From historical change to historical change. That’s how Apple has been doing things since the European Union’s Digital Markets Act, known as the DMA, forced it to change the rules of the game on the iPhone. Something that began to be palpable with iOS 17.4, which brought many changes of a different nature and which must now fall on the iPad.
The European Commission has given Apple six months to implement similar changes to the operating system of its tablets. Something which was not a priori planned by the company and which, given the proximity to iPadOS 18, Apple will have to implement it in this version. A version which, we remember, will be presented on June 10 at WWDC 2024 and will be made public in September.
The App Store will no longer be the only installation route
As was the case on iPhones until a month ago, the App Store was the only certified way to download and install applications on the iPad. However, given the complaints from the European Commission, they will also have to authorize the use of third-party app stores
If Apple chooses to introduce the same mechanism as in iOS, we will find that developers will be able to create their own application stores for iPad and upload them to the App Store and once downloaded they will have their own mechanism. Another option would be that these same stores or applications could be downloaded directly via the Web, as is already the case with the AltStore on iPhone.
This, yes, Apple will want to monitor these s tores
Web browsers are perhaps the most promising thing in iPadOS 18
If Europe is looking for the same impact on iPadOS as on iOS, perhaps one of the most relevant changes will be the authorization of developers integrate their own engines into the browser. As was the case on iOS, on iPadOS they currently all start from WebKit, Apple’s development package that forces all browsers to be essentially the same.
Because yes, we find Google Chrome, Opera, Mozilla Firefox and many others which have an iPad version. However, having to build them all using WebKit essentially makes them very similar to Safari. A different aesthetic, a few more options and nothing else.
Europe’s intentions to equalize iOS and iPadOS would come true because these developers can use their own engines. This can already be done on iOS, although no developers have implemented theirs yet. Although Safari will continue as before, third parties will even be able to add fully desktop browsersalso taking advantage of the good virtues of Mac hardware.
To this would also be added the possibility of changing the default browser when opening Safari. And the European Union considered that iOS took an abusive position by offering its own standard browser and not informing of the possibility of choosing another, which could be done from the settings, even if it had to know. The same thing happens in iPadOS and it is predictable that, as is already the case on the iPhone, upon opening Safari it will be necessary to offer a multitude of options in addition to Safari itself for the install and configure it as the iPad’s default browser. .
A new method of transferring data to Android tablets?
There is one point on which the European Commission has placed particular emphasis, which is that it states that there is no method to transfer data from iPadOS to other operating systems like Android, going so far as to literally say that “the user is tied to iPadOS”. However, it’s unclear to what extent this aligns with Apple and not Google as the developer of the other major tablet operating system.
In any case, it is expected that Europe’s requests will be clearly accepted in order to respond well to the measures, so that Apple can know exactly what is required and thus try to facilitate the process as much as possible. What is clear, in this and other sections, is that, as has already happened with the iPhone, iPads will never be the same. If we want, of course.
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