First, I believe the companies would have a very easy time to distinguish those features, as they know which feature was developed with the intent of keeping users in the app.

So if they acted by the spirit of the law, this would be very easy.

Of course they won't as that goes against their core interests, so we will likely have a cat-and-mouse game of definitions and malicious compliance. I'm looking forward to a whole new era of "UI innovation" where companies scramble to think of patterns that are technically not autoscroll or autoplay, but practically have an even worse effect.

(Interestingly, the "have the user opt-in" loophole we had with cookies doesn't seem to exist here, so at least we hopefully won't see any more "consent popups" or deliberately bad alternatives)

As for the law, apparently it has this line:

> ...or “any other feature defined” by the attorney general “as an addictive feature.”

So essentially the attorney general has to guess the intent of a company behind a feature. It's strange that this power lies with the attorney general and not a judge or jury (not an expert on US law though), but in general, "guessing intents" is something the legal system does all the time for obvious reasons.