> There are standards for accessing more of the device that they've ignored and have chosen to treat differently.
Developers who have signed Apple's developer agreement and utilised the libraries/APIs are being held to the terms laid out in that agreement.
A website is a website.
Whether you agree or disagree with how Apple has chosen to operate their iOS ecosystem—again, I believe that reasonable people can disagree—it's certainly not unlawful for Apple to distinguish between developers who rely on Apple's work (SwiftUI, Metal APIs, etc) and developers who publish web pages with open standards without any involvement by Apple.
The context of this discussion is government commissions putting pressure on Apple to revise their policies "or else".
Developer agreements and rules being unlawful or not doesn't seem to me to be a relevant framing here. One of the party can basically change the law if it goes against common sense or society's wellbeing.
To be clear, what you're advocating for is the nationalisation (internationalisation?) of Apple's intellectual property as a reward for building a very successful product.
I'm not saying this isn't a valid opinion to hold—I'm not necessarily opposed to nationalisation in other contexts—but I just wanted to make sure you were aware of what your opinion entailed.
It was a regression to go from a world where we could repair and freely install to one where we could do neither.
It's further mired by the fact that Apple went from less than 10% market share to over 50%.
As consumers, we can't repair our devices or run the software we want to on them.
As small businesses, we can't ship software the way we want to anymore. It has to be in the form of an app to reach the target audience. We're audited, policed, and taxed. This isn't for some niche hobby or market - this is the primary form of computing for most Americans. We have to waste effort to develop applications twice because reasons, and we're treated like dog shit all the while.
Both sides of the coin suck, and the 800 lb gorilla in the room isn't going away. It feels like we woke up in bizarro world, because this shouldn't have ever become the status quo.
We are not talking about forcing them to GPL their OS or publish their API sources, or even allow uses of whatever they invented outside of their system.
Just "don't prohibit app devs from putting links to external web pages".
Developers who have signed Apple's developer agreement and utilised the libraries/APIs are being held to the terms laid out in that agreement.
A website is a website.
Whether you agree or disagree with how Apple has chosen to operate their iOS ecosystem—again, I believe that reasonable people can disagree—it's certainly not unlawful for Apple to distinguish between developers who rely on Apple's work (SwiftUI, Metal APIs, etc) and developers who publish web pages with open standards without any involvement by Apple.