by Dan Moren
Report: DMA’s browser choice requirement benefiting third-party browsers
Ashley Belanger, writing at Ars Technica:
Reuters collected data from six companies, confirming that, when presented with a choice screen, many EU users will swap out default browsers like Chrome or Safari for more privacy-focused options. And because iPhones have a larger market share than Google-branded phones in the EU, Apple is emerging as the biggest loser, Reuters reported, noting that under the DMA, “the growth for smaller browsers is currently coming at the cost of Safari.”
In some ways, this isn’t surprising: I’m guessing a lot of consumers in the EU weren’t even aware that they could change the default browser on iOS.1 But it’s also early days and it’s possible that some of this is experimentation for people to see what else is on there—it’s not entirely clear to me from the story (or the Reuters story where the numbers originate) over what time period they’ve logged this. People may try out another browser and then change back—especially if we’re talking about browsers with, say, free trials to a paid subscription.
If this is real, lasting change however, then it would seem like the DMA is accomplishing at least part of its goals.
You may also remember, however, that the European Commission is currently looking into Apple’s compliance on browser choice. The Ars story goes into more detail here about some of the elements that spawned that:
[Open Web Advocacy] accused Apple of “maliciously” intending “to undermine user choice” with “an astonishingly brazen dark pattern” where “Apple engineers added code to the Safari’s settings page to hide the option to change the default browser if Safari was the default but then to prominently show it if another browser was the default.”
You can test this on an iPhone by scrolling to Safari under Settings. If Safari is not the default browser, there will be an option for “Default Browser App” where you can easily set Safari as the default. But if Safari is set as the default, this option disappears. For every other browser installed, the option remains to switch the default, whether that browser is set as the default or not.
This made me curious, so naturally I checked it out and, yes, this is true. However, that seems to be because the option for setting any browser as default is within the settings for that particular app. So, for example, if you download Chrome, you need to go to Settings > Chrome to change the default. That said, the Chrome settings always show an option to change the default, even if Chrome is already the default.
The right answer is to probably have a Browsing section (or even a Default Apps section) of Settings that’s an agnostic place to set the default. Because otherwise, you might not even know that you can change the default browser…which is exactly what the Open Web Advocacy group is alleging here. That certainly feels like Apple making a design choice that just so happens to favor its own app—which is exactly what the DMA is taking aim at.
- Case in point: how many consumers outside the EU don’t know that Apple lets you change the default browser too? ↩