So this tap to pair won’t work in the US? The side loading stuff I can understand to restrict to the EU, but this just seems like a nice feature for everyone
Not only isn’t this or any other of the DMA features accessible in the USA, but Norway which is a member of the EEC and which therefore both have to and is in the process of ratifying the DMA. Don’t get this either.
That Apple is so petty that it blocks on legal technicalities like that, when everyone knows it is just a matter of time. Really sours me on the whole company.
They even restrict "letting you choose the default maps app" to jurisdictions that legally require it (EU and Japan), there is literally no justification for that other than "we want to increase KPIs for our shitty Apple Maps app by making people accidentally open it", it's an extremely basic toggle that pretty much any user of Google Maps would prefer.
The problem is you can’t regulate interoperability where it doesn’t exist.
What does it mean to open the “default map app”? Maps apps typically act a native rendering for a web site, and have their own web-parameter based API for locations, navigation, and points of interest, as well as customizing informational layers.
So if I set say Bing maps to be the default map app, does that mean:
2. Bing Maps reverse engineers as much as possible of the various other mapping products and tries to support them with roughly equivalent features or error messages?
What the default maps app setting Apple created does is create an entirely new URI scheme of geo-navigation and an entitlement for apps which wish to support it to be the default map app. This appears to be roughly limited to a subset of parameters common between Apple and Google Maps.
So this setting in the EU and Japan.. mostly does nothing currently. Every developer needs to change their native apps and web pages to call out to this new custom scheme that only works on Apple platforms. Each of these mapping apps needs to support this scheme. That hasn’t happened yet.
The EU (and in this case Japan) gets early access and the potential exposure of multiple breaking revisions.
It is also certainly possible that a good number of web/app developers decide they don’t _want_ to support multiple mapping apps, since they’ve only verified one or two of them actually provide proper navigation/visualization/POI, and that the whole concept is flawed.
If it were, they wouldn’t be asking. And you haven’t answered it either. Your parent comment is asking why the grandparent commenter thinks it makes sense to restrict third-party stores to the EU instead of having them everywhere.
