Why do you need ecosystem own by one company?
You can have Ubuntu laptop, Android phone, WebOS TV. They all support Spotify and Netflix, you can cast videos from Android phone to your LG TV.
The problem with going that route is that you have to be involved in creating and maintaining a great user experience. I love ubuntu, but it's not without it's quirks that require a certain amount of troubleshooting to overcome.
While I was ready to leave a comment about Spotify not playing fair with artists, I have seen Apple's unfair business practices first hand with developing apps and bluetooth devices.
Unfortunately they are abusing their power, and are being flat out unfair if you want to develop a bluetooth device or app.
If you want to vet apps to ensure a safe environment, that's fine, but these practices go beyond that and are unfair.
The big labels aren't important, they're going to get their money anyway. This hurts the smaller labels, like my label, and countless others who never see a god damn dime from Spotify streaming.
Meanwhile, Bandcamp streams the songs for free but they allow you to pay what you want. I've made at least 10x the profit from selling tracks on Bandcamp than I ever did in the streaming world.
If Spotify wants to play fair, they need to pay artists more for streams. This site is just another instance of tech bros thinking they know better and meanwhile fucking over everyone else involved.
> If Spotify wants to play fair, they need to pay artists more for streams.
How? 90% of their catalog is owned by big labels. They cannot sign up artists directly because it will put them directly into competition with the labels.
They are trying to move towards paying artists directly [1], but you have to be eligible (most likely read: not signed up for a label already).
The problem is how do they break apart what to pay people. If they pay your record company a dollar every time a artist of yours is played and life time they get played say 100,000 times sure thats great for you. But are they going to make 100,000 off you? Sure they can make you a loss leader and parrot that they are a platform for the little dude.
But what happens when a major label demands that they also get a dollar every time a song is played. The next time Taylor Swift releases a new album the entire country of Sweden would be owed in Royalties.
Yea digital streaming doesnt pay jack. Even the best paying streaming services only pays .0064 cents per stream. Of course that doesnt add up to much considering they only have .65% of the market.
At the end of the day duder it sucks that you dont make shit from streaming services. It really does. But with how the entire streaming payout model works it just is NEVER going to be profitable for smaller artists. It 100% caters to artists that will pull in 100 million streams in a month. But how much does platforms like Spotify help artists on your label get noticed? I constantly try to find new artists that have under 100,000 listens on their top song to see if its some hidden gem or the next big thing.
Can I ask, what does a record label actually do nowadays? I understand that in the past they would've handled physical manufacturing and promotion, but now that anyone has access to bandcamp and spotify, what do they offer? (Asking as a non-musician)
The claims in here are pretty wild, particularly around how Apple has favored its own products:
- Apple blocked Spotify from working with Apple Watch
- It blocked Spotify from building apps for HomePod
- It blocked Spotify from building apps for Siri
- It blocks Spotify updates on a regular basis
- It blocked Spotify from using a podcasting API after it acquired 2x major podcasting companies
I genuinely hope Europe takes this seriously. The issue of the 30% cut alone is enough for further investigation, particularly as Apple now uses that as an advantage to undercut Spotify with Apple Music.
> - Apple blocked Spotify from working with Apple Watch / HomePad
But they've blocked every streaming music thing, right? It wasn't a vindictive campaign targetted at Spotify as this timeline is suggesting - no-one got to build streaming music apps for the Watch or HomePod IIRC.
I believe this is their point: Apple deliberately leaves those features unbuilt in order to give itself a market position that others can't compete with
Which raises the question: to what degree does a platform owner have a responsibility to support the businesses of others?
Rephrased, Spotify seems to think it has a /right/ to run its software on Apple platforms in an identical fashion to Apple's first-party software. Does that mean Apple has an obligation to provide an equivalent technical capacity for literally any software that runs on its devices? An app store? A payment provider? A cloud provider? A health data store? An update mechanism?
EDIT: This is no longer true, and doesn't exist in the guidelines
[---- obsolete info ----]
Yeah, it's a bit of a grey area.
However, App Store policies explicitly forbid apps that duplicate iOS and first-party functionality IIRC. Now that Apple has Maps, and Apple Music, and Podcasts, and..., and... should they enforce those rules?
> However, App Store policies explicitly forbid apps that duplicate iOS and first-party functionality IIRC. Now that Apple has Maps, and Apple Music, and Podcasts, and..., and... should they enforce those rules?
You should probably pull out the relevant quote from the guidelines. I don't think this is a thing anymore, at least in the way you're describing. If they did enforce it it would be a huge blow to the App Store.
> Which raises the question: to what degree does a platform owner have a responsibility to support the businesses of others?
I wish you'd stopped here because this is an interesting question, but the rest of your comment feels like it stretches things a bit.
What Spotify seems to be saying (correct me if I'm wrong), is that Apple does provide the technical capabilities for third parties to do as they're asking, but Apple is rejecting proposals purely on whim. It's not like there's not a API to stream music on the Apple Watch or play music through HomePod. It's all there. Apple's just blocking them from using it.
Once you publish an API you’re stuck with supporting it. When I’m hacking around with a library I wrote for my own use, I might do all sorts of things while I’m iterating but don’t want others to consume until they are fully baked.
The same thing about not allowing others to use “private APIs”. No guarantees are made about any methods that I didn’t make public. If I change that method in future releases, and your software that depends on it breaks - so be it.
Windows is full of backward compatibility hacks because one piece of software that wanted to use an undocumented method.
Apple has since day one had APIs that it used privately until they were fully baked and made public. Do you think that Apple waited two or three years to make share extensions public because of competitive reasons?
Microsoft used to be roundly criticized for supposedly building private APIs into Windows that Microsoft Office was allowed to use either because they were undocumented, or Office got the documentation far ahead of anyone else.
I'd say if you're selling $1200 computer devices, one principle of that is ownership and that you get to run what you want, not what Apple wants. We seem to have come a long way on this site from fighting Tivoization of embedded platforms, and unrepairable, unfixable, unhackable consumer electronics, to people making excuses for a super locked down platform, and not even on the excuse that it helps security, but from a philosophical standpoint that somehow Apple is morally right to do whatever they want.
Yes, you have a choice of not buying Apple software, just like you had the choice of not buying Windows and using Linux, or building a MythTV instead of a Tivo, but keep in mind, in the latter case, this was only possible because the CableCard standard was forced by law on the cable industry.
Apple can maintain their high levels of security and privacy without their 30% cut of subscriptions, it's a false dichotomy to pretend their behavior is anything but rent seeking.
>Microsoft used to be roundly criticized for supposedly building private APIs into Windows that Microsoft Office was allowed to use either because they were undocumented, or Office got the documentation far ahead of anyone else.
At the same time though, Microsoft wasn't preventing other developers from using those hidden APIs (if they could find them) nor preventing them from publishing their own competing apps. Sure, Microsoft's behaviour at the time was anti-competitive and sometimes even predatory, but they were never so on Windows to the extent that Apple is today on iOS.
> Rephrased, Spotify seems to think it has a /right/ to run its software on Apple platforms in an identical fashion to Apple's first-party software. Does that mean Apple has an obligation to provide an equivalent technical capacity for literally any software that runs on its devices?
Yes.
> An app store? A payment provider? A cloud provider? A health data store? An update mechanism?
Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes and Yes.
To do otherwise, is to invite platform owners to be (potentially abusive) monopolists with a license to favor their own services instead of promoting and maintaining fair competition in markets on top of that platform. In western societies, since the last century, that has been behavior which has been regulated by law and courts.
For comparison, Android keeps a very clear line between the 'Platform', and the 'Apps'.
Every API on the platform is available to all apps which have the necessary permissions.
Sure, it might look like Google has taken over key low level features of the device like updates and wifi location, but in fact from the platform perspective, all those components have an open API and can be replaced.
The only fly in the ointment here is some of the API's require powerful permissions which aren't allowed in store apps, but you can still sideload them, or use an alternate store.
This may have changed recently, haven't used an Android in a bit, but this wasn't true (and still probably isn't).
Specifically my company wanted to break our app into multiple apps and give a way for people to easily install the companions. If you send the user to the Play Store page, about 75% of users would dropoff, in user studies much of it was confusion about what to do once they saw the play store page.
Google has an api that is a much simpler flow than the full store experience which has much lower user dropoff. If you're curious where it's used, one example is the Google Drive app to install the Docs, Sheets, etc.
The API validates that the calling app is an app signed by the Google dev cert.
This isn't a security issue, you could just ship one app with all the functionality. It's clear they just wanted to reduce user drop off in a flow, but now provide that option to others.
I understand the potential for abuse even though the api still checked with the user. It wouldn't bother me if no one had access to the API, we'd just have to deal with it. But it felt anti-competitive that Google had it and we did not.
IIRC there are a few other similar non-security private APIs and they also felt anti-competitive to us. That said, it was no where near on the order of Apple, where it's commonplace on iOS.
I believe that API is in the play store itself. If your user used a third party store, you could ask them to give you an API to install other apps with no user interaction too.
As far as the platform is concerned, any app with the right permissions can install any other app. It just so happens that only the play store and other stores have that permission.
That's true; you're right that there is a open platform between the AOSP layer and the APK apps that run on top of it.
As you point out there is a fly in the ointment (which is enhanced by Google making it very difficult to ship with anything but the Play Store).
As an app developer like Spotify, the platform is the base of devices out there in the wild and how I build on top of them which, for me, is inclusive of the play services and play store.
Android definitely is a lot more open than iOS. But when the Play Store enforces a mechanism that favors Google, it's not of a practical difference to my livelihood than when the App Store has policies that favor Apple. If you have a really loyal following, like Epic/Fortnite, it's better than nothing. But even then the barrier to your users is huge and even the most establish companies with technical user bases will have a hard time crossing it. Nevermind the fledgling startups or developers with non-technical user bases.
You can also ask if Netflix has a /right/ to send their videos to consumers using Comcast's network. Or if Bing has a /right/ to be accessible on Google Chrome.
I'm sure Spotify has no problems with the knowledge of its engineers, I just found the APIs in 5 min. In fact, number 4 of this page explains your comment: https://www.timetoplayfair.com/facts/
This is for the lawyers to make sense of, but in electing to be a platform provider, they should be held to higher standards in my opinion.
They did indeed have "the service" in question, it was just limited to Apple's own offering.
It's a scenario not unlike net neutrality: an infrastructure provider that is also a content provider can put themselves or select customers in a position where free market forces are hindered or suspended in order to achieve a monopoly-like status.
> They did indeed have "the service" in question, it was just limited to Apple's own offering.
Again, there's a difference between "Siri can talk to our music service" and "We have a stable public API that 3rd party vendors can hook into to connect up to a music service". They're not the same thing, and one is a lot easier than the other.
None of the above was an argument about how easy or hard it is to build a service (though Apple has enough resources to build anything they want within the scope that they operate).
Given that they are a platform provider, maybe doing the bare minimum to get their own stuff working, but not enough to get any alternatives to work, is a strategic choice on their part.
"If Homepod only works with Apple Music, more people will switch"
No, a hardware manufacturer has no requirement to support any specific software. An infrastructure provider, however, has (in MY opinion) a requirement to support what they support to an equal degree, or it amounts to… market manipulation? Something not quite fair, some kind of abuse of power which is to the detriment of all other participants in the market, customers and companies alike.
Obviously, America as of today disagrees, seeing as net neutrality is not held in very high regard.
I look forward to roads that only support Fords, water pipes that only support Nestlé water, and stairs that only support Nike shoes.
> I look forward to roads that only support Fords, water pipes that only support Nestlé water, and stairs that only support Nike shoes.
Thankfully, America is not (yet) stupid enough to let private companies build our critical infrastructure, and thankfully "voice controlled speaker" is as critical as chewing gum.
It's also funny because Spotify won't let other people integrate their streaming service on a device (even only for premium subscribers) if you don't follow a huge list of restrictions.
> Apple blocked Spotify from working with Apple Watch
I'm not sure this is 100% true. From browsing the spotify support forums many moons ago, some guy had built a spotify playing app for the apple watch, but spotify squashed it. Given that some random dev could do this, it doesn't seem like apple prevented anything.
If a random guy can make the app then Spotify could certainly have made an Apple Watch app.
If anything it makes the case that if it were so simple for a single random dev that unless Apple itself were preventing it there is no reason the app wouldn't have been released.
For god sake, it's about policy not tech inability!
You don't even need to read the website to know that. WatchOS has APIs like iOS, it's not a matter of being 'hard' to program. It's because if you're nobody, the spotlight is not on you every step you take. But Spotify being your competitor is being close watched.
But it was Spotify that asked the random guy to take the app down. If anything I would have thought it would be in Spotify's interests to keep it up - "look it's possible, but Apple isn't allowing us"
Of course, because this guy had no rights. It’s already technically possible without having to keep an app alive that’s infringing your property just to say ‘hey look’
Counterargument: Apple's review process is more likely to let "some guy's" app slip through the cracks and make it in the App Store than the official app of one of its huge competitors with an install base of many, many, many millions of devices.
Perhaps. No one has any evidence of this in this case though, so it sounds like you're just taking a side.
On the other hand Spotify did squash this guy's app. That's a thing that happened. So it's not like the APIs aren't there.
So now we're taking Spotify's word that Apple is keeping them off the app store, while ignoring the fact that said app is possible and they themselves have kept an app off the app store.
True, I just offered a counterargument based on conjecture. So let's assume at least rational behavior on the part of Spotify. What do you think would be their rationale for not building a feature that would enhance their product and is desired by customers? What do they gain by blaming Apple for not building it? This isn't rhetorical... I think there are potential legitimate reasons they'd want to do this, I'm just curious about where your thinking is on this.
Spotify is available (on apple watch) now, for whatever that's worth... Took me about 2 minutes from reading the complaint to playing Spotify (already had an account) on my watch. That includes downloading from the store and then to the watch (which has in the past, with other apps, taken a while)
The Apple Watch has almost been available 4 years... In the first year and a half all apps were extremely limited. I'm not sure if that leaves "many" years for them to not allow Spotify.
> They state in their timeline that after many years Apple did allow Spotify.
This is a VERY different statement than the true one which is:
Apple didn't allow ANY streaming music (or audiobook, or podcast) apps on the watch due to not providing the API's. They didn't specifically block Spotify.
I _believe_ the issue here is some app developers were invited to visit Apple and (perhaps) get access to certain APIs that weren't going to be made available to normal app developers.
- If you're deep into iOS development you know that Apple apps - the ones shipped with the OS - sometimes do things that 3rd party apps aren't able to. For example the Music app gets to be the _default_ app to live in the control panel even if you hardly ever use it and are using Spotify most of the time.
- I believe - for the Apple Watch - some of the 3rd party apps which were already available on the day of the launch were a) invited to preview the Watch ahead of other developers and b) in some cases allowed to use undocumented APIs. Uber may be one example of this - https://www.macrumors.com/2017/10/05/uber-removing-apple-gra...
As I read this "Time to Play Fair" website, it looks to me like Spotify is complaining they weren't invited to these preview sessions and thereby didn't get to learn about / get permission to use undocumented APIs.
It's one thing to make an app, it's an entirely different thing to get it through the App Store review process.
Did that guy's app make it on the App Store? He could have easily built it with private APIs which would work but wouldn't pass review (maybe, App Review is very inconsistent) or many other reasons why he could and Spotify couldn't.
My read from the linked timeline is that Apple didn't block Spotify from the Apple Watch, but rather wouldn't provide the API necessary to Spotify for offline-mode.
I inferred this from the vague wording in the earlier points and the clarifications in the later points.
> When Apple launches their new Apple Watch, they dismiss our proposals and won’t work with us to develop an app for it.
Notice, they didn't say they were blocked. Also why would building an app for the watch necessitate a proposal to Apple that requires Apple to work with them directly? Wouldn't you instead build your app and submit it for approval? This is probably because the Apple Watch SDK didn't provide all the functionality Spotify wanted, and so Spotify was trying to get Apple to add new functionality to the SDK.
> We submit a new proposal for a streaming app directly on the Apple Watch. Apple declines
> With WatchOS 4, Apple continues to make it challenging for us to deliver a workable streaming solution for the Apple Watch
Again, doesn't say they were blocked, just that proposals were rejected and the provided functionality made it difficult/impossible to do what they wanted.
> With Watch OS 5, Apple allowed the Spotify team to start developing offline functionality
Was this the functionality Spotify was proposing for Apple to make possible all along? In other words, was this the missing part of the SDK that Spotify had kept proposing to Apple and having rejected (not the app itself, which they didn't want to build without this functionality)?
EDIT: I'm also not saying they didn't build the app and submit it and have it rejected. They just never actually say that in the timeline.
I don't see how blocking a company actively trying to monopolize podcasts from using the Apple recommendation API is monopolistic. Apple podcasts (either intentionally or just from neglect) have always been backed by open RSS podcasting.
Apple have a monopoly on the distribution of iOS apps, so they are required to offer fair terms to all app vendors, including themselves.
Apple could charge themselves the 30% App Store fee for Apple Music, demonstrating that the App Store is a fair marketplace that doesn't artificially advantage Apple's own services. It would then be incumbent on Apple to prove that Apple Music is priced fairly, rather than being deliberately operated at a loss to squeeze other streaming music services out of the market.
Yes. So costs of putting up an ad are reflected in the relevant departments. Large corps do this all the time, transferring money from the left pocket to their right pocket.
It's somewhat similar to net neutrality proposals. AT&T doesn't have a monopoly as an ISP. However, if AT&T starts/acquires a video streaming service, they should not give unfair advantages to their own service because they want to compete with Netflix.
What does it mean for one company to “charge oneself”? If Apple Music isn’t a separate legal entity, it means invoicing oneself without any monetary transfer. Which is frankly just ledger masturbation.
Not absurd. Different departments in the same company have budgets of their own. If a department wants to buy an ad from their own paper, it should affect their remaining budget, just as it should show up on the Ad department's revenue.
Sure, but this would not affect Apple music, it’s not like they would shut it down. The Apple eco-system is so popular because Apple takes a holistic approach, they wouldn’t mind at all losing money on Apple music if it increased iPhone earnings.
Technically it does? Apple could be taking a 30% cut all Apple Music subscriptions for hosting the application and processing the payment. Apple then gets the remaining 70%.
Do they actually take a 30% cut? If they're accounting in that manner, then it's likely that Apple Music is running at a substantial loss, which would constitute predatory pricing under EU competition law.
You have an overly simplified view of Apple Music.
It’s on multiple platforms, it’s tied to Beats, it has a relationship with iTunes Store, there is advertising involved etc. So there could be multiple licensing and revenue sharing deals that mean Apple Music is not running at a loss.
It seems that 30% is for features that are delivery in app, since Uber and Deliveroo are delivered outside app they have a lower cut. It's just commission cut rules by Apple.
Regarding Apple Music I'm not sure what that supposed to mean. I'm pretty sure that Spotify doesn't charge the same for "Spotify Premium" and "McDonalds" ads.
And most importantly, it's not 30% for Apple Music.
What do you mean it isn't? Apple Store could trivially take a 30% cut of the Apple Music revenue, and the only thing that would change would be the distribution of revenue between Apple Music and Apple Store in Apple's revenue reports. The total revenue would be the same.
Exactly, but Apple can run their streaming service as a loss leader because they still get to book the 30% revenue on the store side. Spotify can't recoup that 30%.
This effectively gives Apple an extra 30% margin for their streaming music service.
It's 30% for "in-app purchases" which is a specific API which allows one-click payment for one-time purchases or subscriptions ONLY FOR digital goods, and the payment goes through the iTunes account (eg: credit card).
If you buy a real world product or service, you need to use a third party payment service like Stripe (or Apple Pay, if you want), there is a 0% commission fee from Apple. This is why Amazon can distribute an app on iOS that allows to buy whatever you want without Apple getting a cut; well, anything but digital goods, like Kindle books, which in fact can't be bought from Amazon iOS app.
If you read between the lines, it's clear that Spotify was able to make a normal watch app. But they wanted to make one that had special functionality not yet allowed by Apple, for any app, not just Spotify.
There is a fine line between reading between the lines and fabricating things. Can you point to what exactly in that website substantiates your implication?
Their timeline is a bit unclear. They claim that in 2015 and 2016, they were denied outright. In 2017 they say that "Apple continues to make it challenging for us to deliver a workable streaming solution for the Apple Watch". Then in 2018 they say that "Apple finally allows enhanced functionality for the Spotify app on the Apple Watch".
Until watchos 5, 3rd party apps couldn’t do lte streaming. That said, lte was new in watchos 4, the tslk was that apple wanted to initially restrict it for battery life reasons.
Spotify could have made a watch app that provided controls and had offline somgs. They didn’t, and kept shutting down spps that did, or buying them and shutting them. This was a major sore point against spotify on the apple watch subreddit. Even now they’re dragging their feet, iirc.
The watch is a new, battery constrained device. It doesn’t seem unreasonable to limit 3rd party apps for a bit while sorting out how to work with the size constraints.
I’m guessing apple will add lte support for 3rd party apps in watchos 6. Meanwhile, 3rd party apps have had the ability to make apps with offline support since June 2018. Most audio apps have added this.
Spotify....has not. What’s the holdup? Apple watch users are pretty frustrated with spotify: if all the other audio apps can do it, why haven’t they?
(Lte is an edge case: few watches have lte, and even fewer have an active lte plan. Offline audio is the main use case spotify still isn’t doing)
Especially one that isn't currently making money, presumably if Apple wasn't engaging in anti-market strategies they would have more revenue.
How much, I have no clue - but if they can't even have a "get premium now" button in the app then that's insane to me. The 30% fee Apple would take isn't a real alternative either, it's still not profitable.
> It blocked Spotify from using a podcasting API after it acquired 2x major podcasting companies
Is this talking about the Apple Watch-Podcasting issue? Until recently, podcast apps on the watch had issues saving where you are in an episode because they couldn't constantly run in the background; you could still play audio in the background without your app, you just couldn't watch the percentage played. Fitness tracking apps were allowed to run in the background forever, so some podcast apps told the API they were fitness apps to get around the restriction [0]. Apple later removed this loophole and created the APIs necessary for podcast apps to work on the watch [1].
- Apple blocked Spotify from working with Apple Watch
How? By not providing API's to do what they wanted? yawn Next?
- It blocked Spotify from building apps for HomePod
How? By not providing API's to do what they wanted? yawn Next?
- It blocked Spotify from building apps for Siri
How? By not providing API's to do what they wanted? yawn Next?
- It blocks Spotify updates on a regular basis
Wakes up Ok here we have the first real issue, BUT even with that said this is SUPER one-sided. We have only Spotify's word and given their liberal stretching of the truth (or outright breaking it in some cases) I'm not willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.
- It blocked Spotify from using a podcasting API after it acquired 2x major podcasting companies
I'm going to need more info on this because it is super vague.
I don't know about the others, but Spotify is BSing about being blocked on the Apple Watch.
Until WatchOS 5 the APIs to do something like Spotify didn't really exist. There were workarounds, like by abusing the workout API, but unsurprisingly these has significant drawbacks, were unstable and Apple cracked down when they found API abuses.
Apple "blocked" Spotify only in that it hadn't (yet) released APIs that supported their use cases.
It makes me wonder how disingenuous their other claims are.
I do think services should have more options than Apple allows for accepting payment.
-Apple blocked Spotify from working with Apple Watch
The newest version of WatchOS does allow it. The first generation of watchOS really didn’t allow any apps - just remote views of iOS apps (yeah I’m simplifying it).
- It blocked Spotify from building apps for HomePod
Apple doesn’t have any apps on the HomePod. Now we are going to force all single purpose devices to ship with an SDK?
- It blocked Spotify from building apps for Siri
Apple also just came out with any third party integration with Siri a version or two ago. Again we want the government to dictate the timeline when they build features for apps?
- It blocked Spotify from using a podcasting API after it acquired 2x major podcasting companies
Netflix also blocked its API from most third parties years ago. Can we sue Netflix?
This is long overdue. I really hope this leads to something.
The anticompetitive behaviour described on that website is just the tip of the iceberg. Apple is doing a lot worse behind the scenes. Cellular service on Apple Watch for example - as a carrier you can't just provide service for the Watch - you have to be an "approved" carrier and this means being friends with Apple and selling iPhones among other things (you only provide SIM-only plans and not interested in selling phones? Tough luck.). Same for visual voicemail, etc.
Quote: "Early last month, the US Copyright Board (CRB) officially ruled in favor of a 44% increase on streaming music royalties for songwriters and publishers."
Care to guess how much of those services' content comes from publishers (read: labels), and how much those services already pay to them (hint: as much as 70% of their revenue)?
Also, strangely enough, the article quotes everyone except Spotify, Amazon etc. But is happily quoting .... (substitute expletives) various music vultures^W associations who directly benefit from this arrangement (and not the songwriters).
I remember a (deleted) tweet from the rapper Nipsey Hussle where he posted his payout breakdown. It's been reblogged since deletion and is preserved:
>ATTENTION EVERYONE:
>
>1 Million Streams on YouTube = $690
>
>1 Million Streams on Spotify = $4,370
>
>1 Million Streams on Apple Music = $7,350
>
>1 Million Streams on @Tidal = $12,500
>
>1 Million Streams on Amazon Music = $4,020
>
>Don’t shoot the messenger.
>Jus Sign up 4 @tidal
>
>— THA GREAT (@NipseyHussle) January 15, 2018
The only thing about payout $ is that you have to take into account how many streams you actually get on each service. Are we to believe that Tidal's payouts would stay they same if they had Spotify's much greater listenership? Or Apple for that matter? Streaming services pay the rates charged to them by the record companies based on myriad listenership demographics.
I believe the labels are charging the services, and those labels pay the artist. Am I wrong on that? The labels set the price to be paid, don't they?
The payout per play is basically different between free and premium users as they add more to the revenue shared by all the artists.
If you look at revenue for premium users, then it's probably much higher than that, but when you add free users, it will lower the average.
A solution you might think would be to remove the free-tier. But that will only do one thing: cut a (admittedly smaller) revenue stream for artists, cut a promotional stream for artists and less possibilities to upsale premium accounts to free users.
Someone who isn't even a free user will either not listen to music or pirate it. Is that preferable?
A lot of artists admit that Spotify pay-out per stream is certainly lower, but it's still dominating all the other streaming revenues, as long as you are actually an artist who has the potential to make any. Some unknown artist selling 1 CD for $10 on bandcamp with no listen on streaming services will probably think differently.
Downloading and Streaming are two different royalty models.
Legally, you have to pay more expensive royalties if you download music (referred to as "right to reproduce") rather than stream (right to transmit), so a special type of downloaded file must be used that can't be exported in any way. This is what Apple are prohibiting.
> That’s why I nearly jumped for joy during the watchOS 5 announcement in June, when Apple unveiled most of my list of watchOS changes needed to make good podcast apps.
In my understanding, an Apple Watch Spotify app would surely be technically feasible as of watchOS 5 (but I might be in the wrong here, I haven't tried myself more than read the available API docs).
Seems like there's still the issue of networking, and I guess if the accusations about the Spotify app rejections are true then I wouldn't be surprised if a Watch app that allows offline playback would get rejected.
> Seems like there's still the issue of networking
Yes, but I would guess that limitation is done for some "legitimate" technical reason. Streaming Apple Music on the watch just kills the battery life in my experience, and it seems pretty on par with Apple's M-O of limiting expensive hardware access to third parties (like multitasking back in the days). But who knows, could perhaps be out of some evil anti-spotify spite.
> I wouldn't be surprised if a Watch app that allows offline playback would get rejected.
Considering all of the dirty tricks and favoritism between Spotify and Facebook, I’m not sure they are the right messengers for this.
Oh, and one of the early execs involved with Spotify told me, point blank, “that man needs to die already” in reference to Steve Jobs before his passing. Yeah, I was just as shocked as you might be in reading that. I doubt I was the only one aware of such dark sentiments.
The executive team at Apple is probably looking at this website and thinking, “sorry but not sorry.” Making life difficult for Spotify could be seen as a way to carry on Steve’s legacy.
Doesnt really matter where the sentiment comes from if we’re to have an efficient economy. There should be more choices available. Any idea what made the spotify execs wish death on Jobs?
'Any idea what made the spotify execs wish death on Jobs?'
Does it honestly matter? First of all its probably just a joke. But second of all if we assume he said it the day he died that means the joke was made in 2011 when Spotify was a small company. When chances are the joke was made when they were still just in Sweden.
You might have forgotten this because the market has copied almost everything they’ve done, all of their aesthetic choices, etc — Apple creates products that are highly, highly opinionated. The Apple consumer isn’t buying access to a generic computing device, they are buying a point of view.
Sometimes that point of view is compatible with what you, personally, want. Sometimes it’s clearly obnoxious and Apple needs to change course. No matter what the case may be, however, it’s still a situation of a very specific point of view being sold to a consumer that has actively made a choice that this is, in fact, the point of view that suits their needs.
You’ve got to remember that the iPhone was an EXTREME case of this. The entire mobile industry thought the whole touch screen typing thing was never going to work at scale. I myself wasn’t completely convinced. Yet here we are. You can’t have the good without the bad.
I agree with this for the most part - it is just that time has shown that that POV has changed (such as allowing native apps and the app store ecosystem for one). I just don't think that carrying on a grudge against a product that is hugely popular with users (but of course is not without its own downsides) based on a point of view that was held nearly 10 years ago is a particularly sensible way to go about things.
For the most part I'd definitely agree, Apple has done some great things that went away from the established norms - but in this case, given that the song I listen to on Spotify will sound identical to listening to it on Apple music, the whole thing does stink of Apple giving itself the upper hand.
I have no idea what kind of justification you are trying to make for Apples behaviour here, but you think it is justifiable. If this was Microsoft instead of Apple you would probably be on Spotify's side. And it should not matter if it is Spotify or someone else, Spotify have the money and resources to be able to try and fight apple, so many other app makers don't and Apple shits all over them.
There’s been several lawsuits’ worth of material uncovering highly preferential treatment afforded to Spotify by Facebook, which both parties pretended didn’t exist. I’m sure a Google search can help you out with this one.
As for your second comment, well... You’re aware that the parent post is a website that was specifically created to ax-grind, right?
I was at the Spotify office the day the news of Steve's untimely death broke. It was a solemn day, and the the one senior executive I spoke to expressed true sorrow, as if a longtime friend had passed. Jobs was incredibly respected by the Spotify crew, as far as I'm concerned.
On 5 October 2011, Spotify was a freshly minted single-billion unicorn. Factually, no-one had plural billions of dollars on the line at that time, not even the senior exec I quoted.
Spotify was also comparatively small at the time, with limited hierarchy. The entire office - execs and rank-and-file alike - was respectful, with a fair number visibly upset and mourning.
Your comment is effectively only gossip and broad accusations. Leaving your anecdote aside, what dirty tricks and favoritism do you have in mind exactly?
Considering your other comment with "billion dollar investors" in a company that was barely worth 1 billion dollars back then, this definitely reads like a made-up story.
It's also very bad on the "There's an app for that" image.
The other parts of the page are very nice though. The font contrast is fine and the font has a nice weight to it. When they want us to read something they actually still know how to make a proper webpage. And it works fine without JS.
Glad I searched before commenting, it's the first thing I noticed. Could be a covert tactic to trigger Apple though, more deadly than a computer virus, will probably shut infinite loop down for a day.
The timing of this is interesting in the context of Elizabeth Warren’s recent proposal to forbid platform operators from also being participants on their own platforms.
It looks like they’ve filed a complaint with the EU Commission; I wonder if it will become a talking point in US politics as well.
For the purposes of reasoning about this, Apple iOS and Apple's iOS App Store and the iOS Apple Music app are all the same entity, equivalent. It doesn't matter that it's not in the App Store, it ships on the phone alongside the App Store. That's the same as being in the App Store and getting autoinstalled on every device.
This exemplifies some of the reasons proprietary app store lock-in is bad for consumers.
Progressive Web Apps -- web apps that are installable and available offline without any app store -- are a viable alternative, and ultimately a threat to Apple's app store racket. It's likely why iOS Safari continues to drag it's feet on PWA support.
Counter point: the discoverability on all of the app stores I've tried has been pretty terrible. Unless I know the name of an app that I'm trying to install I almost never find what I'm looking for. Most often I search for 'the best app to do X' on Google and then put a name from that into the app store.
App store UX is so horrible I’m sure it is intentional. But I have no idea what they’re trying to achieve. In the case of Apple’s store, I have literally never wanted to browse any of the curated lists of apps, just to open the search view which doesn’t even have the search textbox focused by default!
In theory that's an easy problem: anyone could make an "App Store", especially considering they wouldn't have to host binaries or deliver updates.
Something mimicking today's stores would essentially be links you can rate and comment on. Kind of like Reddit, but with a different UI and no direct user submissions.
But crucially, they’d have no way to moderate for bad actors. You can’t just kick a webpage off the net. Things like Reddit style voting can be gamed, just like app store search and reviews are today. Whoever has the most resources wins, not necessarily who has the best product.
> But crucially, they’d have no way to moderate for bad actors. You can’t just kick a webpage off the net.
Yeah. You could technically still kick them off the store for the sake of maintaining trust— like a forum.
> Things like Reddit style voting can be gamed, just like app store search and reviews are today. Whoever has the most resources wins, not necessarily who has the best product.
Wait, isn't this like current App Store ratings though? I wouldn't be worried about this. It is already the case that many people invest a lot of resources in trying to game the App Store. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The App Store gives you discoverability and could be argued as being one of the reasons for a 30% cut.
If your app can be distributed as a PWA, then the question becomes: is the App Store (which gives you discoverability) worth the 30% revenue cut? For some PWAs the answer will be no.
> Progressive Web Apps [are] ultimately a threat to Apple's app store racket
Honestly, no, they're not. Even the Gold Standard of PWAs - the Twitter Lite app that Google (the patron saint of PWAs) helped them build - provides an inferior experience compared to native apps.
People bring this up often - Apple refuses to improve Safari to bolster their App Store - which completely ignores all the valuable improvements Safari has made to give web apps more native-like features, like backdrop-blur for blurred backgrounds and CSS Snap points for native JS-less carousels. Chrome doesn't support either of these.
You conflate the current state of PWAs with their ultimate outcome. If web apps are as good as native for most people, there is no need for proprietary app stores. This does indeed conflict with Apple's app store business model.
And despite it adding certain CSS standards, mobile Safari on the whole remains the IE6 of the mobile browser world. Apple drags its feet on web app standards support for a reason similar to why Microsoft dragged its feet with IE6 web standards support.
The HomePod is a horrible device unless you want Siri in a can. The source selection is just so locked down for whatever reason, so unless you're all in with the Apple ecosystem, you're going to be missing out something.
The HomePod would be a incredible bargain even if it didn't support Siri at all, and were just an AirPlay compatible speaker. Everyone who complains about Apple Music (myself included) and Siri's uselessness are mostly ignoring the fact that it is the single best compact speaker, audio-wise, shipping today. It's an order of magnitude higher audio quality than everything within 10%-1000% of its price range.
Can someone help me stop playing the world's smallest violin here?
Spotify knowingly built a low margin business living in the pocket of the labels (who force Spotify towards razor thin margins) and Apple/Google (who have, since before Spotify launched, operated app stores for their platforms which are to some extent curated and which are not free market economies).
Spotify feels aggrieved that Apple does not allow it to develop software for certain of their hardware lines, such as Homepod or Apple Watch. Why do I have to allow you to develop software for my proprietary hardware, just because it's technically possible?
The crucial line in their argument is this:
> giving up 30% was too much for us to keep our prices low for our fans. Unfortunately, the end result is that you can no longer upgrade to Premium through the app.
How is this Apple's fault and not your fault? Every market place takes a cut from the vendor. Your business not being able to sustain the cost of doing business is nobody's fault except your own.
Apple should not be allowed to send push notifications about products or services they prohibit other apps from sending. They shouldn't arbitrarily restrict Spotify from updating the app (virtually no information is provided about what infractions Apple saw, and history suggests that companies are great at presenting one side of the argument and then we find that Apple has a legitimate grievance). They should not be able to charge Spotify more because of their competition.
But to suggest that Apple should be forced to allow Siri integration with Spotify? Homepod? Apple Watch? Ridiculous.
Monopolies where prices rise are bad news. But look at UK football coverage. On top of my free-to-air channels (£150 p.a. TV licence) I need a Sky Sports subscription (minimum £25 per month) and a BT Sport subscription (which necessitates one of BT Broadband - gross - or Sky) which I think is around £5-£10 per year. The top flight football is fragmented across all three providers. Is that better for me?
A 30% cut is something that Spotify needs to pay to Apple for every user that subscribes to Spotify through Apple devices. This cost doesn't doesn't exist for PC users, for example.
They probably could live with it but I can understand why it feels like an artificial cost that Apple came up with. It would be an understandable cost if they were selling the Spotify App through the App Store and using the actual store infrastructure for supporting Spotify... but they are not.
The app is nothing more than a portal to the entire Spotify infrastructure, it doesn't weight anything to Apple.
And then we have the subject of the direct competition, Apple Music doesn't need to have their profits cut in 30% because they are owned by Apple itself.
And it's even worse if they are using Siri, Homepad and Apple Watch to make Apple Music more appealing in comparison to Spotify.
> A 30% cut is something that Spotify needs to pay to Apple for every user that subscribe to Spotify through Apple devices
Not so as I understand it. Only if you put the option to subscribe into your app in the app store. That cost doesn't exist for Mac or PC, but Apple doesn't heavily curate and have costs associated with the wild west of downloading apps from the web.
> it doesn't weight anything to Apple
There are significant costs associated with the app store, no? Part of the reason users gravitate towards the iPhone is because you can download high quality apps without malware, viruses, etc.
> Apple Music doesn't need to have their profitts cut in 30% because they are owned by Apple itself.
Conceptually I'm with you. This is an area I'm struggling with though. The Apple Online store charges accessory manufacturers a fee to be featured there. Should Apple also pay a fee to feature their own products there? I don't think so.
> it's even worse if they are using Siri, Homepod and Apple Watch to make Apple Music more appealing in comparison to Spotify
Why? They've made the hardware. Why should they have to let Spotify run on it in the exact way Spotify wants? (You can Airplay Spotify to Homepod.)
> There are significant costs associated with the app store, no? Part of the reason users gravitate towards the iPhone is because you can download high quality apps without malware, viruses, etc.
That should be covered by the one time fee that developers pay to Apple in order to publish apps into the App Store. I am not sure if a simple binary needs a 30% cut of the entire Spotify profit to keep up with the costs of hosting an app there.
> Why? They've made the hardware. Why should they have to let Spotify run on it in the exact way Spotify wants? (You can Airplay Spotify to Homepod.)
Because Apple is using a completely different market, which they have a strong presence on, to increase the value of Apple Music and consequently devaluing any other competing music streaming services.
> That should be covered by the one time fee that developers pay to Apple in order to publish apps into the App Store. I am not sure if a simple binary needs a 30% cut of the entire Spotify profit to keep up with the costs of hosting an app there.
We're now into the murky world of trying to tell other people what their cost base or margins should be.
> Because Apple is using a completely different market, which they have a strong presence on, to increase the value of Apple Music and consequently devaluing any other competing music streaming services.
Another view is that Apple fairly charges a consistent 30% to all customers in the app store. In the same way as Amazon doesn't pay to list its own products on Amazon, and Google doesn't pay to advertise Chrome on google.com, Apple should not have to pay to market its own services on its own marketplace.
> Because Apple is using a completely different market, which they have a strong presence on, to increase the value of Apple Music and consequently devaluing any other competing music streaming services.
This is the core issue. Apple using their dominant market position in the hardware/operating system markets to push anticompetitive practices for their product in a different market (Apple Music).
I don't see how this is much different than IE. Maybe even worse in some ways. But regardless, it is very clearly manipulating the market artificially in Apple's favor.
For those who have significant sums invested in the App Store, they are effectively dominant as there is no way to switch app licenses to a different app store.
Sure, but the rules are _reasonably_ unambiguous and unchanging. The 30% cut has been in place since day one. If Spotify didn't like it, they had the choice to focus their attentions exclusively on other platforms. That wasn't the case with Windows+IE, when effectively there were no other platforms of any size.
And worth noting that Spotify grows by millions of paying subscribers every quarter without the app store. They're currently choosing to focus exclusively on other channels rather than try to pay the 30% and… doing better than Apple Music…
> Apple using their dominant market position in the hardware/operating system markets to push anticompetitive practices for their product in a different market (Apple Music).
Allegedly anticompetitive.
Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Facebook all engage in similar behavior by giving preferential treatment of their products/features/services.
I would be upset because I bought the hardware and they arbitrarily won't let my music from Spotify play on it while their own music does.
Remember it's my device, but theirs. Not apples. If they are going to allow third party apps then do so, but there's no technical reason to not allow the service.
Imagine Ford says you can only use a certain brand of tires on your new car, or can only buy tires through the dealership. That's what's going on here.
Wha? You buy an Amazon Alexa and it only supports certain music services. Certain Bose speakers have Spotify integration https://www.spotify.com/uk/bose/ - how is this not the same?
It's your device that you bought, which quite clearly doesn't support the things you want, so why did you buy it?
>That should be covered by the one time fee that developers pay to Apple in order to publish apps into the App Store
As a developer I can push a hundred updates per day if I want to, and they all have to be reviewed by a human. How large of a "one time fee" should be expected to cover the cost of that review?
> That should be covered by the one time fee that developers pay to Apple in order to publish apps into the App Store.
That seems quite unrealistic. Apple certainly has recurring costs to keep the app store running. Taking a one time publishing fee wouldn't be sustainable long term.
> Why? They've made the hardware. Why should they have to let Spotify run on it in the exact way Spotify wants? (You can Airplay Spotify to Homepod.)
I perfectly understand why Apple would be as anti-competitive as they can away with on their plateform. It benefits them tremendously.
What I don't understand is why some comsumers, who are definitely loosing from the situation - even if you prefer the Apple solution competition tends to bring price down - are systematically defending Apple. It's not like we are talking about a small and endearing company here.
Out of curiosity, do people really view using Apple products as a life style choice ? I liked my iphone but as far as I am concerned it's a mass market device.
All I know is I don’t have to deal with blue screens, malware, and facetime has worked flawlessly for 10 years. And I can walk into a store and get a replacement device in 30 minutes when I break it. The time and effort I’ve saved not dealing with Windows/Android BS (which I experienced) has been well worth it.
Maybe you haven't considered that some consumers don't feel like they're losing from the situation. Maybe some consumers feel like they are winning because Apple's interests align with their own, and the interests of Apple's competitors are not aligned with their own?
I like having an app store I can trust to not have malware, I like knowing the apps I download have had a human review them for quality. I like having hardware with an OS where the developer of the OS controls when I get updates, not a carrier or manufacturer who are not affiliated with the developer. I like getting security and feature updates for my OS for 5 years. I like paying the developer of my software so the developer has a profit structure that doesn't necessitate spying on me. I like knowing that every piece of software pre-packaged on my device was put there by the developer of the OS with their explicit approval, and not sold to the highest bidder. I like knowing that the software on my phone is exactly how the developer planned it, and not modified by an unaffiliated device manufacturer to the point where multiple websites exist for the sole purpose of creating ROMs that mimic the developer's intended software, necessitating that I now either trust the unaffiliated hardware manufacturer or trust some random person on the Internet to deliver me a clean ROM.
There are platforms that are open and free to use however you see fit. They exist and they are great options. Very modern and easy to use and as open as you want them to be. I prefer the option that isn't open to modification. Products exist for both use cases.
> I like having an app store I can trust to not have malware, I like knowing the apps I download have had a human review them for quality. I like having hardware with an OS where the developer of the OS controls when I get updates, not a carrier or manufacturer who are not affiliated with the developer. I like getting security and feature updates for my OS for 5 years. I like paying the developer of my software so the developer has a profit structure that doesn't necessitate spying on me. I like knowing that every piece of software pre-packaged on my device was put there by the developer of the OS with their explicit approval, and not sold to the highest bidder. I like knowing that the software on my phone is exactly how the developer planned it, and not modified by an unaffiliated device manufacturer to the point where multiple websites exist for the sole purpose of creating ROMs that mimic the developer's intended software, necessitating that I now either trust the unaffiliated hardware manufacturer or trust some random person on the Internet to deliver me a clean ROM.
And none of that has anything to do with what we are discussing. Apple could still do all this thing while allowing more competition on the plateform. For example could you explain to me how allowing apps competing with the system ones or allowing other streaming service to cast and use the watch would prevent any of what you listed ?
It is not an either/or situation between two opposite situations. There are plenty of inbetween possibilities.
> feel like they are winning because Apple's interests align with their own
Apple interests is selling you phone and apps so they can make money. Unless you are a stockholder, I don't see how their interests can align with yours. Unless you take pleasure in paying more, you are clearly losing from the situation.
> Not so as I understand it. Only if you put the option to subscribe into your app in the app store. That cost doesn't exist for Mac or PC, but Apple doesn't heavily curate and have costs associated with the wild west of downloading apps from the web.
The cost is there whether or not you pay through the App Store mechanisms. You have to pay it, even if you provide your own payment mechanism.
> There are significant costs associated with the app store, no? Part of the reason users gravitate towards the iPhone is because you can download high quality apps without malware, viruses, etc.
Sure. Then charge all apps for the cost of being in the App Store. It doesn't excuse a situation where Apple directly competes with Spotify and then charge Spotify 30% they don't charge for Apple Music. Thats a textbook violation of antitrust law.
> Conceptually I'm with you. This is an area I'm struggling with though. The Apple Online store charges accessory manufacturers a fee to be featured there. Should Apple also pay a fee to feature their own products there? I don't think so.
You can buy your accessories other places as well. Apple's Online store doesn't have a monopoly on selling accessories to iPhone users. The App Store on the other hand is the only mechanism to sell to iPhone users. The alternative is to allow competing App Stores on their platform.
> Only if you put the option to subscribe into your app in the app store.
Yes, they get 30% only if you subscribe through the app store. That's already too much for a service that doesn't use Apple's infrastructure, but Spotify played along for a while. Their main complaint however is that Apple is outright censoring the Spotify app so that it makes no mention to other options for upgrading to Premium.
That's clearly foul play in my book. I wonder if you would still defend it if instead of Apple, it was e.g. Microsoft using Windows Defender to block Chrome downloads.
> There are significant costs associated with the app store, no?
You pay a $99 per year fee as a developer to Apple. That should cover their costs for general QA. If they feel that popular apps need to pay more, they can still set a higher fixed price. But claiming that 30% is to cover Apple's QA costs is ridiculous.
> Why should they have to let Spotify run on it in the exact way Spotify wants?
Because of the way they market Homepod. They present Homepod as interoperable with your iPhone, but it turns out they place artificial limits to interoperability. I wonder, what would Apple do in case of a mass-return of Homepods from customers unhappy by the lack of interoperability with Spotify or other apps?
>Not so as I understand it. Only if you put the option to subscribe into your app in the app store. That cost doesn't exist for Mac or PC, but Apple doesn't heavily curate and have costs associated with the wild west of downloading apps from the web.
They can do the purchases on their own website, but its against App Store rules for an app to tell users that they have the option of upgrading outside of IAP.
How much does Spotify pay for "PC users"? Of course, they have Customer Acquisition costs there too. Google gets the money. Why do they not fight Google? Spotify got big through the apple app store channel. Now that they are big they start whining about the cost of the channel. If you don't like it, then don't use it?
I don't think Spotify complains about customer acquisition costs. They complain about having to give away 30% of their revenue forever. That's not the case on the PC, or anywhere else.
You do, that's the crux of the matter. Apple can happily claim that 30% is the overhead cost of providing the subscriptions service, that's within their right. Looking past how ridiculously high 30% is the fact that they are so hostile to apps having users pay via means that aren't the app store is the issue. For example Spotify aren't allowed to even tell people in the iOS app that they can subscribe with a credit card on the web without facing rejection.
I was about to argue that in a free market, 30% would never be a reasonable price, but then I looked and that's what Steam charges and they have multiple viable competitors on the same platform, so now I don't know.
But hosting full games is a different story than hosting apps. Not to mention that Steam offers more features, such as cloud saves and an entire social network.
From what they posted, 30% is not the main reason of their complaint. I guess it's more about that they now have to face Apple Music, which has such a huge advantage over them, no fee, better OS support, .etc.
Steam has been hemorrhaging publishers as of late for exactly that reason, and has started offering larger publishers lower rates. That probably still won't be enough.
> A 30% cut is something that Spotify needs to pay to Apple for every user that subscribes to Spotify through Apple devices.
Can you even subscribe through the app? Spotify could simply yell you so go to your web browser to subscribe. That’s what Amazon does for its video etc and it doesn’t seem to cause them any problems.
I subscribed to Spotify via their web site and it works fine on my phone. I’m sure they pay nothing to Apple in order for me to listen. That makes me feel that this is a publicity play by Spotify no matter what the more general (non-Spotify) merits of the issue might be.
In the article, it mentions several times that Apple has rejected apps for linking to the web page to upgrade, or for even mentioning it is possible to upgrade (when IAP is not enabled).
The article says so but I just tried to watch a video on iOS amazon video and it tells me to “Buy through the Amazon website or on your TV”. So I’m sure Spotify could say the same.
I believe it's about the type of product you're paying for -- the Spotify site specifically says Apple doesn't allow _content subscription_ services to be advertised through apps. In addition, I bet Prime gets away with it because it's not _purely_ a content subscription service.
Monopolies can have negative effects without trying to extract monopoly rents.
The competition between BT and Sky massively increased the TV rights price for e.g. the premier league, so the clubs got much more money. In theory, they used this to buy better players etc and increase the quality of the league.
Although you now have to pay twice, the quality of the product has gone up. So it's not a zero-sum game. You can argue that you don't think it's worth it, but that's an opinion, it's not true that it's an inherently worse situation.
Until they entered into a rights sharing agreement.
The difference comes in when Apple introduced Apple Music, a direct competitor to Spotify. So now, they're not only offering an essentially identical service, they're extracting a toll from their competition through their other holdings.
To put this in 19th century anti-trust terms, the manufacturing company owns the railways and charges the competition a toll to transport their goods. It's a clear cut case for Spotify, from a legal perspective.
Hmmm. It's absolutely not that as far as I can tell. Apple is not extracting a toll from their competition through their other holdings. Nothing has changed for Spotify: if you want to sign up users through Apple's infrastructure, which has a cost associated with it, you have to pay the same price as everyone else.
To repeat my question asked of someone else in this thread: Apple charges e.g. Mophie a fee to feature their products on the Apple Store online. Should Apple be required to pay the same fee for featuring their own products there?
The question isn't whether Apple is violating antitrust regulations, it's whether the regulations will be enforced. Spotify has a slam dunk case in the regulation heavy EU, and a very winnable case in the US (and anyone who Apple competes with in this way). They build competing products and are putting an artificial restriction to the market that they control.
What Apple is doing is a direct violation of the Sherman Act of 1890, specifically Section 1, in regards to artificially raising prices by restricting trade or supply:
> Every contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, is declared to be illegal.
Thanks. How does this work for Amazon? Do they have to pay a % cut for every Kindle sold? Apple pulled its products from Amazon for a while rather than selling them there because they had to take a margin hit they didn't like.
There's a few good comparisons to make here, especially if we bring the Google Play Store into the conversation.
Apple is big enough to pull their products from Amazon. Taking it back to the 19th century, Apple owns their own "railway". The real quandary comes in if Amazon gets so big that there's no way for a small supplier to sell a product in mass without going through Amazon and paying their premium. I don't think we're anywhere near there yet.
Amazon also built their own Amazon store, to get away from the fees of Google's equally Sherman Act violating store, and in the process potentially violated the act themselves (Prime Music).
Edit: I just thought of another, slam dunk case, this time for Amazon, because Apple restricts purchasing Audible books in the app, even when using existing book credits.
I am genuinely curious, does Google Play violate the Sherman Act in the same way that the Apple App store does or is it a different clause?
It seems like allowing users to fairly easily side-load apps (ex. Fortnite) and the presence of competing app stores (Amazon App Store, F-Droid, etc.) should alleviate some concerns.
>if you want to sign up users through Apple's infrastructure, which has a cost associated with it, you have to pay the same price as everyone else.
And if you don't, you're out of luck due to the increasingly hostile restrictions on what you're allowed to even mention in the app - at least according to the website.
Can't say I'm 100% on Spotify's side, but to me it doesn't seem like Apple has anything stand on here, ethics-wise. Microsoft and the IE case comes to mind.
> Apple is not extracting a toll from their competition through their other holdings. Nothing has changed for Spotify: if you want to sign up users through Apple's infrastructure, which has a cost associated with it, you have to pay the same price as everyone else.
But Spotify's argument seems to be "you have to pay the same price as everyone else ... except Apple itself."
More than a decade ago, the EU forced Microsoft to let people choose their browser on a Windows machine with a fresh install. Not only that but the list of choices was randomly sorted so that IE would not be the first listed.
> Why do I have to allow you to develop software for my proprietary hardware, just because it's technically possible?
Of course if you were Apple, you would not want to do it. But, that’s what antitrust laws are for. As a consumer they are valuable: how long have people been waiting to use Spotify their Apple Watch?
On my opinion there is no comparison with the dominance MS in the OS market and Apple, I think Apple’ market share is very far from the 90+% windows enjoyed
EU antitrust law doesn't require dominance. It requires the ability to materially affect market pricing, and companies with minority market share have previously been found against.
> Spotify feels aggrieved that Apple does not allow it to develop software for certain of their hardware lines, such as Homepod or Apple Watch. Why do I have to allow you to develop software for my proprietary hardware, just because it's technically possible?
I see your point but you could flip that a 3rd way:
"Consumers pay for their hardware - they own the device - so why should manufacturers tell consumers what they can or cannot install on their hardware?"
I grew up in an era when hardware wasn't so tightly coupled with software. In fact you could go further than that and mod your hardware with custom chips and so on without violating anything more than your warranty. So I find this current era where consumers are expected to pay high prices for hardware and still not have any rights over that platform to be a massive con.
Totally see that. But you can still sideload an app onto an iPhone or Mac and hack around. People were getting Windows onto their x86 Macs before Bootcamp, for example. The point of Homepod is that it does nothing else, by design: it's a device for playing Apple Music on. I don't see a distinction between forcing Apple to open up iOS for installation on any hardware.
You still need certificates from Apple in order to do so. So your ability to sideload requires a $99 subscription to the iOS development program and the continued support of Apple.
Yes. You can sideload an app with Xcode, but you're need a Mac/Hackintosh to do that, plus the sideloaded app needs to be re-sideloaded after a certain amount of time. The feature is more for developers than normal users.
As an Example, Dash <https://kapeli.com/dash_ios> used that method for a while when they were suspended from the app store. But their audience is developers.
Here's the thing: consumers paid (voluntarily) for an iPhone that has the restriction that apps must be bought / acquired / loaded through the App Store. So, yes, they own the device that has this restriction. If they didn't want this device, they could have bought one of the many devices that doesn't, as approximately 75% percent of people do globally.
I've had both Android and iPhones and honestly they're much the same. Google gives you a little more freedom in app development but you lose a lot of privacy. Neither company champions jailbreaking.
Ultimately there isn't a single consumer handset out there that has the same principles of "now you own the device it's yours to do with as you like". Consumer tech just doesn't operate that way any more.
Some handsets might have an unlocked boot loader but that’s only half the battle. It doesn’t mean there will be a working port of Android available, that any proprietary hardware will be supported nor that you’d get the full features of Android (at least not legally since the Google Play is only available for licensed OEMs).
Also I’d already acknowledged that it was easier and cheaper to sideload apps on Android.
Before you jump in and say something like “why should OEMs / Google offer you all this stuff for free etc”, I do completely agree. This isn’t a rant at Google (nor Apple) specifically but just at the state of technology these days. It’s not just an issue about geeks like us having ownership of our devices, it’s also creating a problem for environmental waste since it’s becoming increasingly hard to upgrade or replace parts. Laptops have components soldered in and old phones often end up in landfills. It’s such a shame to see.
Anyhow, I’ve drifted way off topic. Sorry for that
>Why do I have to allow you to develop software for my proprietary hardware, just because it's technically possible?
It's not that you have to, but if you do and you become one of only two or three platform oligopolists worldwide, then you better make sure it's a level playing field or you risk getting regulated as a utility.
The complaint regarding the fee is not just that Apple takes such a large fee (which is reasonable for a one-off game where the exposure and back-end processing is beneficial, but is ludicrous for a recurring subscription from a large scale org), it's that you are restricted from offering any other payment options, or even alluding to possible other payment options. That is grossly anti-competitive and does absolutely nothing for consumers.
As a user of an iPhone/Mac/etc, but who loves Spotify, this whole thing just sours me on Apple a bit. Spotify works great with my webOS TV, and just about everything else for that matter. It supports everything. Its networking/streaming model is brilliant. The interface is much better than Apple music (with its bizarre integration with iTunes). That I can't use Siri to play a song is just obnoxious and turns me off of Siri, and whatever middle managers in Apple are pushing this are just doing themselves harm in the longer run.
~~Why do I have to allow you to develop software for my proprietary hardware, just because it's technically possible?
I don't think we have a clear ethic yet, for these situations. There's obviously a ton of economic power in platforms. Since the msft-vs-netscape days, it's been controversial.
Ultimately... these are marketplaces, important ones and, considering their size, scope and influence... I think there is a strong case that "my house, my rules" is not a reasonable way of doing things.
Apple/Google's app & content stores are huge bottlenecks and being locked out of them is on the same scale as being locked out of the financial/banking system for certain companies.
Does "free market" mean anything useful, if the free market consists of a handful of unfree "platforms?"
There's a similar question for FB and Twitter. They are such big media channels that being locked out of one could (for example) make it impossible to run for elected office.
Things have different implications at large scale.
I think you're wrong - Apple's behaviour in this instance is clearly an abuse of market power and I fully expect the European Commission to rule in Spotify's favour.
Apple are directly competing with Spotify in the field of streaming music services via Apple Music. Apple's total control of the app store and their substantial share of the smartphone market means that they have a dominant market position within the meaning of Article 102 TFEU. Apple are using that dominant market position to advantage their own streaming service and disadvantage Spotify, for reasons set out at length in the original article. Apple are required under EU competition law to give Apple Music and Spotify an equal playing field, which they clearly aren't doing. Apple might have a partial defence if they allowed sideloading of apps, but they don't.
The obvious precedent is the European Commission's action against Google in 2018. Google were fined €4.34bn for using Android to unfairly advantage their search business. Android has a dominant market position within the mobile OS market - if you're a small mobile device manufacturer, you don't have many reasonable alternatives to using Android. Google didn't allow manufacturers to pre-install the Play Store app unless they also pre-installed Chrome and the Google Search app, which is an abuse of their dominant market position. They used their dominance of the mobile OS business to unfairly advantage their search business, which is blatantly illegal.
I agree. I'm actually surprised it's taken someone this long to launch such an action in Europe, as it seems a fairly open and shut case given the precedent and EU law (especially that the EU holds monopoly behaviour to require the ability to "materially affect market pricing", and not to actually own a given percentage of the market, and actions in non-technology sector with market shares in the 40% are not uncommon).
> Apple's behaviour in this instance is clearly an abuse of market power and I fully expect the European Commission to rule in Spotify's favour.
I'm not contesting that. I'm saying that I don't believe Apple is doing anything wrong. (The law and me may differ on that.)
> Apple [has] a dominant market position
Isn't the test for this substitutability in the event that the dominant force increases price? (This area is a total unknown to me so thanks for taking the time to explain!)
> to advantage their own streaming service and disadvantage Spotify
I think the he-said-she-said of the software updates thing is easily parked (unless you think it forms a substantive part of their complaint), so I will focus on the pricing issue. Again I'm drawing a distinction between the ethics of the situation and the law (although I assume that to some extent, the latter follows the former).
Spotify's P&L will have a bunch of rows in it for the costs associated with acquiring a paid user. Different channels have different costs. For example TV, radio, google/bing/alta vista PPC. Each of those will have a cost per install and some channels and keywords will convert better than others. For example if I look at the analysis frequently cited about iPhone vs. Android users, it's easy to believe that there is a greater propensity to pay money for apps on iOS vs. Android.
If Apple was the only place to get those users, I could understand totally the belief that this is unethical behaviour. But Spotify grew by four million paying subscribers in Q4 of last year, all of whom are evidence that they can grow their business by ~$500m of ARR without the app store.
So for me Apple charging Spotify 30% for their paying subscribers (who came to the App store because of a product and marketplace which Apple created, markets, and curates -- benefits which are at least conceptually worth paying for by app developers, even if some of them quibble the 30%). Is the argument that Spotify should not pay this 30% [but still benefit from all the great things which Apple foots the bill for]? And if Apple wasn't in music streaming, they'd be able to charge Spotify 30% Because that to me seems orthogonal to a common monopolistic argument: they are able to do significant harm to Apple (app store), which is a business unit, and remove all of the acquisition costs they'd ordinarily pay through hany channel.
Would it be acceptable legallyl/ethically if Apple effectively treated app store as an acquisition channel like any other, and the Music business unit paid the 30% to App store?
There was a post by Ben Thompson[1] that outlines some of the challenges with Apples approach in the App Store. It's a good read if you have the time. I'm not trying to change your mind, but more give a different perspective on the conundrum that Apple is in.
Something not mentioned anywhere in this thread either is the fact that, after 1 year, any subscription made through the app store goes from a 30% cut to 15% - what I would call much more manageable.
Bottom line: I can't queue and download Spotify content to my Apple Watch for offline use. Considering Apple has a competitor product, there is no reason for me to believe Apple is playing fair.
Secondarily, the expectation that Spotify buck the labels AND expect to bring the concept of 'all music for one price' is a non-starter, so I don't understand that criticsim.
As an avid user of Spotify well before I switched from Android to iPhone. It annoys me to no extent how everything used to work over there like it was first party.
On iOS unless everything else is only partiality supported. iTunes in comparison to Spotify was a joke when it was first released and they're shoving it down our throats constantly.
Never really used Siri until I bought a pair of AirPods. How am I not able to tell it to play music via Spotify?
Apple does provide the infrastructure to distribute the app to customers and does deserve some compensation for it.
But on the other hand, Apple is stepping into a market (music streaming) from which they control top to bottom and has a advantage no one has (no IAP transactions fee, they basically pay themselves for it), which in a way is unfair.
If they want to remain fair to competition, they should waive IAPs costs or reduce them significantly in market they engage themselves in which they are direct competitors.
I’ve been waiting to see Spotify follow Netflix and create their own label, instead of just curated playlists. They’ll otherwise always be at the whim of renegotiations. (Not entirely relevant to the post, but seems like it’s an avenue for them to go to break a little from other players).
I hope this never, ever happens. I love that I can basically listen to any music I like on Spotify. (I know there are exclusivity deals in music streaming but so far it hasn't affected me.) Compare that to the fragmented video streaming marketplace where services try to distinguish themselves with exclusive and/or original content. If you want to watch N shows, you have to subscribe to N different services. And none of the services have a comprehensive movie library (at least where I live).
Why do you think that "iOS is still much more secure"? The fact it's a closed source system means only we are not aware of many potential security risks. Apple has really bad reputation because of serious security bugs discovered in Mac OS recently. It might be similar with iOS devices.
yeah good for you, many of us never even got into it to begin with. I will say my job got me a macbook pro (after decades of windows usage and hackage) and this bitch is still kicking ass 5 years later. Big ups for the laptop. iPhone, who gives a shit it's a phone. Some people are super into it, i'm like dude i dont fucking care about the screen, the camera, the unlocking your face with a picture. If think all that jazz is worth $800+ be my guest.
Just as Microsoft were stopped from shipping a browser with their OS, vendors should be prevented from shipping an App Store with their OS.
You cant move to another platform without losing access to all your "purchases" - there is no free market. They have monopolies within ecosystems they created.
They should be FORCED to have an open platform, with users able to access multiple 3rd party storefronts on multiple platforms. They can market themselves as official/curated/whatever they want but the user should have the choice.
Apple invests billions into R&D, design, manufacture, and UX design for its devices. Your logic would then see them dealing with picking up the pieces for bricked devices, hacked passwords, lost data, viruses, etc.
Using an Apple devices is accepting a benevolent dictatorship, and it's a trade off tonnes of users are happy to make.
The devices are currently costed for, presumably, a certain volume of support issues which I can only imagine is enormously minimised by the walled garden of the app store.
> Vendors should be prevented from shipping an App Store with their OS.
So then how would a novice user get apps the first time they boot up their phone? They would have to know where to get apps from. That seems like an easy way for users to end up downloading a bunch of malware because they think it's the official Apple or Google app store when it's just a random website.
Having a built in app store has huge advantages in security and usability for the end user.
I feel like that would solve the problem that GP was referencing but just create a whole bunch of other issues for users and developers.
"Find Spotify on [list of ten app stores here]." One of the advantages for users and developers is that if you want an app on iOS (and for the most part) Android, you know exactly where to find it.
It's by no means a dealbreaker, but something to consider.
Microsoft were pushed to add a screen to the Windows installer asking the user which browser they wanted to be the default. That would work perfectly well for app stores.
>Just as Microsoft were stopped from shipping a browser with their OS, vendors should be prevented from shipping an App Store with their OS.
That comparison doesn't really work, because MSFT had an effective desktop monopoly. By contrast, Apple is a minority player in the mobile market.
>They should be FORCED to have an open platform,
Just because YOU want this doesn't mean the Apple users want it. I'm utterly content with a single, curated-by-Apple app store for iOS. I like the stability it affords the platform.
I'd never accept it on a general-purpose computing device, but for my phone it's perfect.
> By contrast, Apple is a minority player in the mobile market.
That's Apple's magic trick. They only own the top 20% of the market (evading monopoly attention) but they extract almost 100% of all profit in the smartphone market. No idea how you'd legislate against that though..
Their magic trick is creating products and services that people want to buy.
No one told Google to skimp on customer service and make 18 chat programs that don’t work. No one told Microsoft to drag their feet on preventing malware from destroying the usability of their system. It was Microsoft’s choice to profit from letting manufacturers sell computers riddled with malware that you had to spend hours to remove after buying. It’s google’s choice to not offer product support such that you can’t use their “flagship” devices for 5 years.
Apple invested in setting up their retail stores, training employees well, making their devices easy to use, and now they are reaping the rewards.
Sure, by why should the profit matter when we want to determine what is a monopoly and what isn't? Consumers have a choice, no matter what Apple makes.
it's not a monopoly (which your parent also didn't say), but since it's still the biggest piece of pie in the marketshare it's certainly not a "minority" as your parents parent said
>That comparison doesn't really work, because MSFT had an effective desktop monopoly. By contrast, Apple is a minority player in the mobile market.
Market share is not the only criteria for determining whether a company has a dominant market position under EU competition law. Apple have a substantial share of the mobile phone market and they have a total monopoly on iOS app distribution. If you want to sell apps to ~27% of consumers in the EU, you have no choice but to go through Apple. End users might have a meaningful choice, but developers don't, which is highly relevant in this case.
They can, but that doesn't stop Apple's behaviour from being anti-competitive and illegal under EU law. Apple only control a minority of the smartphone market, but they exert a stranglehold over that share and use that stranglehold to artificially disadvantage competitors.
I am not a lawyer (and it seems the law may differ significantly between the US and Europe) but I think all companies want to disadvantage their competitors, so whether or not this is illegal really hinges on the definition of artificial.
Do you have an example for a case where the EU fined a company for anti-competitive behaviour where the company did NOT control a majority of the relevant market?
> Just because YOU want this doesn't mean the Apple users want it. I'm utterly content with a single, curated-by-Apple app store for iOS. I like the stability it affords the platform.
And you should be able to choose that. But should you change your mind, you should be able to take your purchases with you and go elsewhere. Although apple is in the spotlight here, all of these vendor-locked app-stores are the problem.
> vendors should be prevented from shipping an App Store with their OS.
Congratulations, you've just reinvented the desktop adware / malware market. We know that if this is possible users will be manipulated into making bad decisions which are hard to recover from, and in many cases those bad decisions will be made for them by their carrier.
What I would support is that the app store should be more open: no refusing apps for competing with the built-in apps, and removing the ban on purchases which don't go through the platform — let the store owner charge for payment processing but e.g. Amazon should be allowed to sell you a movie on iOS without paying Apple a cut simply by using their payment system instead.
It's not really blindness... it's a trade-off I'd be willing to make to still own & have full control over the hardware I buy. Unless we can find a better middle way to achieve this.
Also, is Android as malware infected as GP describes? He singles out desktops, but Android does allow side-loading apps and people still near exclusively download apps though the play store. Adding a few other stores of big&trusted companies to painlessly load apps doesn't seem that risky to me. But would certainly add competition. I really don't understand why I must have a Google account to download Microsoft office.
Android does have malware distributed through side-loading but my objection was really the part I highlighted about “prevented from shipping an App Store with their OS”. If you don't have an app store at all the malware numbers will go way up because 100% of your users are going to be trained that it's normal to add stores or direct install apps and then you're going to see all of the shady download.com-style operations SEOing their way into people's search results, with fun variations like phone carriers pre-installing stuff which is ad-supported or the process of backroom deals.
> I really don't understand why I must have a Google account to download Microsoft office.
This is a related but separate issue: most of the value comes from trusting Google to verify that the app you found searching for “Microsoft Office” is actually published by Microsoft. Having a Google account saves you from having to manage accounts with every software publisher you use — which is huge for most people — but it's not really a prerequisite for user safety the way having a review step makes it a lot harder to spam popular application names.
>Just as Microsoft were stopped from shipping a browser with their OS, vendors should be prevented from shipping an App Store with their OS.
There's nothing wrong with providing an app store as long as that store offers fair and non-discriminatory terms to all vendors. Charging app developers for the costs of running a store and maintaining an ecosystem is perfectly reasonable; using those charges to stifle competition isn't.
Engineers tend to want neat, perfect solutions that require no human judgement, but they're very rare in the real world. There are obvious and major disadvantages to a free-for-all versus a walled garden, for both developers and users. Customers have a right to choose a tightly-controlled platform, just as they have a right to shop at a grocery store that refuses to sell poisonous food. Banning app store bundling is a scorched-earth approach that would do more harm than good for the average consumer.
> Customers have a right to choose a tightly-controlled platform, just as they have a right to shop at a grocery store that refuses to sell poisonous food
>Setting aside the store issue for a moment, what you suggest is impossible if Apple is also making apps.
No, it's very easy to implement and commonplace in all sorts of businesses. Apple need to treat their in-house app development teams in exactly the same way as they would treat a third-party developer - they get the same APIs, they get the same documentation, they go through the same approvals process and they pay the same fees.
Apple can hardly claim that they lack the expertise to compartmentalise information in this manner - prior to the iPhone launch, the software team had never seen the hardware and vice-versa.
>No, it's very easy to implement and commonplace in all sorts of businesses.
Can you provide a software example?
> Apple need to treat their in-house app development teams in exactly the same way as they would treat a third-party developer - they get the same APIs, they get the same documentation, they go through the same approvals process and they pay the same fees.
Nobody should believe that a company paying fees to itself will change its behavior. The app development team would still act in Apple's overall best interest and not seek to maximize its own profits.
Even if we somehow accept that there is a real divide, it's still not equal footing. Say that Apple Music and Spotify both have $0.75 in expenses for every $1 they charge on app store. After the 30% cut, both would have loses of $0.05 per dollar of revenue. For Apple, that's a fictitious loss and their actual cash flow is a positive $0.25. For Spotify, that $0.05 represents an actual nickle they have to give someone else. Apple can continue on doing that indefinitely while Spotify can't.
Amazon are already very, very close to that state of play - developers within Amazon are required to design their infrastructure based on standard APIs, to facilitate the commercialisation of those systems via AWS. Chinese walls are commonplace in any kind of reverse-engineering as a protection against claims of copyright infringement.
>For Apple, that's a fictitious loss and their actual cash flow is a positive $0.25. For Spotify, that $0.05 represents an actual nickle they have to give someone else. Apple can continue on doing that indefinitely while Spotify can't.
That would constitute predatory pricing, which is illegal under EU competition law.
i have been thinking more about this and i think you are right. on GOG i am (depending on rightsholdet) able to add games to my library that I own on steam. if this was the norm, enforced through consumer rights, it would allow users the ability to purchase licenses through a store of their choice.
>Just as Microsoft were stopped from shipping a browser with their OS
They were never stopped from that.
They were stopped for abusing their monopoly (e.g. threatening OEM PC vendors that unless they bundled this or that, they wont get Windows for a special price, etc).
And that when they had a monopoly (e.g. close to 98% of the desktop AND business market) -- which in itself is not illegal.
More technically, they had to provide a version of Windows that didn't ship with IE, and iirc a version that allowed new users to pick an alternate browser.
Vendors could solve the whole problem by letting users choose which default apps they want to install in the beginning. In order to make it simple, they could offer bundles. >95% of the users would choose the 'Apple Apps' bundle on iOS and the 'Google Apps' bundle on Android and the 'Microsoft Apps' bundle on Windows. And the few people choosing the 'Privacy-First' bundle with Firefox and Ad-Blocker are those people who would install an alternative browser anyway.
But instead, they are greedy and want 100% of the users of their platform to use their apps.
> vendors should be prevented from shipping an App Store with their OS
The problem here isn't the quality of the App Store. The problem is that Spotify has no alternative.
Apple is a hardware developer, a software developer, and a software retailer. The problem is how tightly coupled those three roles are on the iPhone.
You can't run iOS on other hardware.
You can't run another OS on the iPhone.
You can't install apps on iOS except from the App Store.
You can't use the App Store on other OSes.
Those are the underlying problems.
Users can't use part of the ecosystem. They have to invest in the whole thing, giving Apple more control and reducing consumer mobility.
Apple has an absolute monopoly on its own platform.
They are certainly complying with the laws in this regard, but the reality is that anti-competition laws need to change to deal with companies of this scale and reach.
I am talking about the actual definition of a monopoly, not that defined by antitrust laws, hence my second sentence about how the law (consumer law, anti-trust, or both) needs to change to prevent these walled gardens.
I agree Facebook and google are also problems. Amazon too, likely others. They all have their walled gardens - and whats worse is when they "go to war" with each other, affecting the users tied to their services (financially or otherwise).
> I am talking about the actual definition of a monopoly, not that defined by antitrust laws, hence my second sentence about how the law (consumer law, anti-trust, or both) needs to change to prevent these walled gardens.
I didn't mean that your definition of a monopoly is incorrect, but that you can't just narrow down the market until you find a monopoly. Because if you could, every company has a monopoly (which wouldn't make any sense).
This isn't narrowing down markets until we find a monopoly. This is a trillion dollar company abusing access to their captive market. The only option for users is to leave their ecosystem and lose access to all of their purchases. If that isn't covered by current anti-trust law, then the law is outdated and should be changed.
> The only option for users is to leave their ecosystem and lose access to all of their purchases.
The user signed up for that, so IMHO he gets what he deserves. The only I think I would change is to disallow the use of the word "purchase" when the user only buys the right to access some DRM-ed content.
Judging by number of sales, people seem to either like these walled gardens or don't care about them.
For those of us that care about freedom, we can just buy a phone that's compatible with LineageOS (or Replicant if you're willing to go full Stallman) and install it.
Forced? That doesn't sound like freedom. Forced to enable your competitors to compete with you on your own platform? Forced to develop a platform upon which competitors can reduce your payoff on that investment?
Look at Google Play store. Much more "open," and a shitload of malware, scams, and shit software. Without curation of any kind, you end up with shit. It's the Tragedy of the Commons applied to apps. Build it, and they will ruin.
I've been with Apple Music and Pandora for years. A few months ago my teammates at work convinced me to try Spotify: I love Spotify! Both the content and the UX work for me.
While this post represents Spotify's view without having Apple's to contrast it with, it seem eerily similar to the "Browser War" days leading up to Microsoft's admonishment. Apple seems to be the equivalent of a drunkard walking a fine line.
Spotify is platform neutral. All things being equal, that's enough to use them vs. Apple/Google/Amazon anything.
Those three serving up things like music or movies are ancillary to their main product. Spotify has a vested interest in being the best music platform. Apple as an interest in selling more phones and computers, which may be benefited by a good in-house music app.
I wonder if companies like Spotify would be willing to help invest in developing FOSS devices that compete with Apple products. It would be one way to fight back and advance their own business.
Personally, as an app developer, I think Spotify is taking the right stance here.
I believe that Apple should take some cuts but not as high as 30%. I believe for some categories like microtransaction based apps Apple should take maybe 5%. Plus, I think that if Apple has a competing service, then it should waive the tax altogether. It's only fair.
If the only function of the App Store (or Play Store) is to provide hosting and some quality control then I don't see why apps can't be hosted on a secure website from the vendor - as far as I'm aware, Apple requires you have some sort of website anyway.
At least Google allows installing apps without the Play Store, perhaps it's time Apple permitted something similar with its apps? This could solve this whole problem and have other positive side effects such as people being less likely to jailbreak their iPhones.
This opens up a wide host of negative side-effects including the extreme ease of malware. I'd say the #1 value proposition for the App Store, and why most iOS users prefer it, is the guarantee of virus-free programs.
Why don't Apple/Google ensure AV/Malware protection is a default app? Why do we depend on Apple/Google protecting us from these big bad apps?
If not Apple/Google controlling it directly, I'd imagine there would be a reasonable market for malware/AV providers on mobiles, if not solutions provided by Apple/Google.
A minority of the HN circlejerk doesn’t like the proven security and ease of Apple’s ecosystem, so let’s artificially break that down and replace with inherently flawed anti-malware systems we’re required to use in hopes our phones don’t become botnet nodes with 1hr battery life?
What is "should"? Who determines should, aside from what the law currently says?
Maybe I'm uninformed, but it doesn't appear to me that access to an app store and the terms of such access (which by the way didn't even exist almost 10 years ago) is a public utility or good with an expectation of equal access or certain fair pricing.
Then, under what right does anyone claim that Apple (or any ecosystem platform) has to do anything beyond what is regulated in the payment and terms of operation? What makes your 30% price the right call? If you're an app developer, are you equally ok with someone else determining what you get to charge for your app when you're done with it? Isn't that the same (lack of) logic?
I was about to argue with this and rage against Apple, but then I remembered a very similar situation everyone deals with and no one complains about: Supermarket Generics.
"How is it fair for Price Chopper to undercut Rice Crispies with a similar, cheaper product?" no on says this...
Because your choice of phone brand does not tie you to a specific grocery where you can buy rice crispies. You can simply cross the street and shop at a competing grocery.
If I go to a different grocery store, I can get products that are compatible with everything else I own.
If we go with the store=phone analogy, then somehow my brand A flour and my brand B milk are magnetically repulsed and I can't make pancakes. It's not good for consumers.
There are some extra levels to this. Imagine a country where there is only one supermarket chain allowed. In that case there is no competition and no choice for consumers.
Before you should people should simply switch phones: you can switch phones, but you can't take the apps you bought with you. And even if you switch: there's only one real alternative: Android. If Apple is allowed their 30% cut on literally everythig, why wouldn't Google do the same?
This way you end up with only 2 App stores, 2 Music and 2 Movie streaming services.
Google doesn't require all app installs to run through the play store. In fact, the OS allows for other app stores to automatically install and update apps. The Play Store may be the only option preinstalled on devices, but anyone can download and install third party apps, and if you're rooted or writing a custom rom you can create/use your own app store. See the fdroid privileged extension for an example of an alternate app store that allows background installs similar to the play store. Alternate app stores in general include the Amazon app store for Android.
the fact that I, a software developer by trade, can't install or run any code on an ios device without running something by apple first.
that's like tesla releasing a car saying if you are a lawyer who wants to drive it you have to pay them 100k a year plus 30% of what you earn, or are "free" to drive another car (even if theirs is the fastest/safest/best-for-price in the market.)
or, now, can obtain a "provisional" license to drive it that expires weekly, with the same option to pay yearly for an annual license - these are all artificial barriers. installing software has up till now always been as simple as owning the device you're running it on and running the appropriate commands, these artificual barriers introduced by apple ensure anyone wanting to do so has to check in to see if it's okay with them.
The car analogy doesn't help that much here; plenty of cars work in that fashion. Not the average consumer car of course, but again, even then a company is free to do so. Might hurt their business, where at Apple it's not a problem because they make plenty of money.
I think that is where part of the problem lies: you can choose to do something with the platform or you can leave it alone. Seeing it as an 'I must do something with the platform' is rather strange considering it is a private, non-public platform in the sense that it has an owner and the owner is free to make whatever rules they want to as long as it is within the boundaries of the law (i.e. you can't require use of a platform to be paid with organs :p ).
No, your analogy oversimplifies the situation, just like that old joke about airlines selling paint for different prices.
Apple or Google's app store isn't a blank / open space where you entered an agreement that you have right to do anything you want. Just because you want to not run your code by Apple every time doesn't mean you have the right to do it.
There is no expectation that you have access to their hardware or software kit to do anything that you define. It's not like owning a car.
If the terms of your agreement are that you get time-limited / renewable access to a certain company's playground, what right do you have to insist that they change their terms, with recourse to what law?
There could be laws that decide that there should be open access. But there aren't. Why should this kind of lawsuit succeed in misinterpreting the law? The law can be rewritten, but until then I believe this effort should fail.
That's fine - I don't care about the App Store and what it offers, I just want some way to give users access to my app. Now what? Apple says "Fall in line if you want to access to our platform", I say "Thanks, but I'm not interested, I just want users to access my app somehow", but they can't and that's the crux of it. There are many legitimate apps banned from the app store, and that would be fine if the user could still install them outside of the app store. Consider the analogy of the toll bridge: if you don't want to pay, that's ok, go around. But Apple doesn't leave any alternative, and then in your argument you're putting words into peoples mouths and claiming they wanted to cross the toll bridge all along and they don't have a right to free (both literally and as in freedom) travel.
> There is no expectation
The expectation comes down to the owner of the device being allowed to have control over something they purchased, which in extension gives app developers freedom to target these users. This includes both hardware (right to repair), and software. It's completely valid, and repair, specifically, has been in news headlines months prior.
Again, that's not a correct analogy, and you're framing it like someone with deep feelings of entitlement to do what you want in the software world. That's creating a flawed argument in your logic and you're turning your desire into what you believe is legal. Or thinking that because you put work into something, someone else has to give you a forum to get paid for that work.
Actually your bridge analogy is apt, but in a way that works against your argument.
Toll bridges aren't required to have an alternate way around just because you think you have a right to go there for free by some alternative method.
Staten Island is only accessible by toll bridge. Entry to San Francisco from the north or east is only accessible by toll bridge.
Regardless, Apple built an island and a toll bridge that allows crossing for a fee. There is no entitlement in law that says you have the right to get to that island without paying what Apple charges because you think that would be "fair".
What argument do you have to support not letting users run whatever software they'd like on hardware they own?
And in extension to that, paying other people for software that they'd like to run and don't mind paying for, which is not sold through e.g. the App Store.
I'm legitimately interested in this, because I cannot see any reason why a user shouldn't be able to run any software they'd like on their own hardware, and/or pay for it however they want.
If you can't see any reason why a user isn't able to run any software they'd like on hardware they've purchased, then you need to educate yourself. Because the reason is that the contract you have with the hardware manufacturer and the terms of use do not allow you to. And there is no contradictory law or regulation that trumps that agreement.
Just because you might disagree with that contract, it doesn't change the rules. Your ability and expectation to run software of your choosing on your computer doesn't mean you have the same ability on a phone.
I could ask you, why don't you complain that even on an Android phone, you're not allowed to tinker with the baseband chip and broadcast whatever you want over the air. "Why can't I be allowed to do that? It's my right." Nope. It is not.
This is just an extension of that principle. In some other state or country the rules may be set up differently that consumer rights (however those are defined) take precedence over commercial regulations. But not here. Public opinion and law might someday change. Until then, don't confuse what you think should be with what is. It will not do you credit.
> If you can't see any reason why a user isn't able to run any software they'd like on hardware they've purchased, then you need to educate yourself. Because the reason is that the contract you have with the hardware manufacturer and the terms of use do not allow you to. And there is no contradictory law or regulation that trumps that agreement.
I did not sign a contract relinquishing my rights to execute whatever code I like when I purchased my phone. Does one have to do that with an iPhone?
If you do, shouldn't it be called an applePhone, not an iPhone? If you cannot control what code is executed by the cpu, it is really more Apple's phone than your own.
I'm going to take my leave from this thread after this post, as it's kind of like talking to a wall at this point. I get nothing out of it.
You don't naturally have any expectations of a right to run whatever code you want on a phone. There is nowhere written in law or regulation that you have such a "right". So there is no such right to give up.
Apple enters into an agreement with you to give you a phone with certain capabilities. Control of what code is executed by the phone is not included in your capabilities. End of story.
That's what I wanted to know, and hearing that I'm glad I've never been interested in an apple phone.
> You don't naturally have any expectations of a right to run whatever code you want on a phone. There is nowhere written in law or regulation that you have such a "right". So there is no such right to give up.
Plenty of things that you naturally have a right to do aren't written in a law. Is there a law saying you can browse and post on hackernews on your computer?
> Because the reason is that the contract you have with the hardware manufacturer and the terms of use do not allow you to. And there is no contradictory law or regulation that trumps that agreement.
You are simply answering the question "Why are things this way?" with a tautological "because this is the way it is." Whether or not the status quo will change in the future, it must always start with someone questioning it.
the fact that I, a software developer by trade, can't install or run any code on an ios device without running something by apple first.
If I were a game developer could I install any software on my game console?
that's like tesla releasing a car saying if you are a lawyer who wants to drive it you have to pay them 100k a year plus 30% of what you earn, or are "free" to drive another car (even if theirs is the fastest/safest/best-for-price in the market.)
Let’s not make an analogy. Can I install any software on the computers in my Tesla?
> In my book, the problem is that you are not allowed to provide a link to your payment website inside your app.
This is especially damaging to small companies. Most people have heard of Spotify, Netflix, Pandora, etc. So it's somewhat natural for them (if not a bit akward) to go to the website if they can't get premium in the app.
But for small companies that connection isn't immediately obvious. In my company for instance, we aren't allowed to put ANY reference to our website in the app (as it relates to purchasing premium). As a result when a user signs up, my only option is IAP. I cannot just assume they will naturally go to the website.
Most(every?) app that I’ve signed up for requires an email address. Some apps then send a verification or welcome email. If you mention and link to paid subscription upgrades in that email, will Apple pull your app?
“We’ve just sent a verification code to the email you provided, please type the 4 digit code here:_ _ _ _”
It could even be 2 digits (the same 2 digits for everyone), you’re just looking to get their eyes on the email letting them know additional paid subscriptions are available on your website.
Let's assume you purposefully crafted the email or app to break the code autofill built into iOS.
I think you'd end up confusing users. Most people will go to their email expecting to see a verification code in big bold type. If you make the code less obvious, they'll get frustrated ("I came here to get a code, why am I now doing something else?") It's awful UX at a particularly business-critical moment.
And this is all assuming Apple doesn't see through your ploy and just reject the app.
As Spotify points out, and I've seen first hand, Apple prohibits you from allowing users to create accounts or enter contact information if your service has a paid option and you don't use apple's IAP.
So you couldn't even get to the point where you can send an email without first falling in line with IAP.
And according to my understanding of the Spotify timeline, and I haven't see this because I haven't published to the platform in a while, Apple now prohibits you from targeting your iOS users with upgrade communications (even if they didn't sign up via iOS, which they didn't since that's prohibited).
It's not just those two, it's standard practice: Audible, Google Play video, Amazon video, Amazon music, Playstation Video, Vimeo, Sky Store video, and YouTube Premium/Google Music (same subscription with different marketing).
Deezer music went another route: you can pay for your subscription through an iOS device, but you'll pay a higher price. [0] I'm surprised Apple permit this.
All this strikes me as a clear indication that Apple is asking for too high a cut.
I've never been tempted to use a mobile app to shop on, say, Amazon, but Apple are clearly ok with that experience being far better on Android than on iPhone.
> In my book, the problem is that you are not allowed to provide a link to your payment website inside your app.
Interesting.
The exact words used by the Audible app for iPhone: This app does not support purchasing content. Instead, add to your wishlist.
> Deezer music went another route: you can pay for your subscription through an iOS device, but you'll pay a higher price. [0] I'm surprised Apple permit this.
This is what Spotify used to do (charging $13 instead of the normal $10 to give apple their cut), but they stopped when apple started making apple music available at $10 (since they didn't need to pay their own tax)
How so? Isn't the tipping point of an antitrust suit a lack of competition and/or a monopolized position? Apple doesn't have that. They can do whatever they want in the confines of their own store.
They have close to 50% of the market in the US and I don't think a strict majority is required to be judged a monopoly.
You simply can't ignore iOS if you want to have a successful smartphone app business. That fact alone is enough in my opinion to consider Apple a monopoly and to take action to force them to play fair on their own platform.
I think an obvious comparison could be drawn with the movie industry of the 1940s, when the studios were forced to divest their ownership of the actual theaters their movies were shown in.
Abusing market dominance in one sector in order to shut out or outcompete other providers in another sector is the classic justification for antitrust action.
>In my book, the problem is that you are not allowed to provide a link to your payment website inside your app.
Why on earth is Apple allowed to do that? I get that it is their marketplace and their rules, but they are directly hurting competition and consumers this way. There's simply no real argument to prohibit developers like this. Seems like something the EU should combat against.
That depends on whether you prioritize the ability for developers to profit or the security of customers making the purchase. Apple is guaranteeing its users that purchases made within apps are secure and that only Apple has access to their payment info. In the alternate scenario, customers have no way of verifying the security or veracity of some random app developer collecting their payment info.
I feel for Spotify and other companies on the 30% tax but I also love knowing that any purchase by my family or myself is protected, private and easily refunded if there's a mistake. There are already a lot of apps preying on kids but it would be at another level without the in-house payment system.
I think something like 30% on the first purchase and then 5-6% for any recurring purchases would make more sense. I know it changes to 15% after a year but that's still ridiculous IMO.
Maybe there's an App Association that challenges all of these stores on their rather high recurring fees.
This is a ridiculous stance. Essentially it's the same as saying that you're scared to pay for anything online and you only trust Apple for making online payments. There are other solutions to feel secure about paying online or via an app. For instance, if the app asks you for payment, you could be first shown its rating in the store, if it's low. There could be even a separate rating judging the payment security of the app, if security is what Apple is after. You're allowing Apple to rip you off by 30% on all app transactions, it's as simple as that. (Not to mention the cost of locking yourself in their platform and hardware.)
> Essentially it's the same as saying that you're scared to pay for anything online and you only trust Apple for making online payments.
Strawman. That's not at all what the parent said.
> For instance, if the app asks you for payment, you could be first shown its rating in the store, if it's low. There could be even a separate rating judging the payment security of the app, if security is what Apple is after.
You think people should be shown a payment security score so they can judge whether they want to make an in-app purchase? You must be joking. I don't think you understand what Apple is after if that's your suggestion.
> You're allowing Apple to rip you off by 30% on all app transactions, it's as simple as that.
Your entire comment reeks of irrational anti Apple bias. It's as simple as that.
> Essentially it's the same as saying that you're scared to pay for anything online and you only trust Apple for making online payments.
I'm not particularly scared of paying for things online. I'm scared of almost anyone else in my extended family doing so, though. If you think that concern's "ridiculous" you haven't watched them use the Web. And lots of them—especially the older ones—have (rightly!) never entirely gotten over fear of buying things online. Some(!) of them do buy things online, but reluctantly, with great deliberation. In an app on an Apple device? Concerns gone. Even for me, that little background stress of being on alert for shenanigans quiets down when I'm in the Apple ecosystem. Far lower (though non-zero—there's a reason I do almost no iOS gaming) permitted rates of douchebaggery is one of the things keeping me on iOS, and the one-source-of-payments is a vital part of that.
[EDIT] there are further benefits to users and developers alike, I should add, when the UI for a purchase is the same in every app. It's worth 30% to "defect" from that, so worth it on the individual level, but if it's permitted at all then the game's up and everyone loses.
Yeah... no. Your stance is ridiculous. People have already gamed sites like Yelp, Facebook, Twitter, and Google Play with fake reviews. The App Store also probably is flooded with tons of fake reviews. I'd rather trust my payment information to a company that has already demonstrated that they're incredibly thoughtful with my security regarding payments rather than trusting some giant unknown and just hoping for the best.
> In my book, the problem is that you are not allowed to provide a link to your payment website inside your app.
The counter point is, if Apple allowed this, then every single App would use that method. Most people would not realize or care that they bought the XYZ in a web view vs through the AppStore payment system. Even apps that are currently paid only would switch to a "free" app with a "pay here" in-app purchase.
At this point the AppStore no longer can bring in any money for Apple except indirectly via encouraging iPhone sales.
Maybe Apple could charge the publisher for each app download or something instead to keep making money but I doubt that would be very popular.
There is still a non-zero cost to implementing a checkout page, as well as associated vendor fees etc. In a fair market the fees for Apple checkout would be along the same lines as Stripe, PayPal etc., but they are using their position as the device and OS vendor to charge 10x as much and giving developers no other option.
I disagree they should be the same. Credit card fraud risk is much higher on the internet than in person for instance. Apple through iOS and the App Store I would guess, also has a significant edge in detecting and stopping fraud through name, location, etc. While 15/30% might be too high, it should be higher than a simple payment processor as the transaction is also safer for the merchant.
Try telling the IRS you think their tax rates are too high. Apple owns the sandbox with the most valuable customers and if you want to play in it you gotta pay. Personally I love letting Apple handle my subscriptions and subscribing through iTunes is one of the things it does well.
Do you think apple's subscription feature is worth paying 30% more for spotify?
Do you think spotify should just suck it up and take the hit to keep prices the same because apple is providing a service (access and subscription handling) worth 30% of the price? Not even Amazon charges that much.
I don't know if the anti-competitive practices mentioned are illegal, but they're certainly scummy. The company that owns the walled garden shouldn't be bullying spotify to try and prop apple music up.
Does this view still apply if Apple considers the music subscription as part of the product/device?
Consider the countless users that, perhaps rightfully, argue that Apple should include more than 5 GB of iCloud storage for backups, user data, etc. That could be considered part of the product while it still competes in a different market with Dropbox and similar services.
Yes. Or do what everyone else does and negotiate a lower rate. The simplicity of in app transactions is great and offering that to customers makes a lot of sense. I’m
More likely to keep a subscription if it’s through iTunes; it also makes moving to new devices super easy as all I have to do is login with my iTunes account and all my subscriptions are there or that and hit restore purchases and boom
I’m done.
> I believe for some categories like microtransaction based apps Apple should take maybe 5%.
And then every PAID app will switch to FREE and charge for PRO, to circumvent the 30%. Oh, Apple complained it’s not technically a microtransaction? Fine, just separate every feature into a new purchase.
> If the only function of the App Store (or Play Store) is to provide hosting and some quality control then I don't see why apps can't be hosted on a secure website from the vendor
If the vendor server is compromised or is down, a download from the App Store won’t work for a single app, leaving customers confused and complaining to Apple, who can’t fix the issue.
> And then every PAID app will switch to FREE and charge for PRO, to circumvent the 30%.
Then make it 30% of the first 20 or 30 dollars, and 5% or less after. That more than pays for Apple's verification work without letting them gouge repeat payments.
While the Apple Tax is a problem of its own, I would hate for Apple to allow downloading apps through websites. A large part of iOS security is that everything has to be co-signed by Apple unless it's an Enterprise distribution app [1], so even if there is an exploit that breaks out of the app sandbox you don't have to worry about malicious websites drive-by downloading it.
1: they're likely refining the process of obtaining one of these certs after the recent news reports on business fraud
While I agree that the percentage that Apple takes per sale is too high, I completely disagree with the term 'vendor Tax'. While it's fine as a fun synonym, it's problematic as soon as people start to think about it as an actual Tax. It's not a Tax, it's the amount of money the vendor/platform owner wants to make for every sale. You can opt-out (by not being on the platform, still a choice!) if you want to. But because it's bad for the bottom-line of most companies to do so, they position themselves as a sad little broken bird that gets stomped around by the big bad corp. Newsflash: they all are generic money making capitalistic institutions that on the business side exclusively exist to make money. For profit. For doing things, any thing, to make money. That goes for Spotify and Apple just the same.
On the side of 'level playing field' they do of course still have a point, just like all the anti-trust stuff we had/have with Microsoft and Google. It does make me wonder a bit why this hasn't been involving other companies like Amazon and Facebook. (or, why it hasn't been suggested as widely as it is now)
I do wonder about the technical aspect of those store denials and watchOS problems; other streaming services do not face the same issues/pressue, so what makes spotify so special? They app is a bit crappy (it's not very good at maintaining/restoring state and doesn't have the most consistent UI), but other than that, it doesn't do much different things when compared to others (like Deezer or Tidal). Putting it as a "Apple Music vs. Spotify" thing is a bit weird too; while it might make sense, it doesn't make sense if it's just that and all the other streaming and buying services are free to do what they want. It's weird stuff.
> It's not a Tax, it's the amount of money the vendor/platform owner wants to make for every sale. You can opt-out (by not being on the platform, still a choice!) if you want to.
And I can opt out of selling things in Idaho if I don't want to pay their sales tax. I don't understand the distinction you're making at all.
If you don't sell in Idaho, you lose that market. If you don't sell on Apple's platform, you lose that market. The issue is a combination of the "tax" and the market dominance of these two companies.
If you consider the Appstore/iOS ecosystem to be Apple's "land", then sure that 30% is like the tax for having a presence in that land.
That's the classic meaning of "tax".
However, nowadays, in most civilised countries we expect more of "tax". We expect it to not simply flow to whoever holds power over the land (ecosystem), for them to use for profit, projecting power and keeping it. We expect the tax instead to largely be invested in things that benefit the people paying it (users). In fact, the more this happens, instead of going to the rulers, the nicer a place to live (in general).
Now one the one hand Apple is doing a pretty good job with things that benefit the users: they get security and some privacy. On the other hand, as a tax, it's fair to ask whether that 30% is really necessary for these benefits or just for lining Apple's pockets. An additional thing, looking at it pragmatically, whatever Apple's doing to Spotify doesn't seem to be in the user's benefit at all. But then, they don't pay tax. So that points to the 30% being significantly more than the tax required to benefit the users.
It seems to me that Apple should lower this tax to a rate that Spotify is willing to pay and put up with.
Thing is, Apple is not really like a modern government to its users. They are a "if you don't like it, just leave"-ocracy. So when they put up a "public" service (Apple Music), that undercuts commercial services (Spotify), it is NOT in the benefit of the people (users) like a public transport system would be. This is because the undercutting is purely based on the tax-cut, not because it's more efficient to do it as a public service rather than a commercial one.
Using the word 'tax' here is like calling anything that you need to pay for 'tax'. If you put a bit of money in a vending machine to buy some chocolate, you don't call that vending machine tax, do you?
If you were to scope it to 'services' or 'platform', then perhaps we should call virtual hosting cost not cost but tax :p and if you rent a movie, that'd then be movie tax, or rental tax? But what about actual tax, are we going to call that tax tax? Because at this point people just start using the word tax for every generic transaction.
In your vending machine example, it is a transaction, not a tax, as you implied and I agree. However Apple taking cut of app's revenue is awfully a lot like corporate tax.
> Putting it as a "Apple Music vs. Spotify" thing is a bit weird too; while it might make sense, it doesn't make sense if it's just that and all the other streaming and buying services are free to do what they want. It's weird stuff.
Isn't Spotify just the biggest one by a large margin?
Because frankly I never heard of Deezer or Tidal, and everyone I know that uses a music streaming service is on Spotify or, rarely, iTunes (or Apple Music? is that a rebrand or is it a new thing?)
No and that's a bad thing. Generally the ability to do so (or side-loading in general) has been to the public benefit. Think building a Playstation supercomputer cluster, debugging /modding games and of course the ability to use the things for general purpose (or media centre).
It's just that consoles never have been nearly as popular to make a stink about it. I never bought a console because of exactly this limitation: I can do anything with a computer, why would I buy a neutered computer as well? And that was fine. Because you don't need a console. But you do need a smartphone. And the choice is Android or iPhone, and the usage is about 50/50. So when the iPhone is shut tight, that's a much bigger deal.
No and that's a bad thing. Generally the ability to do so (or side-loading in general) has been to the public benefit.
There is 30 years worth of malware, ransomware spyware and viruses on PCs to show that most of the public hasn’t benefited from being able to download freely.
> I would hate for Apple to allow downloading apps through websites
This is such an extreme stance compared to what you're allowed to do on the desktop. Regardless of what Apple allows or not, shouldn't the user, the owner of the device, be allowed to install applications as they see fit, and choose to bypass any centralized app store? A smarthphone is a computer, and it's arguably many peoples primary computing device, and so I see no valid reason for the future of such devices to be a locked-down walled garden under the guise of security.
More than anything and any security, Apple benefits directly from this, just like they do lobbying against right-to-repair legislation. Because God forbid an owner of a Apple device repairing it themselves instead of have to go through official, expensive channels. Likewise with a (legitimate) company or app maker saying "We'll just let the users install it outside of the app store" and choosing not to deal with Apple's ecosystem. For example, Wireguard for macOS cannot be distributed outside of the app store due to native integration requiring APIs that Apple restricts with such clauses [1]. This is in my opinion ridiculous.
There are plenty of devices that allow you the freedom to do whatever you want to the software. If that is a priority, get one of those. Apple's walled garden is in fact much more secure. (and they also benefit financially. But correlation does not equal causation, necessarily)
You're missing the point. Security is throwing up a hurdle against installing outside apps (could be a bit steeper hurdle than Android's if you need). That's enough to keep your grandparents safe from installing crapware. Apple fighting tooth and nail against any possible installer, sideloading, rooting, whatnot, that's purely for the power, control and financial benefit of Apple and "their" ecosystem.
I put quotes around "their" just to remind that this ecosystem is made up by hundreds of millions of users, too. Yes Apple holds a singular power over this ecosystem but that power mostly boils down to the ability to wreck it for any particular group of participants. That's not ownership unless you want to claim that humans own the coral reefs, too.
Imagine you had a laptop or desktop where you could only install apps that were approved by the hardware manufacturer or os developer. Would you really be ok with that?
a laptop is not a tablet, a tablet is not a phone, a phone is not a watch; that’s part of apple’s philosophy behind how their devices work together. knock it all you want (and there are legitimate criticisms), but it works remarkably well and makes all these devices feel like they have a natural place and purpose
*EDIT: i’m not saying “place and purpose” is a reason why macos and ios have different security models, but just pointing out that “why is a laptop different to a phone” is not reeeeeeally a particularly valid place to start
> it works remarkably well and makes all these devices feel like they have a natural place and purpose
Um really those are artificial, not natural. The nature of the devices is that they're still general purpose computers, the artificial restrictions on them give them an artificial place and purpose. It's still a thing, but Apple isn't magically altering reality.
And that was part of the advantage of the phone. I’m not cleaning crapware and viruses from my parents and children’s phones and tablets every six months.
Do you feel that console makers shouldn’t be allowed to dictate what runs on their devices? Yes physical discs still have to be approved by the console maker. It’s been that way for 30 years.
> Do you feel that console makers shouldn’t be allowed to dictate what runs on their devices? Yes physical discs still have to be approved by the console maker. It’s been that way for 30 years.
Yes of course. Either allow the user full control of the hardware they apparently own, or call it what it really is, renting.
I'd say that the person in favor of restricting someone's use of their own hardware needs to come up with the argument in support of that, not the other way around.
You could have an argument in the case of a car, for safety. Cable box perhaps, but I'd say that should probably be considered a case of renting hardware for it to really make sense.
What they need to do is split off the new competing services into a walled corporation (even new entity). And they play fair by the rules, so 30% tax even to them.
But it is standard practice for divisions to bill other divisions for work. I would be almost certain that Apple Music is already paying the 30% tax however since it’s internal it doesn’t really make a difference. Likewise splitting into a new entity does not change anything.
It changes a lot, since as an independent entity Apple Music (for example) is answerable to its own investors and board of directors, including having the pressure to be profitable. Right now Apple can subsidize them for as long as they force all competitors out.
Making micro-transactions more profitable would be an unfortunate course of action. There are enough of those apps in the store, and they are clearly profitable enough if they can buy Super Bowl airtime.
Subscriptions for apps should be different, but I see a challenge in drawing the line between Spotify/Netflix and a scam app like "awesome culculator" that charges $5/mo to people who don'didn't realize it was a subscription (there was an article on HN this week about apps like that, targeting kids and the elderly, of course).
If Apple has a stipulation about requiring a website, then maybe subscription-based apps can get a discount on the 30% fee if they also have a web or desktop-based version of their application that provides comparable functionality and takes payments.
> ...and they are clearly profitable enough if they can buy Super Bowl airtime.
This is not a good reason to limit how much money an app developer makes. You want to make the play field fair, regardless if there are some companies making a lot of money.
> There are enough of those apps in the store, and they are clearly profitable enough if they can buy Super Bowl airtime.
You're talking about the top 1% or less of micro transaction-based apps here. There are ton of indie apps that depend on micro transactions and aren't making enough to buy a Super Bowl ad.
It's unfortunate that spammy or low quality micro transaction-based apps have become commonplace, but I'd rather that be dealt with by the App Store flagging and filtering the apps with issues.
Not sure that I completely follow your logic in regards to the "tax" here. With any product, you have two main things: production of the product and distribution of the product. Spotify doesn't NEED to be on Apple devices (they started off on the web), but they WANT to be on Apple devices (and Android devices) because they are great distribution channels for its product.
That said, how much is distribution worth to Spotify? Imagine that Spotify was not software, but instead it was a hardware device. Would they expect Best Buy to carry it for free? Would they expect Walmart or Target not to offer a store branded competitor? I think not.
When you don't own your distribution channel, you pay for distribution one way or another.
The practice of stores like Walmart strongarming producers into reducing prices and quality is a well established problem with a number of articles and documentaries around it already.
In either case the difference between a store doing this and Apple doing this is that Best Buy is not the one of two practical ways to access the product, and consumers are not compelled to go only to Best Buy simply because they chose to go there once.
Figuring out the proper practices for phone app markets is difficult right now, because we really can't compare them to anything that already exists. Physical markets just aren't the same thing.
Mobile OS's are more than just a "distribution channel" though, because there's a significant amount of lock-in that prevents customers from buying your software from another distributor even if they want to. I think a better metaphor is like this:
A billion people live in a company town ("Appleville"). When they first decided to move there, they paid a lot of money to buy a house there, and in return they get access to all the benefits the town offers - nicely-built houses, well-maintained streets, and access to lots of public services. Because living in the town is so nice, houses there cost a lot more than they do in other areas.
While you live in the town, you've signed a contract that says you're only allowed to buy things from one store owned by the town's developer. Most popular items are available at the store, so it's never too much of an inconvience, but sometimes things are more expensive than they are in other towns, or they aren't available at all.
Every time you drive into the town, you get stopped, and a bunch of guards search your car. If they find anything in your car that you didn't buy from them, they take it, and you can't have it back.
If you ever do want to leave the town, not only will you have to buy a house somewhere else (and your existing house will be worth a lot less than what you paid for it), but you're not allowed to take any of the stuff in your house with you - it all just disappears forever.
Now imagine you're a new company trying to sell a product, and the store owner won't let you sell your product in their town for some reason (you aren't paying them enough, it violates one of their rules, etc.) Even if the people living inside the town want your product, they can't buy it unless they completely uproot their life and move somewhere else, which no one is willing to do. And so the town owner is able to kill your product, and prevent it from ever being a threat to them. (Meanwhile, the town owner copies your product and starts selling it in the store themselves).
Apple should take no cut, and profit only from the sale of hardware. By taking cut on software they are double dipping. Good software makes the phone more valuable for users and drives phone sales.
If the only function of the App Store (or Play Store) is to provide hosting and some quality control then I don't see why apps can't be hosted on a secure website from the vendor - as far as I'm aware, Apple requires you have some sort of website anyway.
Because that worked so well for Windows with malware,viruses, and ransomware.
I believe it is not the problem of 30% cuts. It is the Problem of Anti-Competitive behaviour when you have a competing services without the cost of cuts.
This is not the same as Amazon offering their own label in their Store. Customers could shop in dozens of many other online retail or local retail. And Amazon does not charge other label 30% cut for stocking fees.
I believe Apple should charge a fair amount only when they have a competing product or services within its locked system. Had Apple Charge 15% for the first year on Spotify and 10% for all subsequent subscription it would have been much better. I don't believe the 5% would work, as I have seen many saying 5% should be enough. The cost of running microtransaction, processing, billing, legal, etc are just about break even at 5% even in the scale of Apple. I don't see charging 10% would seem unfair. ( In US at least, in EU the processing fees are much much lower )
Or Apple should never have made Apple Music in the first place. I still don't see any value in Apple offering it. iTunes was required for iPod. And it changes the whole music industry as a whole, along with iPod sold which ultimately saved Apple. No one will buy iPhone because of Apple Music, and Apple Music itself isn't even profitable.
They have some valid complaints, but "if we use Apple's payment infrastructure, we have to pay them a cut for doing so" isn't one of them.
The thing I find to be anticompetitive is that Spotify cannot provide a web link to their own payment processing web page within their app.
Apple has long allowed content providers to opt out of using Apple's own payment system (and paying Apple a cut), but without being able to point users to your payment website, this rings hollow.
As far as Apple Watch goes, the API to allow for downloading content to local storage and playing it back in the background landed in last year's Watch OS update.
> The thing I find to be anticompetitive is that Spotify cannot provide a web link to their own payment processing web page within their app.
Well, you probably can’t advertise your apartment on AirBnb and then Link people to your own payment service that bypasses AirBnb’s fee either. It sort of makes sense.
> They have some valid complaints, but "if we use Apple's payment infrastructure, we have to pay them a cut for doing so" isn't one of them.
But Spotify doesn't want to use Apple's infrastructure and is compelled to do so regardless.
Spotify is saying that if using Apple payment infrastructure was free, then not allowing other options would not be a problem, but since it's not free, not allowing anything else is a problem, not that Apple charging for the use of its payment infrastructure is a problem in itself.
Oh come on, why play dumb at the behest of a corporation? They ARE compelled to use Apple's payment platform on Apple devices, which is the problem and you know it.
Nobody's claiming it's impossible. That's a strawman.
What Spotify is complaining about is that it is possible, but at a massive inconvenience to users, (having to manually type the payment url into safari etc that they need to find manually first), which makes it so that most just decide the burden is not worth the hassle. That's how anti competitive behavior manifests itself, usually. Technically, anything is possible, Spotify can develop an iPhone competitor and then ship the app there, but come on, we both know that's unrealistic.
>Spotify doesn't want to use Apple's infrastructure and is compelled to do so regardless
I believe I mentioned that not being allowed to provide a link to their payment website within their app was anticompetitive in my initial post?
However your assertion that Spotify is forced to use Apple's in app payment system is simply not true. Especially given the fact that they no longer use it at all for new users.
> However your assertion that Spotify is forced to use Apple's in app payment system is simply not true.
But they absolutely are if they want to offer the same level of experience as Apple Music can.
What they're doing now is significantly degrading the user experience compared to Apple Music, which is the whole premise behind them complaining. I don't know why that needs explaining.
What you're saying is effectively akin to 'the iPhone is not limited to running iOS, because you could disassemble the SoC, reverse engineer the HW and load your own OS on it".
Am sure it would theoretically be possible, however nobody sane would say 'Apple allows multiple operating systems to run on the iPhone'.
864 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 287 ms ] thread4 years ago, I was all in- Mac, iPad, iPhone. In the last 4 years, I've been driven away by Apple seeming contempt for professional users.
Their contempt for other competition is even graver cause for concern.
Unfortunately they are abusing their power, and are being flat out unfair if you want to develop a bluetooth device or app. If you want to vet apps to ensure a safe environment, that's fine, but these practices go beyond that and are unfair.
Spotify is paying as much as music industry extorts from it. Where does the money go? Ask the big labels that are the ones paying artists.
Meanwhile, Bandcamp streams the songs for free but they allow you to pay what you want. I've made at least 10x the profit from selling tracks on Bandcamp than I ever did in the streaming world.
If Spotify wants to play fair, they need to pay artists more for streams. This site is just another instance of tech bros thinking they know better and meanwhile fucking over everyone else involved.
How? 90% of their catalog is owned by big labels. They cannot sign up artists directly because it will put them directly into competition with the labels.
They are trying to move towards paying artists directly [1], but you have to be eligible (most likely read: not signed up for a label already).
This is a legal and financial nitghmare.
[1] https://artists.spotify.com/upload
But what happens when a major label demands that they also get a dollar every time a song is played. The next time Taylor Swift releases a new album the entire country of Sweden would be owed in Royalties.
Yea digital streaming doesnt pay jack. Even the best paying streaming services only pays .0064 cents per stream. Of course that doesnt add up to much considering they only have .65% of the market.
At the end of the day duder it sucks that you dont make shit from streaming services. It really does. But with how the entire streaming payout model works it just is NEVER going to be profitable for smaller artists. It 100% caters to artists that will pull in 100 million streams in a month. But how much does platforms like Spotify help artists on your label get noticed? I constantly try to find new artists that have under 100,000 listens on their top song to see if its some hidden gem or the next big thing.
https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2018/01/16/streaming-music-...
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/apr/03/how-much-...
- Apple blocked Spotify from working with Apple Watch
- It blocked Spotify from building apps for HomePod
- It blocked Spotify from building apps for Siri
- It blocks Spotify updates on a regular basis
- It blocked Spotify from using a podcasting API after it acquired 2x major podcasting companies
I genuinely hope Europe takes this seriously. The issue of the 30% cut alone is enough for further investigation, particularly as Apple now uses that as an advantage to undercut Spotify with Apple Music.
But they've blocked every streaming music thing, right? It wasn't a vindictive campaign targetted at Spotify as this timeline is suggesting - no-one got to build streaming music apps for the Watch or HomePod IIRC.
Rephrased, Spotify seems to think it has a /right/ to run its software on Apple platforms in an identical fashion to Apple's first-party software. Does that mean Apple has an obligation to provide an equivalent technical capacity for literally any software that runs on its devices? An app store? A payment provider? A cloud provider? A health data store? An update mechanism?
[---- obsolete info ----]
Yeah, it's a bit of a grey area.
However, App Store policies explicitly forbid apps that duplicate iOS and first-party functionality IIRC. Now that Apple has Maps, and Apple Music, and Podcasts, and..., and... should they enforce those rules?
[---- obsolete info ----]
You should probably pull out the relevant quote from the guidelines. I don't think this is a thing anymore, at least in the way you're describing. If they did enforce it it would be a huge blow to the App Store.
I wish you'd stopped here because this is an interesting question, but the rest of your comment feels like it stretches things a bit.
What Spotify seems to be saying (correct me if I'm wrong), is that Apple does provide the technical capabilities for third parties to do as they're asking, but Apple is rejecting proposals purely on whim. It's not like there's not a API to stream music on the Apple Watch or play music through HomePod. It's all there. Apple's just blocking them from using it.
The same thing about not allowing others to use “private APIs”. No guarantees are made about any methods that I didn’t make public. If I change that method in future releases, and your software that depends on it breaks - so be it.
Windows is full of backward compatibility hacks because one piece of software that wanted to use an undocumented method.
Apple has since day one had APIs that it used privately until they were fully baked and made public. Do you think that Apple waited two or three years to make share extensions public because of competitive reasons?
If the Apple Watch and WatchOS is a device then I expect it to only contain Apple software.
If the Apple Watch and WatchOS is a platform then I expect to be able to install 3rd party software on it.
The real question is how much feature-parity should 3rd parties expect when developing on another company's platform?
I'd say if you're selling $1200 computer devices, one principle of that is ownership and that you get to run what you want, not what Apple wants. We seem to have come a long way on this site from fighting Tivoization of embedded platforms, and unrepairable, unfixable, unhackable consumer electronics, to people making excuses for a super locked down platform, and not even on the excuse that it helps security, but from a philosophical standpoint that somehow Apple is morally right to do whatever they want.
Yes, you have a choice of not buying Apple software, just like you had the choice of not buying Windows and using Linux, or building a MythTV instead of a Tivo, but keep in mind, in the latter case, this was only possible because the CableCard standard was forced by law on the cable industry.
Apple can maintain their high levels of security and privacy without their 30% cut of subscriptions, it's a false dichotomy to pretend their behavior is anything but rent seeking.
At the same time though, Microsoft wasn't preventing other developers from using those hidden APIs (if they could find them) nor preventing them from publishing their own competing apps. Sure, Microsoft's behaviour at the time was anti-competitive and sometimes even predatory, but they were never so on Windows to the extent that Apple is today on iOS.
Yes.
> An app store? A payment provider? A cloud provider? A health data store? An update mechanism?
Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes and Yes.
To do otherwise, is to invite platform owners to be (potentially abusive) monopolists with a license to favor their own services instead of promoting and maintaining fair competition in markets on top of that platform. In western societies, since the last century, that has been behavior which has been regulated by law and courts.
Every API on the platform is available to all apps which have the necessary permissions.
Sure, it might look like Google has taken over key low level features of the device like updates and wifi location, but in fact from the platform perspective, all those components have an open API and can be replaced.
The only fly in the ointment here is some of the API's require powerful permissions which aren't allowed in store apps, but you can still sideload them, or use an alternate store.
Specifically my company wanted to break our app into multiple apps and give a way for people to easily install the companions. If you send the user to the Play Store page, about 75% of users would dropoff, in user studies much of it was confusion about what to do once they saw the play store page.
Google has an api that is a much simpler flow than the full store experience which has much lower user dropoff. If you're curious where it's used, one example is the Google Drive app to install the Docs, Sheets, etc.
The API validates that the calling app is an app signed by the Google dev cert.
This isn't a security issue, you could just ship one app with all the functionality. It's clear they just wanted to reduce user drop off in a flow, but now provide that option to others.
I understand the potential for abuse even though the api still checked with the user. It wouldn't bother me if no one had access to the API, we'd just have to deal with it. But it felt anti-competitive that Google had it and we did not.
IIRC there are a few other similar non-security private APIs and they also felt anti-competitive to us. That said, it was no where near on the order of Apple, where it's commonplace on iOS.
As far as the platform is concerned, any app with the right permissions can install any other app. It just so happens that only the play store and other stores have that permission.
As you point out there is a fly in the ointment (which is enhanced by Google making it very difficult to ship with anything but the Play Store).
As an app developer like Spotify, the platform is the base of devices out there in the wild and how I build on top of them which, for me, is inclusive of the play services and play store.
Android definitely is a lot more open than iOS. But when the Play Store enforces a mechanism that favors Google, it's not of a practical difference to my livelihood than when the App Store has policies that favor Apple. If you have a really loyal following, like Epic/Fortnite, it's better than nothing. But even then the barrier to your users is huge and even the most establish companies with technical user bases will have a hard time crossing it. Nevermind the fledgling startups or developers with non-technical user bases.
Perhaps they should not be allowed (by law) to change the terms of the platform for X amount of time.
There's a vast gulf between "Spotify was blocked" and "Apple didn't spend time and money building a service that Spotify wanted".
Clearly the technology is there, but Apple is not letting Spotify use it.
Tech is there, https://developer.apple.com/documentation/sirikit/media_inte...
I'm sure Spotify has no problems with the knowledge of its engineers, I just found the APIs in 5 min. In fact, number 4 of this page explains your comment: https://www.timetoplayfair.com/facts/
They did indeed have "the service" in question, it was just limited to Apple's own offering.
It's a scenario not unlike net neutrality: an infrastructure provider that is also a content provider can put themselves or select customers in a position where free market forces are hindered or suspended in order to achieve a monopoly-like status.
Again, there's a difference between "Siri can talk to our music service" and "We have a stable public API that 3rd party vendors can hook into to connect up to a music service". They're not the same thing, and one is a lot easier than the other.
Given that they are a platform provider, maybe doing the bare minimum to get their own stuff working, but not enough to get any alternatives to work, is a strategic choice on their part.
"If Homepod only works with Apple Music, more people will switch"
No, a hardware manufacturer has no requirement to support any specific software. An infrastructure provider, however, has (in MY opinion) a requirement to support what they support to an equal degree, or it amounts to… market manipulation? Something not quite fair, some kind of abuse of power which is to the detriment of all other participants in the market, customers and companies alike.
Obviously, America as of today disagrees, seeing as net neutrality is not held in very high regard.
I look forward to roads that only support Fords, water pipes that only support Nestlé water, and stairs that only support Nike shoes.
Thankfully, America is not (yet) stupid enough to let private companies build our critical infrastructure, and thankfully "voice controlled speaker" is as critical as chewing gum.
EDIT: I thought you could now stream on the Watch but further research suggests that's still not possible. In summary, confusion.
I'm not sure this is 100% true. From browsing the spotify support forums many moons ago, some guy had built a spotify playing app for the apple watch, but spotify squashed it. Given that some random dev could do this, it doesn't seem like apple prevented anything.
If anything it makes the case that if it were so simple for a single random dev that unless Apple itself were preventing it there is no reason the app wouldn't have been released.
It streams Spotify directly without your phone and has a very flaky offline mode.
The developer tweeted that Spotify (not Apple) asked him to remove it four days after it reached the App Store.
I was lucky enough to get hold of it in that brief window and use it often.
On the other hand Spotify did squash this guy's app. That's a thing that happened. So it's not like the APIs aren't there.
So now we're taking Spotify's word that Apple is keeping them off the app store, while ignoring the fact that said app is possible and they themselves have kept an app off the app store.
Sounds like PR bullshit all around.
https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2018/504/
This is a VERY different statement than the true one which is:
Apple didn't allow ANY streaming music (or audiobook, or podcast) apps on the watch due to not providing the API's. They didn't specifically block Spotify.
- If you're deep into iOS development you know that Apple apps - the ones shipped with the OS - sometimes do things that 3rd party apps aren't able to. For example the Music app gets to be the _default_ app to live in the control panel even if you hardly ever use it and are using Spotify most of the time.
- I believe - for the Apple Watch - some of the 3rd party apps which were already available on the day of the launch were a) invited to preview the Watch ahead of other developers and b) in some cases allowed to use undocumented APIs. Uber may be one example of this - https://www.macrumors.com/2017/10/05/uber-removing-apple-gra...
Apple has been inviting 3rd party developers to preview technologies for a while e.g. https://appleinsider.com/articles/16/06/17/apple-invites-dev... so it seems to be standard practice.
As I read this "Time to Play Fair" website, it looks to me like Spotify is complaining they weren't invited to these preview sessions and thereby didn't get to learn about / get permission to use undocumented APIs.
Of course IANAL
Did that guy's app make it on the App Store? He could have easily built it with private APIs which would work but wouldn't pass review (maybe, App Review is very inconsistent) or many other reasons why he could and Spotify couldn't.
I inferred this from the vague wording in the earlier points and the clarifications in the later points.
> When Apple launches their new Apple Watch, they dismiss our proposals and won’t work with us to develop an app for it.
Notice, they didn't say they were blocked. Also why would building an app for the watch necessitate a proposal to Apple that requires Apple to work with them directly? Wouldn't you instead build your app and submit it for approval? This is probably because the Apple Watch SDK didn't provide all the functionality Spotify wanted, and so Spotify was trying to get Apple to add new functionality to the SDK.
> We submit a new proposal for a streaming app directly on the Apple Watch. Apple declines
> With WatchOS 4, Apple continues to make it challenging for us to deliver a workable streaming solution for the Apple Watch
Again, doesn't say they were blocked, just that proposals were rejected and the provided functionality made it difficult/impossible to do what they wanted.
> With Watch OS 5, Apple allowed the Spotify team to start developing offline functionality
Was this the functionality Spotify was proposing for Apple to make possible all along? In other words, was this the missing part of the SDK that Spotify had kept proposing to Apple and having rejected (not the app itself, which they didn't want to build without this functionality)?
EDIT: I'm also not saying they didn't build the app and submit it and have it rejected. They just never actually say that in the timeline.
Not really, it's 30% for everyone, not just Spotify.
Apple could charge themselves the 30% App Store fee for Apple Music, demonstrating that the App Store is a fair marketplace that doesn't artificially advantage Apple's own services. It would then be incumbent on Apple to prove that Apple Music is priced fairly, rather than being deliberately operated at a loss to squeeze other streaming music services out of the market.
It's somewhat similar to net neutrality proposals. AT&T doesn't have a monopoly as an ISP. However, if AT&T starts/acquires a video streaming service, they should not give unfair advantages to their own service because they want to compete with Netflix.
What does it change ? Nothing.
It’s on multiple platforms, it’s tied to Beats, it has a relationship with iTunes Store, there is advertising involved etc. So there could be multiple licensing and revenue sharing deals that mean Apple Music is not running at a loss.
In fact I think it’s likely than you’re wrong.
Interesting, so Spotify could pay nearly the same simply by paying the 30% to artists instead of Apple.
And of course, those 37 might already be partly paid by Spotify anyway.
As they mention on the website. That's not true. It's not 30% for Uber or Deliveroo. And most importantly, it's not 30% for Apple Music.
Regarding Apple Music I'm not sure what that supposed to mean. I'm pretty sure that Spotify doesn't charge the same for "Spotify Premium" and "McDonalds" ads.
What do you mean it isn't? Apple Store could trivially take a 30% cut of the Apple Music revenue, and the only thing that would change would be the distribution of revenue between Apple Music and Apple Store in Apple's revenue reports. The total revenue would be the same.
This effectively gives Apple an extra 30% margin for their streaming music service.
I definitely couldn’t start a ride sharing company when Uber and Lyft are being funded by VCs...
If you buy a real world product or service, you need to use a third party payment service like Stripe (or Apple Pay, if you want), there is a 0% commission fee from Apple. This is why Amazon can distribute an app on iOS that allows to buy whatever you want without Apple getting a cut; well, anything but digital goods, like Kindle books, which in fact can't be bought from Amazon iOS app.
Spotify could have made a watch app that provided controls and had offline somgs. They didn’t, and kept shutting down spps that did, or buying them and shutting them. This was a major sore point against spotify on the apple watch subreddit. Even now they’re dragging their feet, iirc.
I’m guessing apple will add lte support for 3rd party apps in watchos 6. Meanwhile, 3rd party apps have had the ability to make apps with offline support since June 2018. Most audio apps have added this.
Spotify....has not. What’s the holdup? Apple watch users are pretty frustrated with spotify: if all the other audio apps can do it, why haven’t they?
(Lte is an edge case: few watches have lte, and even fewer have an active lte plan. Offline audio is the main use case spotify still isn’t doing)
Interesting one since it is Spotify that is trying to close the currently open podcasting universe.
Let's not pretend that Spotify is either the white knight or the underdog here. This is two big companies negotiating over pricing.
How much, I have no clue - but if they can't even have a "get premium now" button in the app then that's insane to me. The 30% fee Apple would take isn't a real alternative either, it's still not profitable.
Is this talking about the Apple Watch-Podcasting issue? Until recently, podcast apps on the watch had issues saving where you are in an episode because they couldn't constantly run in the background; you could still play audio in the background without your app, you just couldn't watch the percentage played. Fitness tracking apps were allowed to run in the background forever, so some podcast apps told the API they were fitness apps to get around the restriction [0]. Apple later removed this loophole and created the APIs necessary for podcast apps to work on the watch [1].
[0] https://marco.org/2017/08/10/removed-send-to-watch#fn:pLK9h4...
[1] https://marco.org/2018/09/17/overcast5
How? By not providing API's to do what they wanted? yawn Next?
- It blocked Spotify from building apps for HomePod
How? By not providing API's to do what they wanted? yawn Next?
- It blocked Spotify from building apps for Siri
How? By not providing API's to do what they wanted? yawn Next?
- It blocks Spotify updates on a regular basis
Wakes up Ok here we have the first real issue, BUT even with that said this is SUPER one-sided. We have only Spotify's word and given their liberal stretching of the truth (or outright breaking it in some cases) I'm not willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.
- It blocked Spotify from using a podcasting API after it acquired 2x major podcasting companies
I'm going to need more info on this because it is super vague.
Until WatchOS 5 the APIs to do something like Spotify didn't really exist. There were workarounds, like by abusing the workout API, but unsurprisingly these has significant drawbacks, were unstable and Apple cracked down when they found API abuses.
Apple "blocked" Spotify only in that it hadn't (yet) released APIs that supported their use cases.
It makes me wonder how disingenuous their other claims are.
I do think services should have more options than Apple allows for accepting payment.
By raising prices and blocking access to competing services, Apple is acting with malice to consumer welfare.
The newest version of WatchOS does allow it. The first generation of watchOS really didn’t allow any apps - just remote views of iOS apps (yeah I’m simplifying it).
- It blocked Spotify from building apps for HomePod
Apple doesn’t have any apps on the HomePod. Now we are going to force all single purpose devices to ship with an SDK?
- It blocked Spotify from building apps for Siri
Apple also just came out with any third party integration with Siri a version or two ago. Again we want the government to dictate the timeline when they build features for apps?
- It blocked Spotify from using a podcasting API after it acquired 2x major podcasting companies
Netflix also blocked its API from most third parties years ago. Can we sue Netflix?
The anticompetitive behaviour described on that website is just the tip of the iceberg. Apple is doing a lot worse behind the scenes. Cellular service on Apple Watch for example - as a carrier you can't just provide service for the Watch - you have to be an "approved" carrier and this means being friends with Apple and selling iPhones among other things (you only provide SIM-only plans and not interested in selling phones? Tough luck.). Same for visual voicemail, etc.
I mean, of all companies, Spotify. Their whole business model is built upon not playing fair with content creators.
https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2019/03/11/spotify-amazon-g...
Quote: "Early last month, the US Copyright Board (CRB) officially ruled in favor of a 44% increase on streaming music royalties for songwriters and publishers."
Care to guess how much of those services' content comes from publishers (read: labels), and how much those services already pay to them (hint: as much as 70% of their revenue)?
Also, strangely enough, the article quotes everyone except Spotify, Amazon etc. But is happily quoting .... (substitute expletives) various music vultures^W associations who directly benefit from this arrangement (and not the songwriters).
Source: https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2018/12/25/streaming-music-...
>ATTENTION EVERYONE: > >1 Million Streams on YouTube = $690 > >1 Million Streams on Spotify = $4,370 > >1 Million Streams on Apple Music = $7,350 > >1 Million Streams on @Tidal = $12,500 > >1 Million Streams on Amazon Music = $4,020 > >Don’t shoot the messenger. >Jus Sign up 4 @tidal > >— THA GREAT (@NipseyHussle) January 15, 2018
The only thing about payout $ is that you have to take into account how many streams you actually get on each service. Are we to believe that Tidal's payouts would stay they same if they had Spotify's much greater listenership? Or Apple for that matter? Streaming services pay the rates charged to them by the record companies based on myriad listenership demographics.
I believe the labels are charging the services, and those labels pay the artist. Am I wrong on that? The labels set the price to be paid, don't they?
As much 70% of a streaming service's revenue (any streaming service, not just Spotify) goes to rights holders.
Who decides whats fair? Or are you forgetting that the go to website to download songs before streaming was thepiratebay?
The payout per play is basically different between free and premium users as they add more to the revenue shared by all the artists.
If you look at revenue for premium users, then it's probably much higher than that, but when you add free users, it will lower the average.
A solution you might think would be to remove the free-tier. But that will only do one thing: cut a (admittedly smaller) revenue stream for artists, cut a promotional stream for artists and less possibilities to upsale premium accounts to free users.
Someone who isn't even a free user will either not listen to music or pirate it. Is that preferable?
A lot of artists admit that Spotify pay-out per stream is certainly lower, but it's still dominating all the other streaming revenues, as long as you are actually an artist who has the potential to make any. Some unknown artist selling 1 CD for $10 on bandcamp with no listen on streaming services will probably think differently.
Legally, you have to pay more expensive royalties if you download music (referred to as "right to reproduce") rather than stream (right to transmit), so a special type of downloaded file must be used that can't be exported in any way. This is what Apple are prohibiting.
> That’s why I nearly jumped for joy during the watchOS 5 announcement in June, when Apple unveiled most of my list of watchOS changes needed to make good podcast apps.
In my understanding, an Apple Watch Spotify app would surely be technically feasible as of watchOS 5 (but I might be in the wrong here, I haven't tried myself more than read the available API docs).
Yes, but I would guess that limitation is done for some "legitimate" technical reason. Streaming Apple Music on the watch just kills the battery life in my experience, and it seems pretty on par with Apple's M-O of limiting expensive hardware access to third parties (like multitasking back in the days). But who knows, could perhaps be out of some evil anti-spotify spite.
> I wouldn't be surprised if a Watch app that allows offline playback would get rejected.
Maybe, but Pandora seems to have done it without problem. https://9to5mac.com/2019/01/04/pandora-apple-watch-update/
Oh, and one of the early execs involved with Spotify told me, point blank, “that man needs to die already” in reference to Steve Jobs before his passing. Yeah, I was just as shocked as you might be in reading that. I doubt I was the only one aware of such dark sentiments.
The executive team at Apple is probably looking at this website and thinking, “sorry but not sorry.” Making life difficult for Spotify could be seen as a way to carry on Steve’s legacy.
Does it honestly matter? First of all its probably just a joke. But second of all if we assume he said it the day he died that means the joke was made in 2011 when Spotify was a small company. When chances are the joke was made when they were still just in Sweden.
Sometimes that point of view is compatible with what you, personally, want. Sometimes it’s clearly obnoxious and Apple needs to change course. No matter what the case may be, however, it’s still a situation of a very specific point of view being sold to a consumer that has actively made a choice that this is, in fact, the point of view that suits their needs.
You’ve got to remember that the iPhone was an EXTREME case of this. The entire mobile industry thought the whole touch screen typing thing was never going to work at scale. I myself wasn’t completely convinced. Yet here we are. You can’t have the good without the bad.
For the most part I'd definitely agree, Apple has done some great things that went away from the established norms - but in this case, given that the song I listen to on Spotify will sound identical to listening to it on Apple music, the whole thing does stink of Apple giving itself the upper hand.
And I'm not shocked about your comment, as I don't really believe it. I don't think HN should be a place to spread gossip and possibly lies like this.
As for your second comment, well... You’re aware that the parent post is a website that was specifically created to ax-grind, right?
I was at the Spotify office the day the news of Steve's untimely death broke. It was a solemn day, and the the one senior executive I spoke to expressed true sorrow, as if a longtime friend had passed. Jobs was incredibly respected by the Spotify crew, as far as I'm concerned.
Spotify was also comparatively small at the time, with limited hierarchy. The entire office - execs and rank-and-file alike - was respectful, with a fair number visibly upset and mourning.
https://i.imgur.com/uLaVwnd.png
The other parts of the page are very nice though. The font contrast is fine and the font has a nice weight to it. When they want us to read something they actually still know how to make a proper webpage. And it works fine without JS.
It looks like they’ve filed a complaint with the EU Commission; I wonder if it will become a talking point in US politics as well.
Progressive Web Apps -- web apps that are installable and available offline without any app store -- are a viable alternative, and ultimately a threat to Apple's app store racket. It's likely why iOS Safari continues to drag it's feet on PWA support.
Note I work for Google but have no knowledge of Googles PWA products or PWA roadmap
Something mimicking today's stores would essentially be links you can rate and comment on. Kind of like Reddit, but with a different UI and no direct user submissions.
Yeah. You could technically still kick them off the store for the sake of maintaining trust— like a forum.
> Things like Reddit style voting can be gamed, just like app store search and reviews are today. Whoever has the most resources wins, not necessarily who has the best product.
Wait, isn't this like current App Store ratings though? I wouldn't be worried about this. It is already the case that many people invest a lot of resources in trying to game the App Store. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
If your app can be distributed as a PWA, then the question becomes: is the App Store (which gives you discoverability) worth the 30% revenue cut? For some PWAs the answer will be no.
Honestly, no, they're not. Even the Gold Standard of PWAs - the Twitter Lite app that Google (the patron saint of PWAs) helped them build - provides an inferior experience compared to native apps.
People bring this up often - Apple refuses to improve Safari to bolster their App Store - which completely ignores all the valuable improvements Safari has made to give web apps more native-like features, like backdrop-blur for blurred backgrounds and CSS Snap points for native JS-less carousels. Chrome doesn't support either of these.
And despite it adding certain CSS standards, mobile Safari on the whole remains the IE6 of the mobile browser world. Apple drags its feet on web app standards support for a reason similar to why Microsoft dragged its feet with IE6 web standards support.
It's insanely great. As a speaker. Period.
Spotify knowingly built a low margin business living in the pocket of the labels (who force Spotify towards razor thin margins) and Apple/Google (who have, since before Spotify launched, operated app stores for their platforms which are to some extent curated and which are not free market economies).
Spotify feels aggrieved that Apple does not allow it to develop software for certain of their hardware lines, such as Homepod or Apple Watch. Why do I have to allow you to develop software for my proprietary hardware, just because it's technically possible?
The crucial line in their argument is this:
> giving up 30% was too much for us to keep our prices low for our fans. Unfortunately, the end result is that you can no longer upgrade to Premium through the app.
How is this Apple's fault and not your fault? Every market place takes a cut from the vendor. Your business not being able to sustain the cost of doing business is nobody's fault except your own.
Apple should not be allowed to send push notifications about products or services they prohibit other apps from sending. They shouldn't arbitrarily restrict Spotify from updating the app (virtually no information is provided about what infractions Apple saw, and history suggests that companies are great at presenting one side of the argument and then we find that Apple has a legitimate grievance). They should not be able to charge Spotify more because of their competition.
But to suggest that Apple should be forced to allow Siri integration with Spotify? Homepod? Apple Watch? Ridiculous.
Monopolies where prices rise are bad news. But look at UK football coverage. On top of my free-to-air channels (£150 p.a. TV licence) I need a Sky Sports subscription (minimum £25 per month) and a BT Sport subscription (which necessitates one of BT Broadband - gross - or Sky) which I think is around £5-£10 per year. The top flight football is fragmented across all three providers. Is that better for me?
They probably could live with it but I can understand why it feels like an artificial cost that Apple came up with. It would be an understandable cost if they were selling the Spotify App through the App Store and using the actual store infrastructure for supporting Spotify... but they are not.
The app is nothing more than a portal to the entire Spotify infrastructure, it doesn't weight anything to Apple.
And then we have the subject of the direct competition, Apple Music doesn't need to have their profits cut in 30% because they are owned by Apple itself.
And it's even worse if they are using Siri, Homepad and Apple Watch to make Apple Music more appealing in comparison to Spotify.
Not so as I understand it. Only if you put the option to subscribe into your app in the app store. That cost doesn't exist for Mac or PC, but Apple doesn't heavily curate and have costs associated with the wild west of downloading apps from the web.
> it doesn't weight anything to Apple
There are significant costs associated with the app store, no? Part of the reason users gravitate towards the iPhone is because you can download high quality apps without malware, viruses, etc.
> Apple Music doesn't need to have their profitts cut in 30% because they are owned by Apple itself.
Conceptually I'm with you. This is an area I'm struggling with though. The Apple Online store charges accessory manufacturers a fee to be featured there. Should Apple also pay a fee to feature their own products there? I don't think so.
> it's even worse if they are using Siri, Homepod and Apple Watch to make Apple Music more appealing in comparison to Spotify
Why? They've made the hardware. Why should they have to let Spotify run on it in the exact way Spotify wants? (You can Airplay Spotify to Homepod.)
That should be covered by the one time fee that developers pay to Apple in order to publish apps into the App Store. I am not sure if a simple binary needs a 30% cut of the entire Spotify profit to keep up with the costs of hosting an app there.
> Why? They've made the hardware. Why should they have to let Spotify run on it in the exact way Spotify wants? (You can Airplay Spotify to Homepod.)
Because Apple is using a completely different market, which they have a strong presence on, to increase the value of Apple Music and consequently devaluing any other competing music streaming services.
We're now into the murky world of trying to tell other people what their cost base or margins should be.
> Because Apple is using a completely different market, which they have a strong presence on, to increase the value of Apple Music and consequently devaluing any other competing music streaming services.
Another view is that Apple fairly charges a consistent 30% to all customers in the app store. In the same way as Amazon doesn't pay to list its own products on Amazon, and Google doesn't pay to advertise Chrome on google.com, Apple should not have to pay to market its own services on its own marketplace.
This is the core issue. Apple using their dominant market position in the hardware/operating system markets to push anticompetitive practices for their product in a different market (Apple Music).
I don't see how this is much different than IE. Maybe even worse in some ways. But regardless, it is very clearly manipulating the market artificially in Apple's favor.
Allegedly anticompetitive.
Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Facebook all engage in similar behavior by giving preferential treatment of their products/features/services.
Remember it's my device, but theirs. Not apples. If they are going to allow third party apps then do so, but there's no technical reason to not allow the service.
Imagine Ford says you can only use a certain brand of tires on your new car, or can only buy tires through the dealership. That's what's going on here.
That's the reason I don't buy Apple stuff to begin with.
It's your device that you bought, which quite clearly doesn't support the things you want, so why did you buy it?
As a developer I can push a hundred updates per day if I want to, and they all have to be reviewed by a human. How large of a "one time fee" should be expected to cover the cost of that review?
That seems quite unrealistic. Apple certainly has recurring costs to keep the app store running. Taking a one time publishing fee wouldn't be sustainable long term.
I perfectly understand why Apple would be as anti-competitive as they can away with on their plateform. It benefits them tremendously.
What I don't understand is why some comsumers, who are definitely loosing from the situation - even if you prefer the Apple solution competition tends to bring price down - are systematically defending Apple. It's not like we are talking about a small and endearing company here.
Out of curiosity, do people really view using Apple products as a life style choice ? I liked my iphone but as far as I am concerned it's a mass market device.
Maybe you haven't considered that some consumers don't feel like they're losing from the situation. Maybe some consumers feel like they are winning because Apple's interests align with their own, and the interests of Apple's competitors are not aligned with their own?
I like having an app store I can trust to not have malware, I like knowing the apps I download have had a human review them for quality. I like having hardware with an OS where the developer of the OS controls when I get updates, not a carrier or manufacturer who are not affiliated with the developer. I like getting security and feature updates for my OS for 5 years. I like paying the developer of my software so the developer has a profit structure that doesn't necessitate spying on me. I like knowing that every piece of software pre-packaged on my device was put there by the developer of the OS with their explicit approval, and not sold to the highest bidder. I like knowing that the software on my phone is exactly how the developer planned it, and not modified by an unaffiliated device manufacturer to the point where multiple websites exist for the sole purpose of creating ROMs that mimic the developer's intended software, necessitating that I now either trust the unaffiliated hardware manufacturer or trust some random person on the Internet to deliver me a clean ROM.
There are platforms that are open and free to use however you see fit. They exist and they are great options. Very modern and easy to use and as open as you want them to be. I prefer the option that isn't open to modification. Products exist for both use cases.
And none of that has anything to do with what we are discussing. Apple could still do all this thing while allowing more competition on the plateform. For example could you explain to me how allowing apps competing with the system ones or allowing other streaming service to cast and use the watch would prevent any of what you listed ?
It is not an either/or situation between two opposite situations. There are plenty of inbetween possibilities.
> feel like they are winning because Apple's interests align with their own
Apple interests is selling you phone and apps so they can make money. Unless you are a stockholder, I don't see how their interests can align with yours. Unless you take pleasure in paying more, you are clearly losing from the situation.
The cost is there whether or not you pay through the App Store mechanisms. You have to pay it, even if you provide your own payment mechanism.
> There are significant costs associated with the app store, no? Part of the reason users gravitate towards the iPhone is because you can download high quality apps without malware, viruses, etc.
Sure. Then charge all apps for the cost of being in the App Store. It doesn't excuse a situation where Apple directly competes with Spotify and then charge Spotify 30% they don't charge for Apple Music. Thats a textbook violation of antitrust law.
> Conceptually I'm with you. This is an area I'm struggling with though. The Apple Online store charges accessory manufacturers a fee to be featured there. Should Apple also pay a fee to feature their own products there? I don't think so.
You can buy your accessories other places as well. Apple's Online store doesn't have a monopoly on selling accessories to iPhone users. The App Store on the other hand is the only mechanism to sell to iPhone users. The alternative is to allow competing App Stores on their platform.
Yes, they get 30% only if you subscribe through the app store. That's already too much for a service that doesn't use Apple's infrastructure, but Spotify played along for a while. Their main complaint however is that Apple is outright censoring the Spotify app so that it makes no mention to other options for upgrading to Premium.
That's clearly foul play in my book. I wonder if you would still defend it if instead of Apple, it was e.g. Microsoft using Windows Defender to block Chrome downloads.
> There are significant costs associated with the app store, no?
You pay a $99 per year fee as a developer to Apple. That should cover their costs for general QA. If they feel that popular apps need to pay more, they can still set a higher fixed price. But claiming that 30% is to cover Apple's QA costs is ridiculous.
> Why should they have to let Spotify run on it in the exact way Spotify wants?
Because of the way they market Homepod. They present Homepod as interoperable with your iPhone, but it turns out they place artificial limits to interoperability. I wonder, what would Apple do in case of a mass-return of Homepods from customers unhappy by the lack of interoperability with Spotify or other apps?
They can do the purchases on their own website, but its against App Store rules for an app to tell users that they have the option of upgrading outside of IAP.
Can you even subscribe through the app? Spotify could simply yell you so go to your web browser to subscribe. That’s what Amazon does for its video etc and it doesn’t seem to cause them any problems.
I subscribed to Spotify via their web site and it works fine on my phone. I’m sure they pay nothing to Apple in order for me to listen. That makes me feel that this is a publicity play by Spotify no matter what the more general (non-Spotify) merits of the issue might be.
Monopolies can have negative effects without trying to extract monopoly rents.
The competition between BT and Sky massively increased the TV rights price for e.g. the premier league, so the clubs got much more money. In theory, they used this to buy better players etc and increase the quality of the league.
Although you now have to pay twice, the quality of the product has gone up. So it's not a zero-sum game. You can argue that you don't think it's worth it, but that's an opinion, it's not true that it's an inherently worse situation.
Until they entered into a rights sharing agreement.
Also worth noting that the rights sharing arrangement on Sky's end is... <drumroll> ...mandated by a settlement from a previous anti-trust case!
To put this in 19th century anti-trust terms, the manufacturing company owns the railways and charges the competition a toll to transport their goods. It's a clear cut case for Spotify, from a legal perspective.
To repeat my question asked of someone else in this thread: Apple charges e.g. Mophie a fee to feature their products on the Apple Store online. Should Apple be required to pay the same fee for featuring their own products there?
What Apple is doing is a direct violation of the Sherman Act of 1890, specifically Section 1, in regards to artificially raising prices by restricting trade or supply:
> Every contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, is declared to be illegal.
Apple is big enough to pull their products from Amazon. Taking it back to the 19th century, Apple owns their own "railway". The real quandary comes in if Amazon gets so big that there's no way for a small supplier to sell a product in mass without going through Amazon and paying their premium. I don't think we're anywhere near there yet.
Amazon also built their own Amazon store, to get away from the fees of Google's equally Sherman Act violating store, and in the process potentially violated the act themselves (Prime Music).
Edit: I just thought of another, slam dunk case, this time for Amazon, because Apple restricts purchasing Audible books in the app, even when using existing book credits.
I am genuinely curious, does Google Play violate the Sherman Act in the same way that the Apple App store does or is it a different clause?
It seems like allowing users to fairly easily side-load apps (ex. Fortnite) and the presence of competing app stores (Amazon App Store, F-Droid, etc.) should alleviate some concerns.
Exxon doesn't force Shell sell their gas in Exxon stations.
And if you don't, you're out of luck due to the increasingly hostile restrictions on what you're allowed to even mention in the app - at least according to the website.
Can't say I'm 100% on Spotify's side, but to me it doesn't seem like Apple has anything stand on here, ethics-wise. Microsoft and the IE case comes to mind.
But Spotify's argument seems to be "you have to pay the same price as everyone else ... except Apple itself."
And why should it change just because Apple introduced a competitor? Apple charges Spotify the same before and after they launched Apple Music.
> Why do I have to allow you to develop software for my proprietary hardware, just because it's technically possible?
Of course if you were Apple, you would not want to do it. But, that’s what antitrust laws are for. As a consumer they are valuable: how long have people been waiting to use Spotify their Apple Watch?
I see your point but you could flip that a 3rd way:
"Consumers pay for their hardware - they own the device - so why should manufacturers tell consumers what they can or cannot install on their hardware?"
I grew up in an era when hardware wasn't so tightly coupled with software. In fact you could go further than that and mod your hardware with custom chips and so on without violating anything more than your warranty. So I find this current era where consumers are expected to pay high prices for hardware and still not have any rights over that platform to be a massive con.
Can you?
Ultimately there isn't a single consumer handset out there that has the same principles of "now you own the device it's yours to do with as you like". Consumer tech just doesn't operate that way any more.
Also I’d already acknowledged that it was easier and cheaper to sideload apps on Android.
Before you jump in and say something like “why should OEMs / Google offer you all this stuff for free etc”, I do completely agree. This isn’t a rant at Google (nor Apple) specifically but just at the state of technology these days. It’s not just an issue about geeks like us having ownership of our devices, it’s also creating a problem for environmental waste since it’s becoming increasingly hard to upgrade or replace parts. Laptops have components soldered in and old phones often end up in landfills. It’s such a shame to see.
Anyhow, I’ve drifted way off topic. Sorry for that
This will be fine for HN folks but will result in the erasure of security and privacy for normal users.
It's not that you have to, but if you do and you become one of only two or three platform oligopolists worldwide, then you better make sure it's a level playing field or you risk getting regulated as a utility.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/11/sen-elizabeth-warren-wants-t...
Because Apple+Android = de facto monopoly.
As a user of an iPhone/Mac/etc, but who loves Spotify, this whole thing just sours me on Apple a bit. Spotify works great with my webOS TV, and just about everything else for that matter. It supports everything. Its networking/streaming model is brilliant. The interface is much better than Apple music (with its bizarre integration with iTunes). That I can't use Siri to play a song is just obnoxious and turns me off of Siri, and whatever middle managers in Apple are pushing this are just doing themselves harm in the longer run.
I don't think we have a clear ethic yet, for these situations. There's obviously a ton of economic power in platforms. Since the msft-vs-netscape days, it's been controversial.
Ultimately... these are marketplaces, important ones and, considering their size, scope and influence... I think there is a strong case that "my house, my rules" is not a reasonable way of doing things.
Apple/Google's app & content stores are huge bottlenecks and being locked out of them is on the same scale as being locked out of the financial/banking system for certain companies.
Does "free market" mean anything useful, if the free market consists of a handful of unfree "platforms?"
There's a similar question for FB and Twitter. They are such big media channels that being locked out of one could (for example) make it impossible to run for elected office.
Things have different implications at large scale.
Apple are directly competing with Spotify in the field of streaming music services via Apple Music. Apple's total control of the app store and their substantial share of the smartphone market means that they have a dominant market position within the meaning of Article 102 TFEU. Apple are using that dominant market position to advantage their own streaming service and disadvantage Spotify, for reasons set out at length in the original article. Apple are required under EU competition law to give Apple Music and Spotify an equal playing field, which they clearly aren't doing. Apple might have a partial defence if they allowed sideloading of apps, but they don't.
The obvious precedent is the European Commission's action against Google in 2018. Google were fined €4.34bn for using Android to unfairly advantage their search business. Android has a dominant market position within the mobile OS market - if you're a small mobile device manufacturer, you don't have many reasonable alternatives to using Android. Google didn't allow manufacturers to pre-install the Play Store app unless they also pre-installed Chrome and the Google Search app, which is an abuse of their dominant market position. They used their dominance of the mobile OS business to unfairly advantage their search business, which is blatantly illegal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_competition_law...
http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-18-4581_en.htm
Hmm! What about?
> Apple's behaviour in this instance is clearly an abuse of market power and I fully expect the European Commission to rule in Spotify's favour.
I'm not contesting that. I'm saying that I don't believe Apple is doing anything wrong. (The law and me may differ on that.)
> Apple [has] a dominant market position
Isn't the test for this substitutability in the event that the dominant force increases price? (This area is a total unknown to me so thanks for taking the time to explain!)
> to advantage their own streaming service and disadvantage Spotify
I think the he-said-she-said of the software updates thing is easily parked (unless you think it forms a substantive part of their complaint), so I will focus on the pricing issue. Again I'm drawing a distinction between the ethics of the situation and the law (although I assume that to some extent, the latter follows the former).
Spotify's P&L will have a bunch of rows in it for the costs associated with acquiring a paid user. Different channels have different costs. For example TV, radio, google/bing/alta vista PPC. Each of those will have a cost per install and some channels and keywords will convert better than others. For example if I look at the analysis frequently cited about iPhone vs. Android users, it's easy to believe that there is a greater propensity to pay money for apps on iOS vs. Android.
If Apple was the only place to get those users, I could understand totally the belief that this is unethical behaviour. But Spotify grew by four million paying subscribers in Q4 of last year, all of whom are evidence that they can grow their business by ~$500m of ARR without the app store.
So for me Apple charging Spotify 30% for their paying subscribers (who came to the App store because of a product and marketplace which Apple created, markets, and curates -- benefits which are at least conceptually worth paying for by app developers, even if some of them quibble the 30%). Is the argument that Spotify should not pay this 30% [but still benefit from all the great things which Apple foots the bill for]? And if Apple wasn't in music streaming, they'd be able to charge Spotify 30% Because that to me seems orthogonal to a common monopolistic argument: they are able to do significant harm to Apple (app store), which is a business unit, and remove all of the acquisition costs they'd ordinarily pay through hany channel.
Would it be acceptable legallyl/ethically if Apple effectively treated app store as an acquisition channel like any other, and the Music business unit paid the 30% to App store?
[1] - https://stratechery.com/2018/antitrust-the-app-store-and-app...
Secondarily, the expectation that Spotify buck the labels AND expect to bring the concept of 'all music for one price' is a non-starter, so I don't understand that criticsim.
On iOS unless everything else is only partiality supported. iTunes in comparison to Spotify was a joke when it was first released and they're shoving it down our throats constantly.
Never really used Siri until I bought a pair of AirPods. How am I not able to tell it to play music via Spotify?
But on the other hand, Apple is stepping into a market (music streaming) from which they control top to bottom and has a advantage no one has (no IAP transactions fee, they basically pay themselves for it), which in a way is unfair.
If they want to remain fair to competition, they should waive IAPs costs or reduce them significantly in market they engage themselves in which they are direct competitors.
You cant move to another platform without losing access to all your "purchases" - there is no free market. They have monopolies within ecosystems they created.
They should be FORCED to have an open platform, with users able to access multiple 3rd party storefronts on multiple platforms. They can market themselves as official/curated/whatever they want but the user should have the choice.
Using an Apple devices is accepting a benevolent dictatorship, and it's a trade off tonnes of users are happy to make.
So then how would a novice user get apps the first time they boot up their phone? They would have to know where to get apps from. That seems like an easy way for users to end up downloading a bunch of malware because they think it's the official Apple or Google app store when it's just a random website.
Having a built in app store has huge advantages in security and usability for the end user.
"Find Spotify on [list of ten app stores here]." One of the advantages for users and developers is that if you want an app on iOS (and for the most part) Android, you know exactly where to find it.
It's by no means a dealbreaker, but something to consider.
Also I believe it had a positive effect on Firefox gaining users, no one can claim that was a bad thing.
That comparison doesn't really work, because MSFT had an effective desktop monopoly. By contrast, Apple is a minority player in the mobile market.
>They should be FORCED to have an open platform,
Just because YOU want this doesn't mean the Apple users want it. I'm utterly content with a single, curated-by-Apple app store for iOS. I like the stability it affords the platform.
I'd never accept it on a general-purpose computing device, but for my phone it's perfect.
That's Apple's magic trick. They only own the top 20% of the market (evading monopoly attention) but they extract almost 100% of all profit in the smartphone market. No idea how you'd legislate against that though..
No one told Google to skimp on customer service and make 18 chat programs that don’t work. No one told Microsoft to drag their feet on preventing malware from destroying the usability of their system. It was Microsoft’s choice to profit from letting manufacturers sell computers riddled with malware that you had to spend hours to remove after buying. It’s google’s choice to not offer product support such that you can’t use their “flagship” devices for 5 years.
Apple invested in setting up their retail stores, training employees well, making their devices easy to use, and now they are reaping the rewards.
Apple sold 47% of the all smartphones shipped in the US in Q4 2018
https://www.counterpointresearch.com/us-market-smartphone-sh...
2. 47% is not a monopoly
https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2019-02-2...
Market share is not the only criteria for determining whether a company has a dominant market position under EU competition law. Apple have a substantial share of the mobile phone market and they have a total monopoly on iOS app distribution. If you want to sell apps to ~27% of consumers in the EU, you have no choice but to go through Apple. End users might have a meaningful choice, but developers don't, which is highly relevant in this case.
And you should be able to choose that. But should you change your mind, you should be able to take your purchases with you and go elsewhere. Although apple is in the spotlight here, all of these vendor-locked app-stores are the problem.
What do you mean? Every time I've installed Windows, it came with Internet Explorer or Edge (which I then used to install another browser).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BrowserChoice.eu
Congratulations, you've just reinvented the desktop adware / malware market. We know that if this is possible users will be manipulated into making bad decisions which are hard to recover from, and in many cases those bad decisions will be made for them by their carrier.
What I would support is that the app store should be more open: no refusing apps for competing with the built-in apps, and removing the ban on purchases which don't go through the platform — let the store owner charge for payment processing but e.g. Amazon should be allowed to sell you a movie on iOS without paying Apple a cut simply by using their payment system instead.
Also, is Android as malware infected as GP describes? He singles out desktops, but Android does allow side-loading apps and people still near exclusively download apps though the play store. Adding a few other stores of big&trusted companies to painlessly load apps doesn't seem that risky to me. But would certainly add competition. I really don't understand why I must have a Google account to download Microsoft office.
> I really don't understand why I must have a Google account to download Microsoft office.
This is a related but separate issue: most of the value comes from trusting Google to verify that the app you found searching for “Microsoft Office” is actually published by Microsoft. Having a Google account saves you from having to manage accounts with every software publisher you use — which is huge for most people — but it's not really a prerequisite for user safety the way having a review step makes it a lot harder to spam popular application names.
There's nothing wrong with providing an app store as long as that store offers fair and non-discriminatory terms to all vendors. Charging app developers for the costs of running a store and maintaining an ecosystem is perfectly reasonable; using those charges to stifle competition isn't.
Engineers tend to want neat, perfect solutions that require no human judgement, but they're very rare in the real world. There are obvious and major disadvantages to a free-for-all versus a walled garden, for both developers and users. Customers have a right to choose a tightly-controlled platform, just as they have a right to shop at a grocery store that refuses to sell poisonous food. Banning app store bundling is a scorched-earth approach that would do more harm than good for the average consumer.
And giving them the choice is the whole point
Setting aside the store issue for a moment, what you suggest is impossible if Apple is also making apps.
No, it's very easy to implement and commonplace in all sorts of businesses. Apple need to treat their in-house app development teams in exactly the same way as they would treat a third-party developer - they get the same APIs, they get the same documentation, they go through the same approvals process and they pay the same fees.
Apple can hardly claim that they lack the expertise to compartmentalise information in this manner - prior to the iPhone launch, the software team had never seen the hardware and vice-versa.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_wall
Can you provide a software example?
> Apple need to treat their in-house app development teams in exactly the same way as they would treat a third-party developer - they get the same APIs, they get the same documentation, they go through the same approvals process and they pay the same fees.
Nobody should believe that a company paying fees to itself will change its behavior. The app development team would still act in Apple's overall best interest and not seek to maximize its own profits.
Even if we somehow accept that there is a real divide, it's still not equal footing. Say that Apple Music and Spotify both have $0.75 in expenses for every $1 they charge on app store. After the 30% cut, both would have loses of $0.05 per dollar of revenue. For Apple, that's a fictitious loss and their actual cash flow is a positive $0.25. For Spotify, that $0.05 represents an actual nickle they have to give someone else. Apple can continue on doing that indefinitely while Spotify can't.
Amazon are already very, very close to that state of play - developers within Amazon are required to design their infrastructure based on standard APIs, to facilitate the commercialisation of those systems via AWS. Chinese walls are commonplace in any kind of reverse-engineering as a protection against claims of copyright infringement.
>For Apple, that's a fictitious loss and their actual cash flow is a positive $0.25. For Spotify, that $0.05 represents an actual nickle they have to give someone else. Apple can continue on doing that indefinitely while Spotify can't.
That would constitute predatory pricing, which is illegal under EU competition law.
They were never stopped from that.
They were stopped for abusing their monopoly (e.g. threatening OEM PC vendors that unless they bundled this or that, they wont get Windows for a special price, etc).
And that when they had a monopoly (e.g. close to 98% of the desktop AND business market) -- which in itself is not illegal.
But instead, they are greedy and want 100% of the users of their platform to use their apps.
The problem here isn't the quality of the App Store. The problem is that Spotify has no alternative.
Apple is a hardware developer, a software developer, and a software retailer. The problem is how tightly coupled those three roles are on the iPhone.
You can't run iOS on other hardware. You can't run another OS on the iPhone. You can't install apps on iOS except from the App Store. You can't use the App Store on other OSes.
Those are the underlying problems.
Users can't use part of the ecosystem. They have to invest in the whole thing, giving Apple more control and reducing consumer mobility.
Microsoft had a monopoly, Apple doesn't. It's as simple as that.
They are certainly complying with the laws in this regard, but the reality is that anti-competition laws need to change to deal with companies of this scale and reach.
It doesn't work that way. Otherwise I could also say that any company has a monopoly on "products with the company's name on it".
> the reality is that anti-competition laws need to change to deal with companies of this scale and reach.
Hm ... I really think that Facebook and Google are the bigger problems today. And a lot is happening there already (not so much in the US though).
I agree Facebook and google are also problems. Amazon too, likely others. They all have their walled gardens - and whats worse is when they "go to war" with each other, affecting the users tied to their services (financially or otherwise).
I didn't mean that your definition of a monopoly is incorrect, but that you can't just narrow down the market until you find a monopoly. Because if you could, every company has a monopoly (which wouldn't make any sense).
The user signed up for that, so IMHO he gets what he deserves. The only I think I would change is to disallow the use of the word "purchase" when the user only buys the right to access some DRM-ed content.
For those of us that care about freedom, we can just buy a phone that's compatible with LineageOS (or Replicant if you're willing to go full Stallman) and install it.
Look at Google Play store. Much more "open," and a shitload of malware, scams, and shit software. Without curation of any kind, you end up with shit. It's the Tragedy of the Commons applied to apps. Build it, and they will ruin.
While this post represents Spotify's view without having Apple's to contrast it with, it seem eerily similar to the "Browser War" days leading up to Microsoft's admonishment. Apple seems to be the equivalent of a drunkard walking a fine line.
Those three serving up things like music or movies are ancillary to their main product. Spotify has a vested interest in being the best music platform. Apple as an interest in selling more phones and computers, which may be benefited by a good in-house music app.
I believe that Apple should take some cuts but not as high as 30%. I believe for some categories like microtransaction based apps Apple should take maybe 5%. Plus, I think that if Apple has a competing service, then it should waive the tax altogether. It's only fair.
If the only function of the App Store (or Play Store) is to provide hosting and some quality control then I don't see why apps can't be hosted on a secure website from the vendor - as far as I'm aware, Apple requires you have some sort of website anyway.
At least Google allows installing apps without the Play Store, perhaps it's time Apple permitted something similar with its apps? This could solve this whole problem and have other positive side effects such as people being less likely to jailbreak their iPhones.
If not Apple/Google controlling it directly, I'd imagine there would be a reasonable market for malware/AV providers on mobiles, if not solutions provided by Apple/Google.
That’s so backward it’s insane.
Maybe I'm uninformed, but it doesn't appear to me that access to an app store and the terms of such access (which by the way didn't even exist almost 10 years ago) is a public utility or good with an expectation of equal access or certain fair pricing.
Then, under what right does anyone claim that Apple (or any ecosystem platform) has to do anything beyond what is regulated in the payment and terms of operation? What makes your 30% price the right call? If you're an app developer, are you equally ok with someone else determining what you get to charge for your app when you're done with it? Isn't that the same (lack of) logic?
"How is it fair for Price Chopper to undercut Rice Crispies with a similar, cheaper product?" no on says this...
If we go with the store=phone analogy, then somehow my brand A flour and my brand B milk are magnetically repulsed and I can't make pancakes. It's not good for consumers.
Before you should people should simply switch phones: you can switch phones, but you can't take the apps you bought with you. And even if you switch: there's only one real alternative: Android. If Apple is allowed their 30% cut on literally everythig, why wouldn't Google do the same?
This way you end up with only 2 App stores, 2 Music and 2 Movie streaming services.
We do have only two app stores. Apple and Google just haven't managed to kill all the competing Music & Movie services. They'd love to!
that's like tesla releasing a car saying if you are a lawyer who wants to drive it you have to pay them 100k a year plus 30% of what you earn, or are "free" to drive another car (even if theirs is the fastest/safest/best-for-price in the market.)
or, now, can obtain a "provisional" license to drive it that expires weekly, with the same option to pay yearly for an annual license - these are all artificial barriers. installing software has up till now always been as simple as owning the device you're running it on and running the appropriate commands, these artificual barriers introduced by apple ensure anyone wanting to do so has to check in to see if it's okay with them.
I think that is where part of the problem lies: you can choose to do something with the platform or you can leave it alone. Seeing it as an 'I must do something with the platform' is rather strange considering it is a private, non-public platform in the sense that it has an owner and the owner is free to make whatever rules they want to as long as it is within the boundaries of the law (i.e. you can't require use of a platform to be paid with organs :p ).
Apple or Google's app store isn't a blank / open space where you entered an agreement that you have right to do anything you want. Just because you want to not run your code by Apple every time doesn't mean you have the right to do it.
There is no expectation that you have access to their hardware or software kit to do anything that you define. It's not like owning a car.
If the terms of your agreement are that you get time-limited / renewable access to a certain company's playground, what right do you have to insist that they change their terms, with recourse to what law?
There could be laws that decide that there should be open access. But there aren't. Why should this kind of lawsuit succeed in misinterpreting the law? The law can be rewritten, but until then I believe this effort should fail.
> There is no expectation
The expectation comes down to the owner of the device being allowed to have control over something they purchased, which in extension gives app developers freedom to target these users. This includes both hardware (right to repair), and software. It's completely valid, and repair, specifically, has been in news headlines months prior.
Actually your bridge analogy is apt, but in a way that works against your argument.
Toll bridges aren't required to have an alternate way around just because you think you have a right to go there for free by some alternative method.
Staten Island is only accessible by toll bridge. Entry to San Francisco from the north or east is only accessible by toll bridge.
Regardless, Apple built an island and a toll bridge that allows crossing for a fee. There is no entitlement in law that says you have the right to get to that island without paying what Apple charges because you think that would be "fair".
And in extension to that, paying other people for software that they'd like to run and don't mind paying for, which is not sold through e.g. the App Store.
I'm legitimately interested in this, because I cannot see any reason why a user shouldn't be able to run any software they'd like on their own hardware, and/or pay for it however they want.
Just because you might disagree with that contract, it doesn't change the rules. Your ability and expectation to run software of your choosing on your computer doesn't mean you have the same ability on a phone.
I could ask you, why don't you complain that even on an Android phone, you're not allowed to tinker with the baseband chip and broadcast whatever you want over the air. "Why can't I be allowed to do that? It's my right." Nope. It is not.
This is just an extension of that principle. In some other state or country the rules may be set up differently that consumer rights (however those are defined) take precedence over commercial regulations. But not here. Public opinion and law might someday change. Until then, don't confuse what you think should be with what is. It will not do you credit.
You're expressing wishes. I'm expressing facts.
I did not sign a contract relinquishing my rights to execute whatever code I like when I purchased my phone. Does one have to do that with an iPhone?
If you do, shouldn't it be called an applePhone, not an iPhone? If you cannot control what code is executed by the cpu, it is really more Apple's phone than your own.
You don't naturally have any expectations of a right to run whatever code you want on a phone. There is nowhere written in law or regulation that you have such a "right". So there is no such right to give up.
Apple enters into an agreement with you to give you a phone with certain capabilities. Control of what code is executed by the phone is not included in your capabilities. End of story.
> You don't naturally have any expectations of a right to run whatever code you want on a phone. There is nowhere written in law or regulation that you have such a "right". So there is no such right to give up.
Plenty of things that you naturally have a right to do aren't written in a law. Is there a law saying you can browse and post on hackernews on your computer?
USA: If not prohibited by law, you can do.
Taiwan: If prohibited by law, you still can do.
China: Even if allowed by law, you can't do.
You are simply answering the question "Why are things this way?" with a tautological "because this is the way it is." Whether or not the status quo will change in the future, it must always start with someone questioning it.
If I were a game developer could I install any software on my game console?
that's like tesla releasing a car saying if you are a lawyer who wants to drive it you have to pay them 100k a year plus 30% of what you earn, or are "free" to drive another car (even if theirs is the fastest/safest/best-for-price in the market.)
Let’s not make an analogy. Can I install any software on the computers in my Tesla?
Why not only allow to use their payment system?
You pay for your account on Spotify's own web site, which bypasses Apple getting any cut at all.
https://support.spotify.com/us/account_payment_help/subscrip...
Netflix has done the same thing.
https://www.billboard.com/articles/business/8471988/spotify-...
In my book, the problem is that you are not allowed to provide a link to your payment website inside your app.
This is especially damaging to small companies. Most people have heard of Spotify, Netflix, Pandora, etc. So it's somewhat natural for them (if not a bit akward) to go to the website if they can't get premium in the app.
But for small companies that connection isn't immediately obvious. In my company for instance, we aren't allowed to put ANY reference to our website in the app (as it relates to purchasing premium). As a result when a user signs up, my only option is IAP. I cannot just assume they will naturally go to the website.
(An "email me a payment link" button would almost certainly get rejected by Apple)
It could even be 2 digits (the same 2 digits for everyone), you’re just looking to get their eyes on the email letting them know additional paid subscriptions are available on your website.
I think you'd end up confusing users. Most people will go to their email expecting to see a verification code in big bold type. If you make the code less obvious, they'll get frustrated ("I came here to get a code, why am I now doing something else?") It's awful UX at a particularly business-critical moment.
And this is all assuming Apple doesn't see through your ploy and just reject the app.
So you couldn't even get to the point where you can send an email without first falling in line with IAP.
And according to my understanding of the Spotify timeline, and I haven't see this because I haven't published to the platform in a while, Apple now prohibits you from targeting your iOS users with upgrade communications (even if they didn't sign up via iOS, which they didn't since that's prohibited).
Deezer music went another route: you can pay for your subscription through an iOS device, but you'll pay a higher price. [0] I'm surprised Apple permit this.
All this strikes me as a clear indication that Apple is asking for too high a cut.
I've never been tempted to use a mobile app to shop on, say, Amazon, but Apple are clearly ok with that experience being far better on Android than on iPhone.
> In my book, the problem is that you are not allowed to provide a link to your payment website inside your app.
Interesting.
The exact words used by the Audible app for iPhone: This app does not support purchasing content. Instead, add to your wishlist.
[0] https://support.deezer.com/hc/en-gb/articles/360000633989
This is what Spotify used to do (charging $13 instead of the normal $10 to give apple their cut), but they stopped when apple started making apple music available at $10 (since they didn't need to pay their own tax)
You simply can't ignore iOS if you want to have a successful smartphone app business. That fact alone is enough in my opinion to consider Apple a monopoly and to take action to force them to play fair on their own platform.
Abusing market dominance in one sector in order to shut out or outcompete other providers in another sector is the classic justification for antitrust action.
I honestly never really thought about why this is - I simply just hated Audible for it, and thought it was the most annoying part of their app.
However, it's odd - how come the Amazon app is allowed to get away with its own purchasing system?
I believe jordanthoms's explanation is correct.
Why on earth is Apple allowed to do that? I get that it is their marketplace and their rules, but they are directly hurting competition and consumers this way. There's simply no real argument to prohibit developers like this. Seems like something the EU should combat against.
I think something like 30% on the first purchase and then 5-6% for any recurring purchases would make more sense. I know it changes to 15% after a year but that's still ridiculous IMO.
Maybe there's an App Association that challenges all of these stores on their rather high recurring fees.
Strawman. That's not at all what the parent said.
> For instance, if the app asks you for payment, you could be first shown its rating in the store, if it's low. There could be even a separate rating judging the payment security of the app, if security is what Apple is after.
You think people should be shown a payment security score so they can judge whether they want to make an in-app purchase? You must be joking. I don't think you understand what Apple is after if that's your suggestion.
> You're allowing Apple to rip you off by 30% on all app transactions, it's as simple as that.
Your entire comment reeks of irrational anti Apple bias. It's as simple as that.
I'm not particularly scared of paying for things online. I'm scared of almost anyone else in my extended family doing so, though. If you think that concern's "ridiculous" you haven't watched them use the Web. And lots of them—especially the older ones—have (rightly!) never entirely gotten over fear of buying things online. Some(!) of them do buy things online, but reluctantly, with great deliberation. In an app on an Apple device? Concerns gone. Even for me, that little background stress of being on alert for shenanigans quiets down when I'm in the Apple ecosystem. Far lower (though non-zero—there's a reason I do almost no iOS gaming) permitted rates of douchebaggery is one of the things keeping me on iOS, and the one-source-of-payments is a vital part of that.
[EDIT] there are further benefits to users and developers alike, I should add, when the UI for a purchase is the same in every app. It's worth 30% to "defect" from that, so worth it on the individual level, but if it's permitted at all then the game's up and everyone loses.
This is why geeks make horrible product people.
And ratings have never been faked....
I think it's perfectly reasonable for governments to update their terms and agreements.
The counter point is, if Apple allowed this, then every single App would use that method. Most people would not realize or care that they bought the XYZ in a web view vs through the AppStore payment system. Even apps that are currently paid only would switch to a "free" app with a "pay here" in-app purchase.
At this point the AppStore no longer can bring in any money for Apple except indirectly via encouraging iPhone sales.
Maybe Apple could charge the publisher for each app download or something instead to keep making money but I doubt that would be very popular.
Do you think spotify should just suck it up and take the hit to keep prices the same because apple is providing a service (access and subscription handling) worth 30% of the price? Not even Amazon charges that much.
I don't know if the anti-competitive practices mentioned are illegal, but they're certainly scummy. The company that owns the walled garden shouldn't be bullying spotify to try and prop apple music up.
It would be the poster child of an anti-trust case.
Consider the countless users that, perhaps rightfully, argue that Apple should include more than 5 GB of iCloud storage for backups, user data, etc. That could be considered part of the product while it still competes in a different market with Dropbox and similar services.
And then every PAID app will switch to FREE and charge for PRO, to circumvent the 30%. Oh, Apple complained it’s not technically a microtransaction? Fine, just separate every feature into a new purchase.
> If the only function of the App Store (or Play Store) is to provide hosting and some quality control then I don't see why apps can't be hosted on a secure website from the vendor
If the vendor server is compromised or is down, a download from the App Store won’t work for a single app, leaving customers confused and complaining to Apple, who can’t fix the issue.
App doesn’t download - Apple’s fault.
App doesn’t work - App developer’s fault.
Then make it 30% of the first 20 or 30 dollars, and 5% or less after. That more than pays for Apple's verification work without letting them gouge repeat payments.
But if you're dealing with a $100+ per year subscription, the fee goes down to a modest processing cost.
1: they're likely refining the process of obtaining one of these certs after the recent news reports on business fraud
On the side of 'level playing field' they do of course still have a point, just like all the anti-trust stuff we had/have with Microsoft and Google. It does make me wonder a bit why this hasn't been involving other companies like Amazon and Facebook. (or, why it hasn't been suggested as widely as it is now)
I do wonder about the technical aspect of those store denials and watchOS problems; other streaming services do not face the same issues/pressue, so what makes spotify so special? They app is a bit crappy (it's not very good at maintaining/restoring state and doesn't have the most consistent UI), but other than that, it doesn't do much different things when compared to others (like Deezer or Tidal). Putting it as a "Apple Music vs. Spotify" thing is a bit weird too; while it might make sense, it doesn't make sense if it's just that and all the other streaming and buying services are free to do what they want. It's weird stuff.
And I can opt out of selling things in Idaho if I don't want to pay their sales tax. I don't understand the distinction you're making at all.
If you consider the Appstore/iOS ecosystem to be Apple's "land", then sure that 30% is like the tax for having a presence in that land.
That's the classic meaning of "tax".
However, nowadays, in most civilised countries we expect more of "tax". We expect it to not simply flow to whoever holds power over the land (ecosystem), for them to use for profit, projecting power and keeping it. We expect the tax instead to largely be invested in things that benefit the people paying it (users). In fact, the more this happens, instead of going to the rulers, the nicer a place to live (in general).
Now one the one hand Apple is doing a pretty good job with things that benefit the users: they get security and some privacy. On the other hand, as a tax, it's fair to ask whether that 30% is really necessary for these benefits or just for lining Apple's pockets. An additional thing, looking at it pragmatically, whatever Apple's doing to Spotify doesn't seem to be in the user's benefit at all. But then, they don't pay tax. So that points to the 30% being significantly more than the tax required to benefit the users.
It seems to me that Apple should lower this tax to a rate that Spotify is willing to pay and put up with.
Thing is, Apple is not really like a modern government to its users. They are a "if you don't like it, just leave"-ocracy. So when they put up a "public" service (Apple Music), that undercuts commercial services (Spotify), it is NOT in the benefit of the people (users) like a public transport system would be. This is because the undercutting is purely based on the tax-cut, not because it's more efficient to do it as a public service rather than a commercial one.
If you were to scope it to 'services' or 'platform', then perhaps we should call virtual hosting cost not cost but tax :p and if you rent a movie, that'd then be movie tax, or rental tax? But what about actual tax, are we going to call that tax tax? Because at this point people just start using the word tax for every generic transaction.
Isn't Spotify just the biggest one by a large margin?
Because frankly I never heard of Deezer or Tidal, and everyone I know that uses a music streaming service is on Spotify or, rarely, iTunes (or Apple Music? is that a rebrand or is it a new thing?)
It is everyone's full legal right to do whatever they want with their phone. Including downloading apps from websites.
It's just that consoles never have been nearly as popular to make a stink about it. I never bought a console because of exactly this limitation: I can do anything with a computer, why would I buy a neutered computer as well? And that was fine. Because you don't need a console. But you do need a smartphone. And the choice is Android or iPhone, and the usage is about 50/50. So when the iPhone is shut tight, that's a much bigger deal.
There is 30 years worth of malware, ransomware spyware and viruses on PCs to show that most of the public hasn’t benefited from being able to download freely.
Unfortunately, Apple often disagrees. They have tried to make multiple frivolous lawsuits against people doing exactly this, over the years.
Sometimes it doesn't matter what your rights are, if a company is willing to spend a bunch of money trying to submit illegal lawsuits to bankrupt you.
Here you go: https://consumerist.com/2009/02/14/apple-wants-to-make-jailb...
That is a clear example of a bad actor.
This is such an extreme stance compared to what you're allowed to do on the desktop. Regardless of what Apple allows or not, shouldn't the user, the owner of the device, be allowed to install applications as they see fit, and choose to bypass any centralized app store? A smarthphone is a computer, and it's arguably many peoples primary computing device, and so I see no valid reason for the future of such devices to be a locked-down walled garden under the guise of security.
More than anything and any security, Apple benefits directly from this, just like they do lobbying against right-to-repair legislation. Because God forbid an owner of a Apple device repairing it themselves instead of have to go through official, expensive channels. Likewise with a (legitimate) company or app maker saying "We'll just let the users install it outside of the app store" and choosing not to deal with Apple's ecosystem. For example, Wireguard for macOS cannot be distributed outside of the app store due to native integration requiring APIs that Apple restricts with such clauses [1]. This is in my opinion ridiculous.
[1] https://lists.zx2c4.com/pipermail/wireguard/2019-February/00...
I put quotes around "their" just to remind that this ecosystem is made up by hundreds of millions of users, too. Yes Apple holds a singular power over this ecosystem but that power mostly boils down to the ability to wreck it for any particular group of participants. That's not ownership unless you want to claim that humans own the coral reefs, too.
Apple is simply erecting gratuitous roadblocks for rent-seeking purposes.
If not, how is it any different from the phone?
*EDIT: i’m not saying “place and purpose” is a reason why macos and ios have different security models, but just pointing out that “why is a laptop different to a phone” is not reeeeeeally a particularly valid place to start
Um really those are artificial, not natural. The nature of the devices is that they're still general purpose computers, the artificial restrictions on them give them an artificial place and purpose. It's still a thing, but Apple isn't magically altering reality.
Do you feel that console makers shouldn’t be allowed to dictate what runs on their devices? Yes physical discs still have to be approved by the console maker. It’s been that way for 30 years.
Yes of course. Either allow the user full control of the hardware they apparently own, or call it what it really is, renting.
You could have an argument in the case of a car, for safety. Cable box perhaps, but I'd say that should probably be considered a case of renting hardware for it to really make sense.
Car radio or printer, etc? Nothing comes to mind.
That's easy enough to circumvent.
But it is standard practice for divisions to bill other divisions for work. I would be almost certain that Apple Music is already paying the 30% tax however since it’s internal it doesn’t really make a difference. Likewise splitting into a new entity does not change anything.
Subscriptions for apps should be different, but I see a challenge in drawing the line between Spotify/Netflix and a scam app like "awesome culculator" that charges $5/mo to people who don'didn't realize it was a subscription (there was an article on HN this week about apps like that, targeting kids and the elderly, of course).
If Apple has a stipulation about requiring a website, then maybe subscription-based apps can get a discount on the 30% fee if they also have a web or desktop-based version of their application that provides comparable functionality and takes payments.
This is not a good reason to limit how much money an app developer makes. You want to make the play field fair, regardless if there are some companies making a lot of money.
These dollars are most certainly coming from VC funding. Most of these businesses aren't (and will never be) profitable.
You're talking about the top 1% or less of micro transaction-based apps here. There are ton of indie apps that depend on micro transactions and aren't making enough to buy a Super Bowl ad.
It's unfortunate that spammy or low quality micro transaction-based apps have become commonplace, but I'd rather that be dealt with by the App Store flagging and filtering the apps with issues.
That said, how much is distribution worth to Spotify? Imagine that Spotify was not software, but instead it was a hardware device. Would they expect Best Buy to carry it for free? Would they expect Walmart or Target not to offer a store branded competitor? I think not.
When you don't own your distribution channel, you pay for distribution one way or another.
In either case the difference between a store doing this and Apple doing this is that Best Buy is not the one of two practical ways to access the product, and consumers are not compelled to go only to Best Buy simply because they chose to go there once.
Figuring out the proper practices for phone app markets is difficult right now, because we really can't compare them to anything that already exists. Physical markets just aren't the same thing.
A billion people live in a company town ("Appleville"). When they first decided to move there, they paid a lot of money to buy a house there, and in return they get access to all the benefits the town offers - nicely-built houses, well-maintained streets, and access to lots of public services. Because living in the town is so nice, houses there cost a lot more than they do in other areas.
While you live in the town, you've signed a contract that says you're only allowed to buy things from one store owned by the town's developer. Most popular items are available at the store, so it's never too much of an inconvience, but sometimes things are more expensive than they are in other towns, or they aren't available at all.
Every time you drive into the town, you get stopped, and a bunch of guards search your car. If they find anything in your car that you didn't buy from them, they take it, and you can't have it back.
If you ever do want to leave the town, not only will you have to buy a house somewhere else (and your existing house will be worth a lot less than what you paid for it), but you're not allowed to take any of the stuff in your house with you - it all just disappears forever.
Now imagine you're a new company trying to sell a product, and the store owner won't let you sell your product in their town for some reason (you aren't paying them enough, it violates one of their rules, etc.) Even if the people living inside the town want your product, they can't buy it unless they completely uproot their life and move somewhere else, which no one is willing to do. And so the town owner is able to kill your product, and prevent it from ever being a threat to them. (Meanwhile, the town owner copies your product and starts selling it in the store themselves).
They've still got to at least cover bandwidth (minor) and payment processing.
Because that worked so well for Windows with malware,viruses, and ransomware.
This is not the same as Amazon offering their own label in their Store. Customers could shop in dozens of many other online retail or local retail. And Amazon does not charge other label 30% cut for stocking fees.
I believe Apple should charge a fair amount only when they have a competing product or services within its locked system. Had Apple Charge 15% for the first year on Spotify and 10% for all subsequent subscription it would have been much better. I don't believe the 5% would work, as I have seen many saying 5% should be enough. The cost of running microtransaction, processing, billing, legal, etc are just about break even at 5% even in the scale of Apple. I don't see charging 10% would seem unfair. ( In US at least, in EU the processing fees are much much lower )
Or Apple should never have made Apple Music in the first place. I still don't see any value in Apple offering it. iTunes was required for iPod. And it changes the whole music industry as a whole, along with iPod sold which ultimately saved Apple. No one will buy iPhone because of Apple Music, and Apple Music itself isn't even profitable.
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/31/netflix-stops-paying-the-a...
Spotify doesn’t just forfeit 30% of their App Store revenue, they pay this directly to Apple - so the relative handicap is doubled.
And of course it only applie for in app purchases, if you browse to Spotify.com on you iphone and pay there, Apple doesn’t get a penny.
Most of these claims are dubious at best. Bunch of cry-babies.
The thing I find to be anticompetitive is that Spotify cannot provide a web link to their own payment processing web page within their app.
Apple has long allowed content providers to opt out of using Apple's own payment system (and paying Apple a cut), but without being able to point users to your payment website, this rings hollow.
As far as Apple Watch goes, the API to allow for downloading content to local storage and playing it back in the background landed in last year's Watch OS update.
Pandora manages this task just fine.
Well, you probably can’t advertise your apartment on AirBnb and then Link people to your own payment service that bypasses AirBnb’s fee either. It sort of makes sense.
But Spotify doesn't want to use Apple's infrastructure and is compelled to do so regardless.
Spotify is saying that if using Apple payment infrastructure was free, then not allowing other options would not be a problem, but since it's not free, not allowing anything else is a problem, not that Apple charging for the use of its payment infrastructure is a problem in itself.
They are absolutely free to handle billing their customers on their own website and to turn off the ability to pay through their iOS app altogether.
This is, in fact, exactly what Netflix has chosen to do with new users.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/31/netflix-stops-paying-the-a...
Nothing is stopping Spotify from doing the same thing with new and/or existing users.
What they are not free to do is provide a link to their billing web page within their app.
Would you believe it after a citation showing that Spotify itself has already ditched Apple's payment system?
>Spotify & Netflix Are Bypassing Apple's App Store Billing Charges
Both companies are now driving new subscribers to pay directly, avoiding iTunes' 30% cut.
https://www.billboard.com/articles/business/8471988/spotify-...
What Spotify is complaining about is that it is possible, but at a massive inconvenience to users, (having to manually type the payment url into safari etc that they need to find manually first), which makes it so that most just decide the burden is not worth the hassle. That's how anti competitive behavior manifests itself, usually. Technically, anything is possible, Spotify can develop an iPhone competitor and then ship the app there, but come on, we both know that's unrealistic.
I believe I mentioned that not being allowed to provide a link to their payment website within their app was anticompetitive in my initial post?
However your assertion that Spotify is forced to use Apple's in app payment system is simply not true. Especially given the fact that they no longer use it at all for new users.
But they absolutely are if they want to offer the same level of experience as Apple Music can.
What they're doing now is significantly degrading the user experience compared to Apple Music, which is the whole premise behind them complaining. I don't know why that needs explaining.
What you're saying is effectively akin to 'the iPhone is not limited to running iOS, because you could disassemble the SoC, reverse engineer the HW and load your own OS on it".
Am sure it would theoretically be possible, however nobody sane would say 'Apple allows multiple operating systems to run on the iPhone'.