The big confession at MWC: the incompatibilities between iPhone and Android were a lie

Satellites are all the rage.

A long-standing tradition at MWC was the Monday debate between the CEOs of the four major European telecommunications operators, whose added value was gender parity. This year, that tradition was broken: in the afternoon, Marc Murtra of Telefónica and Tim Höttges of Deutsche Telekom repeated their usual refrain, demanding better treatment from European regulators that would encourage consolidation into larger groups. According to Murtra, this is essential for the continent's sovereignty, because it's naive to believe that the US and China will provide us with their most advanced AI models in ten years' time. Höttges introduced a new element: he called on states to invest in digital services from the major European telecommunications companies. telecoms European companies, instead of opting for the easy route of contracting with American hyperscalers. Christel Heydemann (Orange) and Margherita Della Valle (Vodafone) met this morning, and Della Valle announced an alliance with Orange and Telefónica to jointly deploy satellite coverage capable of competing with Elon Musk's Starlink, which he announced this afternoon will begin operating. GSMA Intelligence says that 80% of mobile operators already have agreements with some satellite network to supplement service in areas without coverage.

Historical notes.

Two decades of MWC in Barcelona offer plenty of material. The Mobile World Capital Foundation (FMWC) has formulated a new concept: Catalonia's digital GDP, which encompasses both ICT companies and those in other sectors that depend on technology. This makes sense: the GSMA says that more than half of the attendees at MWC events now come from these industries. adjacentAccording to FMWC, the country's digital economy has grown by 86% since 2006. On a more tangible note, MWC is paying several tributes to the history of mobile phones: Vivek Badrinath took to the stage displaying a Motorola Razr V3 (from 2004); Samsung is exhibiting all seventeen models in its Galaxy range, from the first S (2010) to the current S26, including the 2013 S4 with a pop-up antenna; Vodafone zooms in on the past forty years, displaying a wall of 48 iconic phones, starting with the Motorola DynaTAC (1983) and ending with the models that Honor and Samsung have recently unveiled. I shed a tear seeing very popular phones from Nokia, Palm, and BlackBerry that were swept away by the current ubiquitous rectangular touchscreen format with icons.

It wasn't that difficult.

For mobile users, this will be the MWC where the barriers between Apple devices and those of other brands have fallen. If yesterday Honor boasted about allowing file transfers between its Android phones and tablets and iPhones and iPads, today Xiaomi activates the same function, adding a physical element: the Xiaomi Tag location medallion, which can be found by both Apple's Find Me network and Google's Find Hub. And it costs half as much as Apple's AirTag. In the end, we've discovered that the difficulties of coexistence between the two most popular digital ecosystems in the world weren't technical, but rather commercial constraints.