The EU believes that the iPad is dominant enough that the product must be included in the DMA legislation.
The DMA Act entered into force on 7 March
This means that the company suddenly has a deadline of six months to ensure that the board’s services comply with the new and far-reaching legislation. From before, iOS, the App Store and Safari are affected by the DMA legislation, and now iPadOS is also part of Apple’s realities in Europe.
This means that iPadOS must offer users alternative app stores for residents of the 27 member states. We also expect that means users are given a choice of browser at start-up, and that third-party browsers can use their own engine to draw and display web pages.
To Bloomberg a spokesperson for the company that they continue their focus on delivering, and we assume they mean changes, to European users “while mitigating the new privacy and data security risks DMA poses.” There are five months until Apple launches iPadOS 18. It may therefore be possible that they will have time to include the changes at launch – possibly they will have to wait for a 0.x update sometime before the end of September.
EU Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager said of the decision that it will “ensure that fairness and competition are preserved,” and that “iPadOS constitutes an important gateway that many companies rely on to reach their customers.”
