I would not be so sure that Spotify will lose this case. In recent years, Apple track record in courts has been abysmal. They basically lose all court cases not judged by Lucy Koh.
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Apple Says Spotify Only Pays 15% Fee on About 0.5% of Subscribers in Response to App Store Complaint
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I would not be so sure that Spotify will lose this case. In recent years, Apple track record in courts has been abysmal. They basically lose all court cases not judged by Lucy Koh.
I think you have me confused with someone else. Please show me where I called you a hater or a shill?
And what does owning Apple products have to do with your argument? You're still wrong no matter how much Apple stuff you own.
Apple isn't under oath right now, so any lies do not come with any consequences. Apple is now trying to convince potential jury members and the public that they are the good guys.
Please. You didn't just claim that something said by a company or an officer of a company doesn't have consequences because they're not under oath, did you?
Here they are:
Apple claims that not a single Spotify user pays 30% fee. While technically correct, what's the reason for that? Is it because a year ago Spotify had to cancel accepting paid subscriptions via App Store because of the exorbitant fee?
Few people are paying 15% fee either. So? Is it because of the reason mentioned above? Is it because Spotify is the most popular music streaming service which is used by people not just on their smartphones which means that way more people are aware of it that would be the case otherwise? Any new streaming service would be in a much more difficult position on iOS platform.
The fact published by Apple do not disprove any of the issues outlined by Spotify.
Free apps add value to Apple's platform and ecosystem. On the balance sheet however, Apple takes a hit from purely free apps. You think $99/year that a developer pays covers all costs in reviewing, distributing, and providing developer services for free apps? Nope.
Spotify has hundreds of millions of users. Let's say 60 million users are iPhone users. Spotify releases weekly updates. That's potentially 240 million copies of Spotify downloaded every month. Think one server can handle that global distribution? Nope. $99/year that Spotify has to pay for development certificates isn't going to cover the CDN servers alone. Then there's the review process. Then there's the push notification servers which Spotify uses.
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I didn't really follow what you are saying. Apple was "greedy" when they only took 30%, but then they introduced a provision that decreased that to 15%. Now Apple is "greedy" because 30% exists. They should have made the discount volume based and not tenure based. As your subscriber base increases your fee decreases, and vice versa. That would should make Spotify, and their trillions /s of customers happy while also alleviating us from subscription based calculators.
To fully answer this, we would need to see how that 0.5% number evolved between the period while Spotify did offer the (very simple) in-app subscription through Apple vs when they stopped doing so (this article from Aug 2018 mentions they've removed this option, though not sure when exactly that happened).
Spotify does not need App Store to begin with. They could have let iOS users to install it from their own web site. It would be more convenient and cheaper for them than dealing with Apple. The problem is Apple won't allow it (unlike, say, Android).
Spotify did charge 30% ($12.99/month vs $9.99/month) more for those signing up via in-app subscriptions (before it removed that option), not sure for how long that was the case, here is an article from 2015 describing it. And as the article said, Spotify was trying to steer users away from using the in-app option (as it made Spotify a better deal for people and thus more likely to subscribe or to stay subscribed). We don't know how that price delta affected user decisions. That is at least the leg they can still stand on.
And Android users are infected with malware by doing that. Security would be greatly compromised on iOS. Also it's bad UX. You wouldn't be able to autoupdate the app.
There is an interesting dynamic at play here that is not fully independent. Spotify et al. are wanting to change the rules (or dismantle) the App Store model. In the most recent Fast Company, the argument is made that Apple needs to get more control of the App Store to prevent bad players from capturing user data. Not sure if we can have it both ways.
Review process takes between 5 to 10 min. Netflix accepts about $100/year from each streamer and Netflix is able to deliver terabytes of data to each streamer monthly. So yes I think $100/year can easily cover cc# processing, data hosting, app review process.
Apple makes money through iPhone (and iPad) sales. That is what pays their costs for maintaining the App Store for free apps. Apple could enforce a minimum price, but it has decided that in balance it profits more from the presence of all the free apps that help generating iPhone sales than the App Store running costs the free apps cause. Plus there is also the aspect that a good deal of free apps come from developers that also have paid apps (upfront, in-app, or subscription), allowing the free apps helps those developers which in return does help Apple via their paid apps (both directly via the 30% fee and indirectly via iPhone sales).
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Do you know when exactly this happened? It must have happened before 23 Aug 2018, as this article from that date mentions that they had stopped accepting in-app subscription.
You’re talking about apple as if it’s providing gas or something! It’s not a utility company lol!
You look at the issue as how much does it cost for apple to serve a Spotify app fille to a user. Apple look at it as we’ve spent untold billions of dollars over the last 20yrs to build a user base of the highest caliber. We have taken risks and could have lost it all to any one of our competitors in the space ( Microsoft, google, Samsung etc..).
What you as an app developer licensee is paying for us access to that trusted, curated and loyal user base that Apple has built over the decades.
And if that user base is not of value then fine, don’t use it. But you can’t be upset on one hand that your paying for access to it and that makes you uncompetive and then on the other hand say that that specific user base isn’t meaningful enough for you to pay more for!
Finally apples developer license probably is still at their discretion. Does everyone have a legal right to develop for Apple devices? If that’s the case then their is a heck of a lot of other companies (Sony, Nintendo, Xbox etc) that will start having huge problems from an EU ruling that says every and anyone has the right to develop for a platform.
Also, one of the reasons I suspect Apple hasn’t provided a way of compiling code on the iPad is to differentiate it from a personal computer like a windows or mac pc is. That implies that no one really has the legal right to develop on iOS because it’s never been sold as a personal computer that you can build your own software on.
I think Spotify’s numbers posted by Apple massively undermines their claim for compensation as it seems they have lost very little from Apple policy. There lawsuit kind of claims Apple makes it hard to compete. However they don’t seem to be doing badly. I think they have lots of users don’t they?
You basically can’t have a law suit talking about damages and not show how damaging something actually is.
Do the math:
10min * 4 updates in a month * 12 months, that's 480 minutes or 8 hours of work. Glass door says average $32/hour for an App Store reviewer.
$32 * 8 = Apple needs to pay $252 to review Spotify for 1 year.
And that's just the app store review costs. For 1 app.
You want to try again with your math?
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In my experience, app review takes longer than 5 to 10 minutes. If we’re referring strictly to the In Review stage, it's about a half-hour. From submission to approval, usually a few hours.
Most, if not all, of the discussion about this article is attempting to judge Apple as good or bad in their practices. I think an interesting question is why Spotify is bringing about this lawsuit. Are they trying to bring revolution for all, or is it that "Spotify wants all the benefits of a free app without being free."
The reason Apple can spend millions of dollars to support free apps is because the apps making money help pay for the whole ecosystem. And in turn, the free apps enrich the App Store and act as a gateway to paid apps.
If app developers stopped paying Apple a cut of their digital revenue then how does the ecosystem survive?
The reason Apple can spend millions of dollars to support free apps is because the apps making money help pay for the whole ecosystem. And in turn, the free apps enrich the App Store and act as a gateway to paid apps.
If app developers stopped paying Apple a cut of their digital revenue then how does the ecosystem survive?
You don't have to knock down their pricing model - you just have to stop them from banning competition.
If Spotify were allowed to say 'Go to our website to sign up' or 'click on this Paypal link to sign up', or 'click here to pay with your Google App account' (or whatever) then a lot of the anti-competitive issues go away
Personally, I don't think Apple deserves a dime from Spotify subscriptions. Apart from making the app available in the App Store (in which Apple gets nothing from Spotify if I sign up on Spotify website), what does Apple do to deserve year-after-year-after-year of "royalties"? Greed. And, 30% (or even 15%) is quite a bit to lose for Spotify (or any service providing their services via in-app purchase).
If every app were allowed to do that then none of them would be paying Apple. Where would Apple get the money to support the app ecosystem?
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and this is the underlining issue. No matter what Apple is saying or trying to use as a defense does not get away from this underlining fact.
Apple defense does not address this issue.
that's still pretty good.. I would' be worrying abut that, but seems Spotify's looking for "every penny"
I don't mind, its fun watching company's\and developers alike, go to Apple's system, only to come back and have issues with the way it's always worked. You gotta do something during the day.
Apple is a fancy credit card processor.
I would say yes Apple is to much.
At 5% that would be much more reasonable for all of that. 2-3% to cover CC charge plus another 2-3% for the other items.
Right now Apple is charging 12-13% for your 2 other items.
Maybe they could find some spare change in all the money they make from the sale iPhones and iPads and Mac machines? Not exactly slim margins on those. THAT is what supports the app ecosystem!