iOS 26.3 brings AirPods-like pairing to third-party devices in EU under DMA
macrumors.com324 points by Tomte 3 months ago
324 points by Tomte 3 months ago
Recently bought an apple watch for my mom and got it set up with her iphone. Almost instantly she notices that she cant accept WhatsApp calls on her watch, and after looking into it I found out that it was another one of those apple things where they assume youre obviously using facetime so that functionality isnt available for any other app. For context, in europe Whatsapp is the dominating messaging app and alot of people use it for calling as well as messaging. The apple watch is, as far as I can tell, a simple Bluetooth wearable with a speaker and a microphone, so the only reason its like this is that apple has a concept of how the device is "supposed" to be used and only lets you use it that way. After that experience I fully support all the regulations the EU is putting on apple to open up.
You can accept calls on the watch from Telegram.
So this sounds like a “whatsapp didn’t want to do it” more than a “Apple disallowed it”
Most probably. WhatsApp is also still using the old way of accessing photos where you have to define which photos WA has access to every time you want to share newly taken photos. I’m pretty sure they do that deliberately so you get annoyed and give them blanket access to all your photos. (Which they then probably secretly analyse in the background.)
I wish apple would deprecate the old way and force apps to adopt the new photo picker.
Then you will see here thousands of comments explaining how that is bad for small businesses, and apple is forcing them out of the market… is a balance…
Perhaps it should be by user base?
"You have 100M MAU, you need to be keeping up with the standards"
Seems like you’d just need to set WhatsApp as the default calling app on iOS and make sure to install WhatsApp on the watch too. The ability to set another app as the default for calls has been around since early this year. Doesn’t this work?
Huh, with CallKit’s existence I would have assumed any app using CallKit would work on Watch…
I was genuinely sure it’s not a problem, as I personally know quite a few people who do that. But I think they use either FaceTime or regular cellular. That’s sure weird a simple call does work in iPhone 4S (imagine a price for it in 2026), but doesn’t on modern Apple Watch Ultra, which is quite expensive.
Unfortunately, it doesn't work like that. Third-party app calls don't go to the Watch. It's so annoying, I have to tell people to call me using regular phone calls or FaceTime instead of using Signal or WhatsApp because I always miss the latter ones.
WhatsApp did not have a dedicated Watch app until 1 or 2 months ago – it was not even possible to respond to WhatsApp messages on the Watch, only seeing the mirrored notifications was possible.
You can blame Apple for other things if that is the intention, but this particular one was a decision made by Meta and by Meta only.
Write to your regulator and make a complaint that Meta is keeping the WhatsApp stage gate.
It’s fascinating the kind of cool features we can have when products are made to be useful, with their target user in mind. Go EU!
I live in the EU and now traveling my family outside the EU. Today I’ve tried updating AltStore but it won’t let me. Even VPNing to my home won’t do it.
So until there will be more incentive to make it globally, the UX is intentionally crippled not only by making the minimal viable but also by region locking.
Imagine pairing headphones working great in EU and then you’re traveling somewhere and it’s broken.
This is the future of the internet. More and more countries have their local laws and international companies need to comply with local laws. This has been the case forever for companies selling products and (physical) services and some digital services restricting music and movie rights in certain countries, but it will expand to more and more services and apps in the future.
"Local laws" is quite the loaded term when your parent commenter's anecdote is about EU which currently encompasses 27 countries.
And when "comply with local laws" means "unbrick bluetooth pairing for third-party devices" then a company in good faith could just, you know, not brick the functionality in the first place. There's no law against products that "just work".
Good. It was hubris to think that the internet would forever be segregated as an American asset.
I think the EU believes they have more of an effect on the rest of the world than they actually do. Complying with every law in every jurisdiction that has access to a product sounds like a nightmare that will only stifle innovation.
Between this and the USB-C iPhone, I think you're very wrong.
Mmkay, now do something important. If the EUs fame is forced USB-C adoption, that’s very weak and almost narcissistic since we have to congratulate the EU for minimal effort. Also realize the USB-C standard is chaos and all that did was confuse people about what’s a data cable vs what’s a charging cable vs what is thunderbolt. Chaos is what the EU did there, brag more about it!
Hopefully third-party devices will actually implement what is necessary to take advantage of it. Being limited to the EU market, it’s not clear if it will happen much.
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Last time I checked the European Union was a political construct and not a phone manufacturer.
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Still don't get your point.
How can the failures to innovate from privates companies be the responsibility of a political union of different governments?
EU regulations strangle corporate innovation there
I think you're looking at it from the wrong angle.
Most of the EU corpus of law is based on culturally acceptable actions from their members. The EU regulations don't strangle, the EU culture is just different.
Innovation for the sake of innovation and the pursuit of money isn't deeply entrenched in European culture.
So yes, innovation based on "go fast and don't care if you break stuff" comes mainly from outside of EU.
Well I'm not blaming the EU itself. It'd be the the same or worse in today's EU countries if they weren't in the EU. Yes it's a cultural thing too, but they made regulations based on it.
And another one parroting this without talking to EU founders.
I mean, they're not entirely wrong, but it's actually the lack of a capital markets union that causes the issues here.
So in fact, this is a case where the answer is more EU (specifically, a better set of cross-country capital markets). Depressingly, the obvious place to build this is no longer in the EU.
They're wrong in everything but a meaningless "well technically" sense. People spouting "EU regulations strangle business" nonsense are never talking about the lack of capital markets union. Let alone in a thread about "iOS 26.3 brings AirPods-like pairing to third-party devices in EU under DMA".
> So in fact, this is a case where the answer is more EU (specifically, a better set of cross-country capital markets).
Can you give me a set of non-EU countries with better cross-country capital markets, that are as such now instead the place to build this? Especially for a set size bigger than 3? Serious question, as I've never heard of one and am fairly sure it doesn't exist, though I'd love to be proven wrong.