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European Regulators Awaiting Response From Apple After Spotify Called the App Store a Monopoly
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APPS AREN'T CLOTHES.
And 30% is A LOT OF MONEY. VERY VERY Niche enterprise apps which are downloaded only a handful of times, Apple tells developers "You can't have these enterprise users purchase a license from you. You must give us 30% AND use in-app purchases. No, companies can't pay you directly, and you can't put a link anywhere, these enterprise customers must find a way to have an apple account that pays with in-app purchases".
Starting to see a point of why developers are complaining? Ever thought how can developers that build products for multiple platforms can offer one single license? Not possible. Why? Because Apple makes it impossible.
This comment boils down to complaining corporate greed and “I don’t want to pay commission”.
Same dried out complaining by someone asking for intelligent discussion.
The reality is, people think because Apple has so much money it doesn’t need to charge commission on app sales and doing so is “evil”. That’s a matter of opinion rather than fact.
If you use someone’s resources to make money they have the right (being used out of legal context) to ask for a cut. That’s standard business practice.
Not allowing app sales through another app store...well, do you really want that?
Think very carefully before you answer.
That gets rather messy fast.
anti-competitive behavior is leveraging dominance or control of one market to dominate or control another market.
In this case Apple makes the iphone, controls the only store and then puts Apple Music on every iPHone. Spotify is not only not on every iPHone by default but they have to pay Apple 30% the first year for commissions and 15% every year thereafter. That can't compete because of Apple's control of the store and iPHone.
Profit has nothing to do with being a monopoly. Apple sells a product that people want to buy and who are willing to pay a premium for. If you want to see a monopoly take a look at the Wikipedia entry for Standard Oil. Part of what they did was charge outrageous prices to companies in industries where there was no competition for their products and where there was they kept the prices so low that it prevented competition.
Are you american? I hear this argument „but you can go somewhere else. No one forces you to do XY“ a lot from Americans. That usually doesn’t fly with the EU. Maybe it’s a cultural thing somehow haha
Oh so Apple is supposed to just let someone else sell on their platform? It’s their OS. Why does another company have the right to sell on Apple platforms? And fairness isn’t a good reason.
This is one point I think needs to be emphasized in this argument. Apple charging a 30% tax is actually less of an issue than their contractual requirement that apps cannot direct users to purchase the subscription outside of the app. It's debatable whether a 30% tax is "anticompetitive" but what clearly to me is undeniably anticompetitive is forbidding app developers from telling their customers they have other options. It's already bad enough that you can't buy apps outside the App store, but Apple charging 30% for subscriptions to third party services makes no sense (what exactly is Apple "hosting" or even "reviewing" for this 30%? Payment processing? 30% or even 15% is far, far, FAR above the industry average rate.)
Apple used the brick-and-mortar analogy before, so imagine a physical store being forbidden by mall management from posting a sign at one location informing customers that a location-specific sale is occurring at another location. I doubt this would ever be considered acceptable behavior.
Same reason Microsoft was fined for making the IE the default browser back in the day.
While we are at it, the EU should look into why I can’t make Gmail my default mail program on iOS or MyCloud the default option to save my photos at and so on
The way I see it, Spotify has the right to demand a higher cut from Apple, while Apple has the right to refuse it, if it deems it unsuitable for its business. The terms of their deal (70/30% cut) were clear from the onset and Apple actually improved these terms by lowering its cut to 15% from the second year onwards. As for competition, Spotify can hardly claim that Apple harms it accessing the market, as people can easily subscribe to Spotify service from any browser, without even having to install an app, and then use these credentials in any Spotify app on any platform or web-player.
Boiled down to...”Greedy Apple”.
[doublepost=1559577972][/doublepost]It’s no secret that this forum favors reducing corporate profits and frowns upon Apple making money in any way shape or form.
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Sure but the poor inconvenienced customers have to go into Safari and sign up there. They want to have their cake and eat it too.
This is crap. Apple made its app store, charging people 30% since the beginning. This wasn't a surprise to anyone. They are giving companies access to develop apps and sell to individuals who collectively have purchased over 1 BILLION iOS devices. Apple hosts their apps, handles billing and payment processing for thousands of apps and developers. The cost for manpower to review incoming apps, a billing department and the infrastructure to house an App store is massive when you have customers all over the world and supporting over 1 Billion devices.
Ex. Amazon is accessible to anyone with the internet, they sell their own line of devices and even advertise them better than smaller companies. And yet, there are still other Bluetooth speakers, tablets, and clothing available for sale by third-parties. All of whom pay a portion of their proceeds to Amazon, as Amazon gives them an avenue to reach billions of people, something those sellers otherwise would never have had access to.
Spotify wants all the benefits of Apple's store, like the customer base, analytics, processing, and billing and doesn't want to pay like the rest of the developers. They want the perks of being a free app, but then go around the system and tell people to go on their website and sign up for a paid plan. That's cheating, dishonest and honestly should violate the Terms of Service as a developer. Luring customers into downloading a free app and then telling them to sign up for a paid plan that is outside of Apple's ecosystem is bad business.
I have no sympathy for Spotify, they didn't start to complain until Apple improved iTunes Music, now they feel threatened and want Apple to back down. If Ek doesn't like Apple's business plan, don't put your App there. Use just Android and see how that turns out.
It's also not a monopoly when Apple doesn't control the market. Google does the same thing and has far more Android devices, with Google Play in the world, thus creating an even larger (though arguably a lesser quality) app store. It would be like suing Kia for having a monopoly on more affordable cars when there are much larger companies with much more affordable cars.
Ek just doesn't want to pay a competitor, especially one that is about to overtake his own company in subscribers. Simple as that and if a Judge doesn't see that, they are blind.
Ex. Amazon is accessible to anyone with the internet, they sell their own line of devices and even advertise them better than smaller companies. And yet, there are still other Bluetooth speakers, tablets, and clothing available for sale by third-parties. All of whom pay a portion of their proceeds to Amazon, as Amazon gives them an avenue to reach billions of people, something those sellers otherwise would never have had access to.
Spotify wants all the benefits of Apple's store, like the customer base, analytics, processing, and billing and doesn't want to pay like the rest of the developers. They want the perks of being a free app, but then go around the system and tell people to go on their website and sign up for a paid plan. That's cheating, dishonest and honestly should violate the Terms of Service as a developer. Luring customers into downloading a free app and then telling them to sign up for a paid plan that is outside of Apple's ecosystem is bad business.
I have no sympathy for Spotify, they didn't start to complain until Apple improved iTunes Music, now they feel threatened and want Apple to back down. If Ek doesn't like Apple's business plan, don't put your App there. Use just Android and see how that turns out.
It's also not a monopoly when Apple doesn't control the market. Google does the same thing and has far more Android devices, with Google Play in the world, thus creating an even larger (though arguably a lesser quality) app store. It would be like suing Kia for having a monopoly on more affordable cars when there are much larger companies with much more affordable cars.
Ek just doesn't want to pay a competitor, especially one that is about to overtake his own company in subscribers. Simple as that and if a Judge doesn't see that, they are blind.
They are free to charge whatever they want if the user decides to process their purchase via built in IAP process but what is bothering me is that they don’t approve apps into the App Store that simply provide a link to an alternative. Are they afraid that people wouldn’t use IAP? Knowing people i would argue most are lazy and would just use IAP instead of taking the extra step through safari anyway.
Part of the reason behind forbidding apps to redirect payments outside of the app is fraud control. If the user gets screwed then Apple has no way to fix it. And I’m willing to bet every penny I have that the user will be calling Apple first when they get scammed.
Doesn't this just make simple business sense? If someone signs up through Spotify's website or some way other than the App Store that would mean they knew about it because of something other than the App Store. And in that case, good for them. But if they've found Spotify in the App Store and decide to make the purchase through Apple, shouldn't Apple get a "commission"? For that customer, at least in that moment, they would otherwise not make the purchase at all.
It's like Nike selling a pair of shoes in multiple stores. Joe's Shoe Shack sells them of $100 and Susie's Sneaker Store sells them for $110 and Nike then demands to put up a sign at Susie's telling people they could get a better deal at Joe's.
Not true. I have a bunch of apps distributed on the developers' websites. It works just fine.
I honestly think it’s convenience like you said and fraud control.
If Apple doesn’t control the payment and it’s one of those sneaky IAPs that the user signs up for there’s no remediation available.
Btw...I wasn’t accusing Apple of greed. They have the right to charge what they want. That user comment came off as complaining about greed, however.
Why should Apple have to do this? If you are a small developer, you can't still market your game or app on social media? You can still do all the marketing you want. You could even give the game away for free. But let's assume you want to make money without selling it through Apple. Create your own web site, market the game, let Apple distribute it free of charge. The first level plays, but when you get to the second level, it wants a code. You like the game, you buy a code to play the rest of it.
Oh, but you want that easy in-app purchase model, right? Well, then Apple is the payment processor. They created the security and process and wish to be paid for their service. Heck, they developed the whole platform with the concept of selling a platform which has the added benefit of allowing 3rd parties to share in the revolution of this new personal platform.
Like a DVD. Did you use to buy DVD movies right? Well, part of the money you paid for that movie paid for a royalty on a per disc basis. Every single copy of any movie on any DVD that was manufactured paid a royalty fee. And we do this now on Blu-ray.
Spotify needs to wake up to the fact that all they did was make an app. Apple created the platform from scratch. They created the dev tools, they created the language. They invested in making all this at huge expense. Maybe Spotify should try it. You have heard of Steam? They took Linux, and made a platform from scratch because they didn't want to be on Microsoft's XBOX. It's not so easy to do.
Spotify needs more whine to go with their cheesy claim. The EU's "antitrust law" is just a money maker for an organization who conjured themselves power out of thin air. I don't recognize unelected and unaccountable EU bureaucrats as having ANY power. Apple's only crime is being successful.
Who sets the fee?
Apple created the platform. If Spotify doesn't like it, they can take the Linux kernel, an open source JAVA and start their own platform. Danger did it with the Sidekick. Apple did it with iOS. Both Google and Microsoft did it with Android and Windows Mobile. And at the time Apple did it they invested a serious amount of CASH to do it and had to go up against Windows CE and Blackberry which ruled the world and were both multi-billion dollar companies.
Sorry, Spotify needs to grow up.
In the modern world, success is “offensive” and just another form of “oppression”.
Spotify is one of those social justice companies. Makes sense they don’t want to pay money. That’s a common theme amongst that crowd.
