apple AI in iOS 18 is a pro not a cons. I am afraid Apple AI will be a massive flop, somehow similar to the dire situation of Siri now (for things slightly more complicated than setting a reminder or asking for the weather it is so annoying and frustrating to use that I gave up completely on it). On top of that, my current latest-and-greatest iphone 15 does not have the hardware to fully support Apple AI (does that mean that in 2023 Apple did not know that it would launch an AI in 2024 ??) so everything would be a request to their cloud computing.
I can live without Apple AI – thanks EU.