As pointed out by John Gruber, author of Daring Fireball, Kay Jebelli has written an insightful, detailed thread on the social media website X all about the European Commission’s Digital Markets Act compliance workshop with Apple. I won’t bore you with most of the details, and I’ve already written about the Core Technology Fee earlier, but there were a few more tidbits from the meeting.

The commission began the second section of the meeting — the section where developers by way of the commission itself are allowed to make suggestions to Apple’s DMA compliance — by asking Apple to change the verbiage on the alternative app marketplace choice screen, i.e., the view that appears to a user when they decide to download an app from a marketplace that is not their “default marketplace.” Currently, the screen either asks a user to confirm the download, which is affirmative, or “skip” the screen, which simply closes it and cancels the app download. The commission instead requested that the two options be affirmative, providing users with a clear-cut “yes-or-no” choice.

Apple responded to criticism from the commission regarding the browser choice screen and how users can easily opt to skip the screen, therefore setting Safari as their default browser without scrolling through the options. The commission instead asks that Apple display Safari as one of the randomly displayed options alongside other browsers, like Brave and Google Chrome, and remove the button pinned to the bottom of the screen that allows users to skip it. The commission appears to want to create unnecessary friction for users here and it’s baffling and upsetting. The complaint read by the commission states that Apple will “institute mandatory forced scrolling,” which is not present in the current version of the sheet.

Perhaps most infuriatingly of all, the commission tells Apple that it is not allowed to notarize apps that are distributed via third-party app marketplaces to protect users. Instead, app moderation can and should be only done by government authorities, the commission says. Apple can only ensure no illegal content is in the apps — it cannot remove apps if they are broken or have security vulnerabilities. This throws an unnecessary wrench into Apple’s DMA compliance plans and will degrade the user experience significantly, leading to a massive uptick in scams and broken, malicious apps available for download on iOS. It’s incredible to me that the commission does not see how this could possibly go wrong.

The rest of the session was interesting, but again, I couldn’t sit through it even if I wanted to. I recommend reading Jebelli’s posts instead. The commission continues to impose onerous and ludicrous demands in the guise of “openness” — even though it can’t even be open enough to let the public view the commission’s workshop live without a password.