What if Spotify takes your phone number and sends you a text link to sign up to pay?
Spotify to Apple: Time to Play Fair
691–700 of 865 posts
Re: Spotify to Apple: Time to Play Fair
#692Personally, 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 ho…
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.
Re: Spotify to Apple: Time to Play Fair
#693Personally, 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 ho…
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 o…
> 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.
[1] https://lists.zx2c4.com/pipermail/wireguard/2019-February/00...
Re: Spotify to Apple: Time to Play Fair
#694Apple did the same thing to Kindle for iPhone back when it launched. We submitted the original version to Apple with a fully functioning store built into it—and were then stuck in submission limbo. Two weeks later, Apple announces their intent to build in-app purchasing. The kicker: Apple wanted a 30% cut of every book sold on the store …and at the same time, had negotiated with book publishers that the publishers MU…
It wasn't just Kindle. There were dozens of really high quality book reading apps that either sold old or hard to find books, comics, or even mangas. All of them evaporated over night once Apple forced the 30% cut. I'm still very bitter about that move. Apple even went as far as making some Steve Jobsian rule that you had to sell your book for the same price on the web as you did in-app. So you couldn't make up for t…
For others reading this comment: “recently” as in “several years ago”, i.e. not do recently, that rule was rather short-lived.
Re: Spotify to Apple: Time to Play Fair
#695There should be an alternative App Store, plain and simple. As long as the sandbox for apps exist, users will be pretty safe. Apps should work the same way sandboxing works on PC browsers. Apple constricts Safari iOS because they don't want web apps to be fully competitive with native apps. E.g I prefer to use Overcast.fm over web than the native app, but most times, my podcast streams will stop abruptly in mobile safari, that i'm thinking of trading my privacy to Android for a pixel 1. Only thing that saves me, is I hardly use my phone, otherwise the limited functionality of iOS for devices you pay hundreds for is painful.
Re: Spotify to Apple: Time to Play Fair
#696Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 indi…
> 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)
That's the sort of behavior that gets your company broken up. Apple's management team doesn't seem to own a single history book between them.
Re: Spotify to Apple: Time to Play Fair
#697Personally, 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 ho…
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 o…
What does the site the app is downloaded from have to do with security? The app is either signed, or it isn't.
Apple is simply erecting gratuitous roadblocks for rent-seeking purposes.
Re: Spotify to Apple: Time to Play Fair
#698Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 th…
What if Apple Music is for free? Should be Apple be punished then, like MS for IE being free?
Re: Spotify to Apple: Time to Play Fair
#699Earlier quoted context omitted.
The 30% fee only applies to digital goods, not physical ones. It's part of why there's all the awkward hoops that the main amazon app goes through when you run into digital goods, but everything else is mostly sane
If that's the case, could Spotify work around this by mailing something to the customer every month (like a "Certificate of Subscription")? That way it'd technically be a physical good.
I imagine that would be insufficient to transform the purchase into that of a physical good. Might have a chance if it were a physical widget (USB key?) that you plug into your computer or phone to validate your subscription. Even that is walking the line, since you're arguably still buying a digital good, albeit one that is activated/confirmed via a hardware key.
Re: Spotify to Apple: Time to Play Fair
#700Whenever Apple's 30% take on the App Store comes up, people on this website get all up in arms about it. Let me provide some perspective, which I think is sorely lacking: I sell physical goods on Amazon. They charge me 15% for this privilege. The only reason they don't charge more is because physical goods have lower margins than digital goods (my margins after it's all said and done are somewhere between 10-15%). An…
The Amazon Basics point is interesting. They are able to capitalize on other's R&D and market research with almost no cost. If you want to sell a product, you have to do some amount of research to determine if it will be profitable. They are able to just look at selling statistics and launch their own version of popular, profitable to produce items.
This feels like an abuse of their position as a marketplace platform, but it isn't that different from grocery stores creating white label/off brand products.
Maybe it only becomes an issue when they promote their own items and bump original products down the search results. This is closer to the behavior that Spotify alleges Apple is doing.