The European Union has forced to do Major changes in the Apple ecosystem to comply with the Digital Markets Act. In addition, this law prevents some functions and services relevant to the Big Apple, such as Apple Intelligence, from delaying their launch in these countries. iOS 18.2 incorporates one of the changes required by the EU but all over the world. This is a section that allows Change the default apps on iOS and iPadOS for a series of actions. Below is all the information.
iOS 18.2 incorporates a system of default apps
The EU forced Apple to prevent official apps from being the default, even iOS 18.2 will allow the removal of native apps such as the App Store, Safari, Messages, Camera and Photos. All these changes come thanks to the pressure exerted by the EU and its Digital Markets Act. In fact, iOS 1 beta 18.2 incorporates a system to modify default apps throughout the ecosystem, a modification inherited from EU obligations.
The user may change which apps default to which different action. Apple has made available to users a section within Settings > Applications > Default Apps where they can choose an app to be used as a reference for a specific action. At the moment these are the ones that have been implemented:
- Email address
- Messages
- Calls
- Call filtering
- Web navigator
- Passwords and codes
- Keyboard
If we click on each of these elements, we will access a screen where they will appear all apps that can perform that action and the user will have to choose which app they want to have as default. For example: web browser and Google Chrome, Safari, DuckDuckGo or Firefox. It is expected that The number of services to choose from will depend on the obligations of each region, the EU being the one that will impose more obligations.
And this is something interesting, since it seems that this function is not only implemented in the European Union, but it will also be available in the USA. For now, The first beta of iOS 18.2 shows this feature but we don't know if Apple will finally include it, although everything seems to indicate that yes.