Apple will not sell its latest product in Europe, it has announced.
The company has announced the “HomeView”, a new smart screen for people’s houses and the leader of its attempt to break into the smart home. It is intended as a way for people to speak to its Siri in their house, as well as showing information and allowing them to listen to music, and relies heavily on the recently introduced changes to the virtual assistant that arrived last month.
But the HomeView will not be arriving in the European Union, because of an ongoing and complex dispute between Apple and the EU’s leaders. The same dispute has left Apple users in Europe with a fundamentally different experience of their devices than those elsewhere – and now they are unable even to buy one of the company’s new, most prominent products.
The announcement was buried at the bottom of Apple’s press release announcing the HomeView, so small as almost to be missed. But it contains at least some explanation of why Apple has chosen not to offer it in Europe.
“Apple HomeView is not available for sale in the European Union, as Siri AI is currently unavailable in iOS in the EU,” it reads. “Apple is working constructively with the EU in an attempt to find a path forward.”
As that might suggest, Apple has been in discussions with the EU since long before the HomeView was launched. The current dispute goes back to the launch of Siri AI in June, when Apple revealed the new and overhauled Siri that can use artificial intelligence and draw on personal context to offer much richer and more useful responses.
Apple said at the time that it would not be launching that feature in the European Union. The dispute is because of European regulation that aims to ensure that big tech companies cannot unfairly favour their own platforms.
In this case, that meant that Apple might be required to allow other AI assistants access to the same data and capabilities that Siri has. But Apple has argued that would be unsafe, since other third-party companies might not preserve privacy in the same way, and that personal data could be gathered without users knowing it was happening.
Since even before Siri AI was released, the Apple and the European Union have been working together to try and find a way to offer the new features that would satisfy both Apple’s commitment to privacy and security and the EU’s belief that it should work with other systems. That work is ongoing but the two organisations have yet to find a solution that will allow the HomeView to go on sale in Europe at the same time as the rest of the world.
Apple has frequently clashed with European regulators over a variety of restrictions, most of them a result of the EU’s digital markets act that went into effect in 2023. Many of those conflicts have related to European attempts to limit the control of tech companies over their own platforms, and Apple’s arguments that those limits would make their users unsafe.
The two have been locked in long arguments over the EU’s alternative app stores policy, for instance, which lets users download apps in other ways than the official App Store but which Apple says weakens the protections that people depend on the iPhone for. The two organisations appear to have reconciled some of those difficulties, however, and Apple introduced a new set of rules for alternative app stores over summer.
EU users have been unable to get a variety of features as a result of those disputes. Some of them are small, such as a feature that allows the Apple Watch and the iPhone to share WiFi networks – but others, such as the HomeView, are much more significant.
At the same event, Apple also introduced a new HomePod Mini and Apple TV, both of which are primarily updated to allow them to use that new Siri experience. In that announcement, Apple said only that “Siri AI will not be initially available in the EU in iOS or iPadOS”, though it is not clear whether its use of the word “initially” suggests any progress has been made.
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