Apple’s EU move to help Indian techies

Apple Inc.’s decision to allow third-party app stores to operate on iPhones and iPads in the European Union is likely to have a cascading impact on Indian app developers as well, industry experts said. On 14 December, Bloomberg reported that Apple plans to change a long-standing policy of not allowing app downloads on iOS from third-party stores, following the EU’s new competition regulation, which mandates an open consumer market where users will have a choice in terms of the services they wish to use. Apple’s EU move may set guiding principles for more such verdicts, even in the absence of a specific law,” said Anisha Chand, partner, competition and antitrust practice at law firm Khaitan & Co. In 2019, Apple software chief Craig Federighi claimed that allowing third party downloads on iOS would compromise the comparatively higher level of security from malware on iOS — citing examples of Google’s Android and Apple’s own macOS as operating systems that allow third party downloads, but pose greater cyber risk to users.