Apple is making big App Store changes in Europe over new rules. Could it mean more iPhone hacking?

08.03.2024 - 04:35 / tech.hindustantimes.com

Apple is opening small cracks in the iPhone's digital fortress as part of a regulatory clampdown in Europe that is striving to give consumers more choices — at the risk of creating new avenues for hackers to steal personal and financial information stored on the devices.

The overhaul rolling out Thursday only in the European Union represents the biggest changes to the iPhone's App Store since Apple introduced the concept in 2008. Among other things, people in Europe can download iPhone apps from stores not operated by Apple and are getting alternative ways to pay for in-app transactions.

European regulators are hoping the changes mandated by the Digital Markets Act, or DMA, will loosen the control that Big Tech's “digital gatekeepers” have gained over the products and services that consumers and businesses use as they become more dominant forces in everyday life.

The measures took effect just days after EU regulators fined Apple nearly $2 billion (1.8 billion euros) for thwarting competition in the music streaming market.

Apple has lashed out at the new regulations for unnecessary security risks to iPhone users in Europe, exposing them to more scams and other malicious attacks launched from apps downloaded from outside its ecosystems and raising the specter of more unsavory services peddling pornography, illegal drugs and other content that the company has long prohibited in its App Store.

Despite trying to maintain security safeguards while also adhering to the new rules in the 27-nation bloc, Apple is warning that “the changes the DMA requires will inevitably cause a gap between the protections that Apple users outside of the EU can rely on and the protections available to users in the EU moving forward.”

Apple's warnings should be taken with a grain of salt, experts say.

Managing mobile devices is “totally different” from third-party app stores, and Apple is “deliberately confusing it here to muddy the waters,” said Michael Veale, an associate professor at University College London who specializes in digital rights and regulation.

“Apple's App Store is not a proxy for corporate data security — apps within it regularly send data to insecure cloud servers, to hidden third-party trackers and much more,” he said.

Some smaller tech companies like music streaming service Spotify and video game maker Epic Games also are attacking the ways Apple is complying with the DMA as little more than a facade that's making a “mockery” of the regulations' intent.

“Rather than creating healthy competition and new choices, Apple's new terms will erect new barriers and reinforce Apple's stronghold over the iPhone ecosystem," Spotify, Epic and more than two dozen other companies and alliances wrote in a March 1 letter to the