Easy switching to Android will only help the iPhone grow stronger

Welcome to our weekly Apple Breakfast column, which includes all the Apple news you missed last week in a handy bite-sized roundup. We call it Apple Breakfast because we think it goes great with a Monday morning cup of coffee or tea, but it’s cool if you want to give it a read during lunch or dinner hours too.

If you love somebody, set them free

Intriguing developments last week, as Apple published a summary of its DMA Compliance Report. This outlines the company’s plans for meeting the requirements of the EU’s far-reaching and enormously significant Digital Markets Act and includes a number of eye-catching measures. Some of these are discussed in our analysis of the announcements.

One that receives comparatively little space concerns that tricky moment when a person who owns a smartphone on one company’s software platform decides to switch to a phone on another. (I don’t know why I’m being coy. We both know the platforms are Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android. Everything else is within the margin of error.) There are tools and guides to help you make the transition: Apple falls over itself to help you switch to iPhone and Google makes a Switch To Android app for iOS. But for obvious reasons, each company is motivated only to assist with the direction of travel that benefits itself, while building in as many hurdles and headaches as possible to dissuade you from going the other way.

That’s all going to change. Hopefully.

There’s not a whole lot of detail, including the critical question of whether this will apply globally or only in the EU, but in the summary Apple reveals that it “is developing a solution that helps mobile operating system providers develop more user-friendly solutions to transfer data from an iPhone to a non-Apple phone.” This tool appears to be some way off, with Apple airily noting that it “aims” to get it out there by fall 2025. (This reminds me of my children aiming to get their coats on in time for school, and may not impress regulators.) But it’s all a question of baby steps for the world’s biggest walled gardener, and this is progress.

And the fun thing about the DMA–if anything is fun about exhaustively detailed regulations–is that it applies to everyone who wants to operate in the EU. If Apple sees the writing on the wall and recognizes that it has to provide a more robust iOS-to-Android tool, Google will be doing the same thing in reverse. And while Tim Cook will be grinding his teeth at the thought of iPhone customers jumping ship, he should see the opportunity represented by Android customers climbing aboard. It’s like that scene in the Mad Men pilot where all the cigarette companies have to stop making health claims: it hurts everyone equally, which means, provided you know how to pivot, it doesn’t hurt at all.

The fact is that, in satisfaction surveys, Apple products tend to score very highly indeed. (Indeed, almost implausibly so.) Take away all the platform lock-in nonsense and the iPhone is still an incredibly effective advert for itself: happy owners are persuaded to stick with the same brand in the future, and friends and loved ones on other platforms get phone envy and start to consider a switch. A world in which switching smartphone brands is trivially easy is one, I would guess, where the iPhone is if anything even more successful. Which makes it all the stranger that Apple has resisted such a state of affairs so vigorously for so long.

Foundry

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Podcast of the week

Apple just released a MacBook Air update, but what else can we expect this month? In this episode of the Macworld Podcast, we talk about the very busy spring season that Apple has in store.

You can catch every episode of the Macworld Podcast on Spotify, Soundcloud, the Podcasts app, or our own site.

Reviews corner

The rumor mill

That foldable MacBook rumor makes more sense than you’d think.

New iPhone SE 4 leak reveals big-screen overhaul with a notch and Face ID.

The Apple spring event we’re all waiting for probably isn’t happening.

Software updates, bugs, and problems

Stop reading this and go update your Apple device.

Don’t believe the latest social media scare. Your iPhone isn’t suddenly sharing personal info with strangers.

We’ve got three (and a half) reasons to upgrade to iOS 17.4 right now.

Don’t panic, but there’s a day-one macOS update for the new M3 MacBook Air.

Multi-display support is coming to the M3 MacBook Pro via a software update.

Your HomePod is about to become a whole lot less annoying, thanks to an important change in HomePod Software 17.4.

And with that, we’re done for this week’s Apple Breakfast. If you’d like to get regular roundups, sign up for our newsletters. You can also follow us on Facebook, Threads, or Twitter for discussion of breaking Apple news stories. See you next Monday, and stay Appley.