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Addressing Spotify’s Claims

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Re: Addressing Spotify’s Claims

#441

Post by jessemillar »

asdff wrote: post #439
jessemillar wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I understand your point, I would gently argue that to develop a truly great macOS or iOS app, you somewhat need to live in the Apple ecosystem to understand the design guidelines and quality that Apple customers have come to expect.

I bet the most downloaded apps these days are ground up cross platform and identical on every platform, e.g. steam, spotify, and web browsers. Relying on proprietary apple features that you have to clumsily port over to another OS would waste a lot of your time as a dev. You'd probably do your best troubleshooting on a cheap, under powered hackintosh than a model year macbook pro, to be honest.

Fair point. I tend to not like those cross-platform apps because of their generally-degraded performance so my previous comment showed a bit of my underlying bias.

Re: Addressing Spotify’s Claims

#442

Post by philistine »

robert_foss wrote: post #417
simonh wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

XCode may cost you 0$, but you have to buy a Mac to use it. And those things are >0$ in most cases.

Instead of having Xcode be available on PCs, which we all know are free to own.

Yeah, right.

Re: Addressing Spotify’s Claims

#443

Post by virtualritz »

jessemillar wrote: post #427
robert_foss wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

XCode may cost you 0$, but you have to buy a Mac to use it. And those things are >0$ in most cases.

While I understand your point, I would gently argue that to develop a truly great macOS or iOS app, you somewhat need to live in the Apple ecosystem to understand the design guidelines and quality that Apple customers have come to expect.

Yes. But parent didn't contest that. They rather made the point that you have to pay to "live" in that ecosystem. MacOS is officially only supported on Apple hardware ... So it's not free and the fact that XCode is is therefore a moot point to that line of reasoning.

Re: Addressing Spotify’s Claims

#444

Post by jklinger410 »

madeofpalk wrote: post #391
jklinger410 wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Apart from Lightning, which was created when no better alternative existed They could have easily went with USB-C.

USB-C spec was finalised two years after Lighting shipped.

And lightning works with USB-C. The narrative here is supposed to be that we're all certain Apple was working really hard to try and make a universal adapter to their device and just couldn't because it wasn't far enough along?

Re: Addressing Spotify’s Claims

#445

Post by jeremy7600 »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #407
bad_user wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple popularized trusted computing. And yes, it's as bad as we feared it would be back in the '90s.

Apple popularized me not spending hours of time troubleshooting and restarting and letting me do what I want to do.

Sad/angry/sick macs the world over would like a word with you.

Re: Addressing Spotify’s Claims

#446

Post by rahoulb »

RayVR wrote: post #60
exwiki wrote: post #4

> 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…

They’re not milking anything. Apple has, as far as I know, always charged 30%. What has changed is the way we buy and pay for apps and services. Everyone wants to move to the subscription service model and Apple has developed rules accordingly.

What has changed is Apple has a direct competitor product.

Firstly, that competitor product has technical advantages as it can access APIs that Spotify cannot (SiriKit, background audio on earlier versions of WatchOS).

Secondly, that competitor product is at a financial advantage because of the 30% fee.

It's not the fee itself that's the issue. It's that Apple is (arguably) using it's control of the platform to compete unfairly against Spotify.

Re: Addressing Spotify’s Claims

#447

Post by jeremy7600 »

threeseed wrote: post #121
jraedisch wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought the problem was, that their own apps do not have to pay 30%, so they can easily replace any app with their own, if they choose to.

There is zero evidence that Apple does not pay the 30%. We don't see the internal accounting but it's quite likely they do. Internal revenue distribution is standard practice in almost all enterprises.

You couldn't be more wrong.

Re: Addressing Spotify’s Claims

#448

Post by hjk05 »

infinity0 wrote: post #15

> What Spotify is demanding is something very different. After using the App Store for years to dramatically grow their business, Spotify seeks to keep all the benefits of the App Store ecosystem — including the substantial revenue that they draw from the App Store’s customers — without making any contributions to that marketplace. Please Apple, pay all the open source projects that you use, a fair share of the reven…

There is nothing hypocritical about using opensource licensed software under the terms of that software license.

Re: Addressing Spotify’s Claims

#449

Post by EthanV2 »

philistine wrote: post #442
robert_foss wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

XCode may cost you 0$, but you have to buy a Mac to use it. And those things are >0$ in most cases.

Instead of having Xcode be available on PCs, which we all know are free to own. Yeah, right.

I guess the point is you might already own a PC, and you could use that for developing Android apps, for example. But if you also want to use Xcode and develop iOS apps as well then you have to buy a Mac.

Re: Addressing Spotify’s Claims

#450

Post by asdff »

throw0101a wrote: post #429
asdff wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any apple laptop video out for the past 15 years?

The original MacBook Air had micro-DVI, and then later Mini DisplayPort. Later generations had Thunderbolt. None of these were Apple-only. The original MacBook Pros had MagSafe, which was proprietary, but DVI for displays (open); later on they had Mini-DP or Thunderbolt The MacBook follows a similar pattern. So once MagSafe was eliminated, Apple switched to non-Apple-only plugs, though since they were early adopters,…

Practically speaking, they were mostly an apple only liability. Go to any podium with an apple laptop made before retina when they finally caught up with the worldand stuck an HDMI port in the macbook pro, and you will find the DVI/VGA/HDMI cable that everyone uses, and no way to plug in your macbook if you forgot your 3" dongle. During presentations in undergrad, everyone with a macbook had to email themselves or use a flash drive to bum someone's better endowed laptop to hook up to the projector, because no one ever accounted that they would need a $30 dongle to use the video out on their $1500 laptop. IT started buying these miniDVI or whatever dongles for the podiums, but they wouldn't stay put for very long in the lecture halls.
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