AI’s distribution dilemma
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Apple’s credibility deficit with EU regulators
As a company, when is it fine to publicly express that you’re mad as hell?
Apple has decided that this week is a good time. More specifically, it’s a good time to tell European citizens that the Digital Markets Act (DMA) is stupid and, by extension, the European Commission.
To give you a bit of context, Apple held its annual developer conference earlier this week and unveiled iOS 27, the next version of the iPhone operating system that will be released in September. The big breakout feature was Siri AI (not to be confused with Siri not AI).
Apple is launching its own ChatGPT-like AI assistant in the form of an app. You can also access it from anywhere by swiping down from the top of the screen or by triggering the Siri voice assistant. It can easily find and reuse information from your messages, photos, emails and calendars that are already on your device. And it looks genuinely useful.
Quick aside: people always say “I don’t download apps anymore” but ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini dominate the charts for most downloaded apps and these apps have only been around for three years or less. So Apple made the right choice by creating a new app for Siri AI. It’s the right entry point if they want to compete seriously with other AI apps.
Coming back to Apple being mad. The company also announced that Siri AI is not going to launch in the EU due to the DMA. “We’re deeply disappointed that our EU users won’t have Siri AI on iPhone or iPad when we share our new software releases later this year,” Craig Federighi said in a press release. “Their refusal to engage constructively on solutions that preserve privacy and security means we do not currently have a timeline for Siri AI’s availability on iOS and iPadOS in the EU.”
First of all, in Apple lingo, this sort of quote is extremely unusual. The company is better known for its public restraint and answering “no comment” to basically any question from reporters. So this very salty press release stands out.
Let me take a deep breath and give you a one paragraph recap on the DMA. The DMA was created to give equal access to platforms that are so big that the EU called them “gatekeepers” so that other companies could compete fairly with the platform owner. The list includes many American tech giants (Google, Apple, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft), also the company behind TikTok (ByteDance) and Booking.com because hotel chains have a thing or two to complain about Booking.com and it’s a European company (so it’s not just American companies and TikTok, good for the EU narrative).
With Siri AI, under the DMA, Apple has to grant similar access to your personal data (messages, photos, calendars…) so that Gemini or Meta AI can compete fairly with the built-in AI assistant. Some context, Google and Meta respectively generate 70% and 98% of their revenue from advertising.
In other words: Apple has a point.
Letting Google and Meta access all your data would turbocharge the algorithmic-based advertising model that these two companies leverage with billions of people. It would also make their social platforms even more efficient at capturing everyone’s attention. More importantly, it would spawn other anti-competitive issues with Google and Meta. So Apple is right to tell European users that the DMA is inappropriate for the current state of technology.
However, the context doesn’t play in Apple’s favor. Apple has been extremely dismissive with the European Commission for several years. They didn’t want to open up iOS to other app stores and ended up creating a convoluted platform fee, which at first included a controversial €0.50 per install fee above 1 million installs (imagine if European governments had to pay a fee to Apple for social security app downloads from third-party app stores).
They blamed the DMA to justify the fact that Apple Intelligence (notification summaries, writing tools, Genmoji, etc.) wouldn’t be available in the EU. They ended up rolling out Apple Intelligence in the EU once they added support for languages other than English. So it was a technical issue disguised as a policy issue. And the list goes on.
So the Commission’s frustration with Apple didn’t appear out of nowhere. Apple says they comply with the exact legal obligations even though the EC expects them to comply with the interpretation of the DMA so that it achieves the DMA’s objectives.
With Siri AI, Apple is right on the substance, but has burned so much credibility with EU regulators that nobody wants to give it the benefit of the doubt. So I’m not surprised the EC is not cooperative and Apple ended up in a dead end.
By releasing this week’s statement, they’re hoping the public sentiment against the DMA will change. And I don’t think the DMA is perfect. It feels inappropriate for the current AI era. But I’m not sure EU citizens want to side with Apple either.
So, for now, Apple is stuck with it.
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What is WhatsApp exactly?
In other antitrust news, the European Commission has told Meta that it should restore access to WhatsApp for rival AI assistants (this is unrelated to the DMA, btw).
If you’re an intense WhatsApp user, you may have noticed a new purple banner and button at the bottom of your conversation list that nudges you to start a conversation with Meta AI, the company’s own AI assistant. Meta is using one of its best distribution channels (WhatsApp) to drive adoption of its new AI service.
But for quite a bit of time, Meta AI wasn’t the only AI assistant available on WhatsApp. OpenAI introduced ChatGPT on WhatsApp in December 2024. Perplexity and Microsoft also launched their own AI assistants and paid API usage fees to interact with WhatsApp users. A year later, Meta banned general-purpose chatbots from its platform, leaving Meta AI as the only major consumer AI assistant integrated directly into WhatsApp.
Not only the EU wants to restore access to competitors, but it says access should now be free. Meta is appealing and I’m sure there will be more ramifications down the road.
But it proves once again that distribution is key to capture this relatively new market of consumer AI chatbots. While ChatGPT now has one billion monthly active users, Google’s Gemini is not far behind despite the late start. And Apple’s Siri AI will jump from 0 to hundreds of millions of users with an iOS update.
So it’s interesting to see big tech companies using all the levers they can pull to control the next platform shift.
Have a good day ☀️
Romain