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Yes, it's gratis, not libre. I understood the parent comment to be referring to the price.
I understood it the other way. Proprietary cables to free tools. ️
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> And Spotify isn't asking to keep 100% of the revenue. Spotify is asking for a choice of letting users pay how they wish. But users can pay how they wish, if Spotify didn't mind the 30%/15% cut. Spotify simply can't direct users to use their website to use an alternative payment system. I think that is a very reasonable policy for an app store, as it protects its users from poorly implemented financial info handling…
It's not an even playing field though. Apple has a competing music service and they can undercut their competition by avoiding the 30% transaction fee, squeezing competitors into submission.
As things stand, Apple has mixed priorities. They want to enable developers where those developers add uniquely to the platform, but they want to outcompete developers where they cannibalise sales from Apple's own products.
This dual remit doesn't help consumers. If Apple's music offering had to pay the 30% tax "for real", they might have to charge $13 too, and that might make the iPhone an expensive platform for music-listeners, and they might be incentivised to cut their margins to compete with other platforms. We could all agree, "Sure it's expensive, but it's their turf and they can run it badly (to their own detriment) if they want."
Not sure where you draw the line between first-party app and OS functionality though. I imagine in some cases it'd be less clear than here.
> Underneath the rhetoric, Spotify’s aim is to make more money off others’ work. And it’s not just the App Store that they’re trying to squeeze — it’s also artists, musicians and songwriters. Uh, I seem to recall Apple being forced to reverse some brazenly greedy policies for their music service when a high-profile artist called them out and withheld content in protest. For Apple to characterize itself as a champion…
Spotify literally sued artists and musicians because they didnt agree with a court ordered fee increase...but Apples hypocritical on this issue somehow. Spotify also uses Apples infrastructure and marketing tools for its app. I dont think Ive seen any app creator up on stage at Apple events more than Spotify. Its not like Spotify will use Apples tools and ecosystem one time then stop. Its ongoing and 15% is reasonabl…
As for payments, they all follow the same scheme more or less and redistribute about 70% of the revenue to the rightholders. If the services are priced the same, it's exactly the same for artists.
The big difference is that Spotify has a permanent free tier, which admittedly makes less money short term, but it is driving acquisition of premium users faster than any other methods. The alternative being no revenue, it's just fine. Apple on the same topic doesn't care about razor thin margins on this product, or even losses. They are a hardware vendor, so as long as they still sell their devices, they will be fine.
> Spotify wouldn’t be the business they are today without the App Store ecosystem, but now they’re leveraging their scale to avoid contributing to maintaining that ecosystem for the next generation of app entrepreneurs. We think that’s wrong. I think that's a very hypothetical claim. > Let’s be clear about what that means. Apple connects Spotify to our users. We provide the platform by which users download and update…
> Spotify wouldn’t be the business they are today without the App Store ecosystem, Apple makes Microsoft look like an angel. Using this argument, Microsoft could claim they could have made hundreds of billions if they got a cut out of every Windows app sale. Oh, and that those companies wouldn't exist if it weren't for Windows.
Which is absolutely true of Microsoft as well. The sheer productivity boon that Office has added to businesses around the world is unmatched by practically any other piece of software ever written. Most of the businesses would still exist, but they wouldn't be the same business. Excel, Powerpoint, and Word are ridiculously important software.
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Spotify pays artists a fraction of what Apple pays.
Do you have a reference for that?
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> Spotify wouldn’t be the business they are today without the App Store ecosystem, Apple makes Microsoft look like an angel. Using this argument, Microsoft could claim they could have made hundreds of billions if they got a cut out of every Windows app sale. Oh, and that those companies wouldn't exist if it weren't for Windows.
Apple popularized trusted computing. And yes, it's as bad as we feared it would be back in the '90s.
Why can I buy train tickets on iOS apps using any payment provider, but not spotify-subscription? It can't be that it is a subscription service, because I can also buy commuter-tickets as a subscription service using CC. Is it that you can't sell competing services on app-store without paying apple tax or is there an arbitrary list of services that requires apple tax?
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> they've had proprietary cables and adapters for as long as I can remember. Apart from Lightning, which was created when no better alternative existed, I cannot remember a proprietary Apple connector in at least the past 10 years.
That wide flat thing that looked kinda similar to Samsung's tablet connector? I'm not sure if it was in the last 10y tho...
I love how brazen this letter is. > Apple’s approach has always been to grow the pie. Apple's approach has always been to grow it's own pie. They have never been even remotely interested in playing nicely with other companies. I don't fault them for it, but let's not kid ourselves here; the app store is largely an extremely profitable exercise in rent seeking. It's not like this is new for Apple; they've had propriet…
There’s a thread of truth in what you’re saying, but it unravels on close inspection. Proprietary cables are hardly new, and to be fair those cables and connectors are usually way better than the standard stuff. Firewire and thunderbolt were actually released as open standards and saw decent adoption. Lightning is far superior to Micro-USB. Just listen to the wailing and gnashing of teeth by Macbook owners having to…