Comment by fleahunter

Regulators never manage to design good products, but they’re weirdly good at accidentally clearing technical roadblocks that incumbents had no incentive to touch.

This is what "interoperability" actually looks like in practice: nobody forces Apple to ship AirDrop-for-Android, they just force them off a proprietary stack and onto a public standard, and suddenly Google can meet them on neutral ground. The EU didn’t create a feature, it removed Apple’s ability to say "we technically can’t."

Also notice the asymmetry: once both sides sit on Wi-Fi Aware, Apple gets basically nothing by embracing Quick Share, but Google and users get a ton from being able to talk to AirDrop. So the market on its own would never converge on this, because the only player who could unlock the value had the least reason to. You need a regulator to make the defection from proprietary to standard mandatory, then "open" just looks like someone finally flipping a bit that was always there.