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Spotify CEO renews attack on Apple after Musk's salvo

reuters.com

821–830 of 903 posts

Re: Spotify CEO renews attack on Apple after Musk's salvo

#821
post #744

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My example was about subscriptions, no console maker takes a cut of a subscription to a game done through the game publisher's own servers/service. No console maker takes a cut from sales of digital items done through the game's platform. You are moving the goalposts, licencing is a well established practice and only interferes with the sale of the initial product: the game, not subsequent upsales where the console m…

Which console makers allow you to have subscriptions that you pay for outside of the game?

Final Fantasy XIV for example.

Re: Spotify CEO renews attack on Apple after Musk's salvo

#822

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On Android, which globally is bigger than iOS, it didn't happen. It's exactly the discussed setup - you can install alternative store, there's just a bit of friction to do that.

This is totally false. When I used Android, finding a phone maker and carrier who sold “pure” or “stock” Android without pre-installed garbage was the first step to buying a phone!

>without pre-installed garbage

Like Apple Music?

Each phone vendor including Apple does this to some extent. On Android you at least have some options (I had a few of them all were very close to stock), and usually you can disable these apps if there are any.

Re: Spotify CEO renews attack on Apple after Musk's salvo

#823
post #772

People are digressing into all kinds of matters unrelated to the article and issue. The heart of the matter is not control of the device, it's about the Apple tax, and how it makes no sense in particular scenarios, such as subscriptions. Sure enough, the app store services are worth something . Real labor, infra and costs go into it. Although Apple could very well subsidize it, it's not 100% unfair to ask for some ki…

The fee to set up a developer account is $99/year. The biggest apps on the store and the smallest pay the same fee. A fixed fee helps to equalize the barrier to entry, and everyone likes that. On the other hand, App Store's cost structure is not fixed. Spotify costs Apple vastly more than an app with 1000 installs. This needs to be accounted for.

> Nothing about the streaming or value delivered is in any way related to the App Store.

Entirely incorrect. By taking a percentage of transactions, App Store is incentivized to help apps grow. From day one, getting featured on App Store has driven serious business outcomes for developers. This has only grown over the years, especially after Apple started to focus on marketing apps more deliberately with the "For You" tab.

That's a service that they provide "for free". You get an email from Apple saying that they'd like to feature your app, send over some creative assets, they write an article, and suddenly you're getting a lot of "free" installs. This is only one example of the value that apps get "for free" from Apple and the App Store. And again, this levels the playing field between big and small developers.

Of course, nothing is actually free. Apple is a business and not only needs to be compensated for the value that they provide, but they also need to make a profit. That's why they take a cut of transactions.

An alternative model would be to charge for all of this à la carte. All promotion would be paid for directly. Bandwidth would be metered and invoiced. WWDC sessions locked behind a paywall. Maybe that would even add up to be less than 30% of revenue. Certainly big developers would like it -- up and coming competitors would have a much tougher time competing than today.

Re: Spotify CEO renews attack on Apple after Musk's salvo

#824

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That analogy makes no sense. An iPhone isn't a restaurant. If Apple is McDonalds and Google is Burger King, who does Epic, Spotify, or Twitter correspond to in the analogy?

Make it literally any store, then. Target, Costco, Walmart, etc. You can't walk into Target, demand they carry your product, refuse to pay them a fee for doing so, while claiming Target has a "monopoly" on their customer because the customer isn't likely to drive across town to another store that does carry your product.

This is more like target locking in half of all customers unless they pay a big fee and give up everything they ever bought there. After gaining control of all customers they take huge chunks of all product revenues. See, you can go to Walmart over the street and sell your product there. It‘s the same situation with them by the way.

Re: Spotify CEO renews attack on Apple after Musk's salvo

#825

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do like it and I'm tired of tech-brained dorks trying to turn iOS into Linux.

Yeah, same. The walled garden is a feature for me. I like having apps forced to use a single payment processor with a consistent and easy sub/unsubscribe interface. It's not perfect, obviously, but I think it also results in fewer obviously scummy apps. I understand if others don't feel this way, but I do. I would be sad to lose it.

It‘s good. The fees are just too high because they abuse their market power.

Re: Spotify CEO renews attack on Apple after Musk's salvo

#826
post #819

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The PC game market is a nothingburger compared to console. So the same people who aren’t willing to walk away from ios with 50% market share are going to suggest walking away from all consoles which combined have a much larger than 50% market share in the games market? People have been complaining for years that Apple is holding the PWA market back. Where are all of the companies that are releasing iOS + web only and…

Would it be ok for you then if Apple took a 30% cut of every sale made through an app distributed by their App Store? Like Amazon, or food delivery, or grocery apps, and any other app that sells something through the app?

No I wouldn’t. But software has a zero marginal cost and even server costs are minuscule on a per user basis.

80% of all Apple revenue from the App Store comes from pay to win games (came out in the Epic trial)

Re: Spotify CEO renews attack on Apple after Musk's salvo

#827

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Developers make sure their sites work in Safari. Just like developers made sure that their sites still worked in IE11 for almost a decade. Because it works for you is exactly why it's holding back development.

If developers made sure their sites worked in Safari we wouldn't have submissions to HN for sites that only work in Chrome with "oh yeah it doesn't work in Firefox or Safari because I didn't test it". The number of developers who do their work on Chrome and call it a job done and never test in another browser, far outweight the number of developers who do test cross-browser. The reason people tested in IE11 and less…

> If developers made sure their sites worked in Safari we wouldn't have submissions to HN for sites that only work in Chrome

You're replying to me replying to the guy who says every site he goes to works fine in Safari.

Re: Spotify CEO renews attack on Apple after Musk's salvo

#828

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spotify stopped allowing in app purchases years ago before any Court said anything.

Because, rightly or wrongly, they didn’t want to have 30% more expensive plan on iPhone.

How is that different than any other product where you can sell cheaper through your own website than on a third party platform?

Re: Spotify CEO renews attack on Apple after Musk's salvo

#829
post #650

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Google play store is heavily censored and moderated and most users don’t know about side loading.

A sibling argument is saying that if side-loading were opt in, major apps would move to require it from users. This has never happened on Android.

Facebook claims to have lost $10 billion due to a single iOS prompt giving users the option of blocking tracking. If side-loading were allowed on iOS, Facebook would have 10 billion reasons to push users to side-load their app, a pressure that doesn't exist at all on Android, which is tracking-happy.

Since Google lets most apps do what they want in most ways, there's not much motivation for bypassing the App Store--unless you're greedy like Epic. Since Apple restricts apps more with each passing year, the motivation is much higher, in addition to the identical 30% fees.

Re: Spotify CEO renews attack on Apple after Musk's salvo

#830
post #819

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would it be ok for you then if Apple took a 30% cut of every sale made through an app distributed by their App Store? Like Amazon, or food delivery, or grocery apps, and any other app that sells something through the app?

No I wouldn’t. But software has a zero marginal cost and even server costs are minuscule on a per user basis. 80% of all Apple revenue from the App Store comes from pay to win games (came out in the Epic trial)

What does it matter if software has marginal costs or not?

The principle is the same, it's a product being sold by a 3rd party which Apple has no involvement at all in its production costs being distributed by the App Store which Apple takes a fee of 30% off.

The costs of software services are part of the cost of a subscription, as the cost of production of something Amazon is selling is part of its cost. Streaming services have ongoing costs for development, maintenance, etc. that physical goods don't have after they're sold. You are just paying one upfront and the other one is ongoing.

> 80% of all Apple revenue from the App Store comes from pay to win games (came out in the Epic trial)

And what's the argument here? That those are easier to produce they deserve to get taken a 30% cut because marginal costs are near zero?

Netflix and other streaming services have much higher costs than these P2W games if that's your argument; costs for licencing content, maintaining infrastructure, paying for development. Nothing of that is cheap, what is the big difference between a product such as a streaming service and physical goods sold by Amazon that makes you not support Apple taking 30% from Amazon per purchase?

Do you think it'd be fair if every Netflix subscriber using Android devices had to share a slice of the 30% Apple takes if Netflix allowed subscriptions through their iOS app and Apple took a cut? Because it's either that or Netflix having different subscription prices between iOS and Android, both are bad for Netflix and good for Apple. All while Apple also produces a competitor.

In what world is this a fair market practice when you have so much power over a platform? And even directly competes with some companies that you are putting in a natural disadvantage?

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