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Spotify Pens Joint Letter Calling Apple 'Harmful' and 'Anti-Competitive,' Claims App Store Ruins Business

capitalism at its finest. Sure, these companies are trying to construct a narrative about how "users" are being hurt. But, in reality they really couldn't care less, as long as they are growing.

How, exactly, does it hurt me that I got one place to pay for services I consume? How, exactly, does it hurt me that apple can undercut their music services versus all those competitors with apple one?

It's all warm air, Spotify doesn't give a flying freckle about the end-users, or stifling innovation. They want to sell to apples users, and they are butthurt that apple charges them. It's all about green dollar. It's got zero to do with the end user. It's similar to greenwashing really, bs narratives from apex capitalist that tries to with the ultimate motivation of earning more money for them and raising their share price. End of.

Apple is no different btw, when they talk about their environmental mission and so on and so forth. It's just marketing, if public opinion was "burn the planet! faster!" they would do that.
 
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McWetty said:
I was in the same boat. I loved Spotify. Then I got an Apple Watch for marathon training. Shifted to AM. Running without a phone is bliss.

I’m pretty sure Apple allows streaming from Spotify now, but Spotify is slow to support it. I guess they spend more resources complaining about fairness than being competitive.

I’d go back to Spotify in a heart beat if they would stop banging their drum and just work to be the best.
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I suspect Spotify just doesn’t want to pay developers and testers so their product can work in Apple’s ecosystem. Coupled with Spotify paying artists less per stream than Apple (and even Tidal), it’s clear Spotify’s focus isn’t on users or artists.
 
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Now might be a good time to point out that while Apple opened up HomePods to allow for third party streaming services back with software 14.5 in 2021 Spotify, alongside many of the other heavyweights, have yet to add support. Why would consumers who use the Apple ecosystem use your service if you don’t support all of the devices?

(And to be clear, I think Apple’s App Store policies are unnecessarily heavy-handed, I just think it’s important to call out hypocrisy when it happens).
 
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tdar said:
All of these people need to get over themselves. You try to run a business and provide the credit card service costs, the sales tax collection, the marketing costs, the advertising costs, and the website costs, along with the cost of downloading the app. Oh and you provide over a billion customers for the service. And after you do all that, let’s look at what it costs you. I guarantee that it is more than 30 percent of the cost.
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But lots of these companies actually do that. Taking just the example of Spotify, they do run their own infrastructure, credit card processing, marketing, advertising, sales tax, websites, CDN, etc. The issue really is that Apple forces you to use their infrastructure. What if all of those companies would be more than happy to bear the burden of those costs, but they literally can't do so because, in order to reach millions of people on iOS, they have to use and pay for the Apple infrastructure? Or, more precisely, what if they already do bear the burden of those costs, and now they have to pay a 30% or 15% royalty for services they really don't need, which becomes a redundant expense? What if, instead of paying 30% or 15% of your revenue, you just paid Apple a fair price to be listed on the App Store and to cover server/infrastructure costs?

You could simply say "ok, screw Apple and their customers" but given the market share of iOS, you're basically cutting off your arm to save your face at that point. If you want to actually get your product in front of all those Apple users, you are forced to use Apple's systems, and pay for them accordingly. It's probably a fair statement that there are few apps or services that would actually cause an iOS user to abandon the Apple platform entirely. Therefore it's also reasonable to say that it is a monopoly for those specific customers.

Imagine if, to distribute an album on CD back in the 2000s, you had to pay Philips 30% of your album sales revenue, because come on, what about all that R&D to develop the CD? Even if you were willing to build your own CD pressing plant, do your own advertising and marketing and distribution, etc. you still had to pay 30% to Philips? And if you didn't want to do that, you'd be unable to sell your album to the millions of people using CD players. Ok, maybe 30% isn't a fair comparison, but assume even 10%. I could actually be completely wrong, but I don't think that CD manufacturers were required to pay royalties based on sales revenue. Maybe there would be a flat rate per disc, but Apple isn't doing a flat rate per download or per purchase, they're doing a percentage.
 
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The major issue for Spotify and the others is not that they want to lower their costs (although they do), they want to escape the constraints the app store places on them with regard to data collection and privacy. They want to monetize their users data to a much greater extent than store policies currently permit. That’s where the real money is.
 
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Rob__Mac said:
I will put my hands up and say I was a very happy Spotify user until I got an Apple Watch about 5 years ago, which only really worked with Apple Music. Same with the HomePod I got later.

If Apple allowed me to use Spotify in the way that Apple Music works with these devices, I would still be a loyal Spotify user. I miss all my friends mixes etc. but I need to be able to use Siri with my devices, leave the house with my watch only and known I'll be able to stream…
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Spotify has access to many api that would allow more feature parity. At this point it feels like they intentionally are gimping the app so they can complain about the things they dislike
 
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I liked Spotify music discovery but I dropped them and moved to Tidal when Spotify revoked the licenses for using them with DJpro. I have Apple Music as well but Tidal is my goto for music.

Spotify probably wouldn’t even exist if it wasn’t for the iPhone and by extension the App Store and the competitor systems and stores. I don’t ever remember Spotify for Nokia ;)
 
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MacRumors said:
The group claims Apple's App Store has hindered their businesses and consistently makes it difficult for them to grow due to the platform's policies and its "capricious changes to terms and conditions."
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So they are making money from Apple's platform (not as much as they want) and now they want to make the rules of how the platform is run? Way to go!
 
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McWetty said:
I was in the same boat. I loved Spotify. Then I got an Apple Watch for marathon training. Shifted to AM. Running without a phone is bliss.

I’m pretty sure Apple allows streaming from Spotify now, but Spotify is slow to support it. I guess they spend more resources complaining about fairness than being competitive.

I’d go back to Spotify in a heart beat if they would stop banging their drum and just work to be the best.
Click to expand...

Yes Spotify is the biggest service I think? But is very slow to introduce new features, I don't think they have lossless still yet.
 
What nobody talks about here is that Apple Music does not need to pay the "Apple Tax" and therefore have an edge on all competitors.
Apple is so big now that they can swoop in on any market and with the power of owning both the platform and the store, just price anyone else out of business.
At what point will that be a problem for people here? Never? No?
 
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I am so sick of these people trying to bring down the app stores. People don't remember (or know) what it was like to be a developer and not have things like app stores back in the day.

You had to pay for so much extra infrastructure/security/webhosting/etc just to publish an independent app. You had to handle all the financial transactions for payment and refunds. You had to handle things if for some reason your hosting site crashed or worse, somehow got infected with malware. There was so much extra crap to handle.

App stores took that all away for a small fee and made the indie scene thrive and made it possible for small indie devs to get products out and be seen.

Now big greedy companies are trying to ruin all of it.
 
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tdar said:
All of these people need to get over themselves. You try to run a business and provide the credit card service costs, the sales tax collection, the marketing costs, the advertising costs, and the website costs, along with the cost of downloading the app. Oh and you provide over a billion customers for the service. And after you do all that, let’s look at what it costs you. I guarantee that it is more than 30 percent of the cost.
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Well to state the obvious, to a degree that's what they're trying to do, isn't it? You can't really blame the service providers for not putting in place infrastructure they are explicitly unable to use because Apple locks it down. Besides, companies like Spotify that don't use Apple's payment systems probably already cover global sales taxes, marketing costs, advertising costs etc.
 
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