It's over. Apple lost, Google lost. They lost in the EU, and they've lost in the US. Just today, Japan jumped on as well: https://9to5mac.com/2025/08/01/japan-mandates-apple-must-all... (This affects both companies actually.) No country who cares about their own citizens is going to let Apple and Google take advantage of them now that the US and the EU is putting a stop to it, so it won't be long until both companies unify their global policy to stop restricting this stuff.
What you're still going to see, is any way they can delay enforcement in the large markets, because the money they're raking in the government will not claw back in penalties. So things like the stays of enforcement are not because they have any chance of winning, but because it's profitable to draw out the case. They have no chance of winning this in front of this Supreme Court or any other one, for that matter.
The comedy here is the changes they're saying would be too hard for them to do in 14 days were ones that Apple has already had to accept... and they had less than 14 days to do them. So if the judges are vaguely aware of the parallel Apple case, they have already seen how this plays out and deny this stay request too. But we'll see.
Hacker News unfortunately does not respond to this logic unless it is a company they are trained to hate. We could run the same story reporting Google and Meta's opt-out abuses, and it would also reach the frontpage with just as many comments. Except those comments would be violent condemnation, not apologetics and hand-wringing over whitepaper quotes.
It's tragic, because computing is in a professedly imperfect place right now. Digital privacy is under fire, many payments see a 30% digital service surcharge that is wholly arbitrary, and revolutionary cross-platform standards are being supplanted with proprietary and non-portable solutions that does not benefit any user.
As an American, I am ashamed that our government's dysfunction extends to consumer protection.
The problem I have is that the AppStore doesn't solve the problem of people being tricked into misconfiguring their computer. Until Apple employs experts to stand physically between the machine and the user this is always going to be possible.
While you're reading the rest of this, ask yourself if it's really worth throwing away personal computing (free speech and community maintained software are some of the bigger things you lose) for a very slight increase in security.
Here are just some ways to get in trouble despite Apple's intrusion into people's lives:
1) CA certs.
McAffee now tells users to install malware on (or just replace) their routers with software that terminates their TLS connections (and does God only knows what with them.) They've managed to convince Verizon to advertise this and have their technicians set it all up. So the AppStore didn't keep one of the larger malware vendors out. You can also find many sites telling you to install their (likely malicious) CA cert because certain jailbreaking methods in the past used that.
2) There is malware on the AppStore and you almost certainly have some installed
Distributing malware directly as an App you build is hard, Apple can revoke your developer ID and so that gets expensive. The solution is to distribute libraries that make certain things easier for developers (authentication is a big one.) You can do this anonymously and don't even need a machine running OSX. This is one of Facebook's primary methods for getting malware on your phone. Almost every non-trivial App you have uses the Facebook SDK, and if you log into anything in the App Facebook knows who you are and adds the information to the profile they have for you (whether or not you've "created" or "deleted" it.) There is no easy way for users to detect this since the AppStore makes user buildable open source software impossible. Facebook is not the only company doing this but they're one of the biggest.
3) Software can be installed outside the AppStore but only if you have money and know what you're doing
It is possible to distribute iOS software outside the AppStore with no review. There are two channels for this: the first is testflight which is supposed to be used for beta testing. iSH used testflight for a long time before attempting to get listed on the AppStore. The issue here is that testflight apps cannot be widely used: the "beta" is limited to ~10,000 users. The iSH authors would weekly go through the list of users and remove ones that hadn't opened the app recently (near the end it was 10s of users and the period would get shorter and shorter, I remember having to re-install the app pretty much every time I wanted to do anything useful with my phone.)
The other method is via enterprise deployment. Non-coorperate users aren't supposed to see these but I've heard some larger companies (surprise, it's Facebook again) use this to get certain Apps installed on devices owned by minors because that would cause problems for their primary App.
No companies (at least above the “tiny” category) care about anything, they are paper-clip machines and the only thing preventing them from extracting iron from our blood is the law.
I wonder if this is the worst cryptography blunder since Nintendo Wii using 'strncmp' to validate a hash (which stops after the first matching 00 byte)
You still need some way to keep out the poor and underprivileged who are not good for business. Overtly stating they are not welcome doesn't fly anymore, but rejecting anyone who isn't in a position to be able to casually engross themselves in the sciences for several years for no reason other than personal enjoyment is a decent proxy.
Or they need to de-register with iMessage (because of course, how could you not have known?!?).
Apple is the company that gates iMessage because if they don't, in Craig Federighi's words, they are "[removing an] obstacle to iPhone families giving their kids Android phones".
I also cringe at the corporate speak of "iPhone families". "We're an iPhone family". What?
Author rails against separating the modem, claiming iommu is sufficient (yeah, google qualcomm iommu cve, you'll find plenty of fun to be had). Then goes on claiming that chips connected by usb 2.0 (a protocol explicitly used because it doesn't have rdma) might be vulnerable to some rdma attack.... because firewire exists?
They rail against being unable to swap out "the firmware", while failing to mention that "the firmware" in question is nothing more than the ddr4 memory training blob.
For me depression comes when I have low amounts of energy, which I've since realized is affected by my nutrition. If I eat too many carbs or sugar, I get extremely fatigued and then get depressed. It also causes me to daydream and have a hard time concentrating. Maybe keep a close eye on what you're eating/drinking and see if it's related.
Luke Smith is somebody who LARPs as a technology skeptic while using technology, and who spouts his insanely uneducated opinions about anything he wants while shilling Monero as if it is God's greatest gift to the earth. One example is the (unfortunately, massively popular) youtube video where he tells everyone that all jobs are fake, deflation is a good thing, and the reason central banks don't want deflation is because they are in a giant conspiracy to make you poor.
What you're still going to see, is any way they can delay enforcement in the large markets, because the money they're raking in the government will not claw back in penalties. So things like the stays of enforcement are not because they have any chance of winning, but because it's profitable to draw out the case. They have no chance of winning this in front of this Supreme Court or any other one, for that matter.
The comedy here is the changes they're saying would be too hard for them to do in 14 days were ones that Apple has already had to accept... and they had less than 14 days to do them. So if the judges are vaguely aware of the parallel Apple case, they have already seen how this plays out and deny this stay request too. But we'll see.