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Spotify CEO renews attack on Apple after Musk's salvo

reuters.com

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

#841

Post by etchalon »

JanSt wrote: post #824
etchalon wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Apple has always taken the exact same percentage from developers, since the launch of the App Store, and long before the iPhone was one of the dominant phones purchased.

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

#842

Post by anonymous_sorry »

rosnd wrote: post #692
anonymous_sorry wrote: post #686

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nevertheless, there is something people call "Linux" that is a full OS (rather than just a kernel). Android differs substantially from that. Just semantics.

Yes, but that is fundamentally incompatible with phones! It's an oxymoron, like a Windows 2000 phone. Marricks's comment simply does not make any sense if we're to use that definition of "Linux".

Marrick's comment makes even less sense using a definition of Linux that includes Android, since they lists three different options: iOS, Android and Linux.

"No one is going to spend billions of dollars to get you to buy Linux.", Marrick said. Perhaps they were including the resources required to make something that is recognisably Linux that is compatible with phones, and polished enough to be appealing to the average consumer?

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

#843

Post by acdha »

2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #764
tedunangst wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because Elon is a nut and likes stirring up drama? For real, who was the first person to tell Elon that twitter was going to be banned? Was it Tim Cook? Or was it catturd?

Attack ideas, not people. What does Elon's actions have to do with Apple's anti-competitive behavior?

We don't reliably know that this was anti-competitive, or even what the meeting was about. It could have been related to Apple pulling advertising — since they're reportedly the largest single advertiser that'd get an HQ visit on its own — or simply that communications had broken down due to all of the fired people not being replaced. That's the larger point here: he's making pointless, stupid mistakes and that means that a lot of things are happening which technically could be part of some big conspiracy but might also be Musk shooting himself in the foot again and then blaming anyone but himself.

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

#844

Post by davidlumley »

heavyset_go wrote: post #555
davidlumley wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding around how this works (and I might be wrong!) is that Apple tracks a variety of usage on device and your device itself knows which ad to serve, versus say Google or Facebook collating your data on their own servers. I'd not be surprised to learn there was some level of phoning home though.

This just has all of the negative privacy implications FLoC does[1], which is also something pushed by Google that was heavily criticized. I guess now that Apple is doing it, it's okay. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federated_Learning_of_Cohorts

Similar! The biggest difference in my mind is that any website using FLoC would be able to know what cohort I belonged to.

FLoC is definitely more anonymous than "davidlumley visited nytimes.com twice on December 1st 2022". However, that particular usage information was previously only available to nytimes.com, any ad/data vendor using third party tracking cookies that were present on nytimes.com at the time of my visit, and finally any company that purchased data from the ad/data vendor.

My FLoC was theoretically available to any website and had much of the same intent data that intent ad/data vendors were/are selling.

If my understanding of Apple's ad platform is correct, advertisers don't know which cohort the user davidlumley belongs to, or that their ads are being served to me because that's all handled on device.

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

#845

Post by GeekyBear »

tablespoon wrote: post #817
GeekyBear wrote: post #752

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This has never happened on Android. >When Fortnite launched on mobile in 2018, Epic Games very notably sidestepped the Google Play Store and pushed users to download the title directly from their website, an effort made to avoid the substantial revenue cuts that Google takes from in-app purchases of Play Store downloads. At the time, the move was understandable for Epic, which was sitting on the hottest free-to-pla…

>> 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. > When Fortnite launched on mobile in 2018, Epic Games very notably sidestepped the Google Play Store and pushed users to download the title directly from their website... Though that's the exception that proves the rule. Besides Fortnite, who else has pushed users i…

We know from discovery in the various Google antitrust cases that Google has a pattern of behavior where they place barriers against others who attempted to offer their own app store. They talk a good game about allowing it, but their conduct is a different story.

>The lawsuit is effectively claiming that this openness is a facade, because while customers technically have the choice of where to get their apps from, Google’s business practices have prevented a viable app store competitor from emerging.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/7/8/22568111/google-play-andro...

>Google has struck at least 24 deals with big app developers to stop them from competing with its Play Store, including an agreement to pay Activision Blizzard Inc about $360 million over three years

https://www.reuters.com/technology/google-agreed-pay-360-mln...

>Epic reached an agreement with OnePlus to preload Epic Games on the company’s smartphones. As part of the agreement, Epic says it developed a version of Fortnite specifically for OnePlus devices to take advantage of the OnePlus phones’ high-refresh-rate screens...

Google demanded OnePlus not implement the agreement outside of India, where the company allowed OnePlus to move forward with the deal.

OnePlus reportedly informed Epic that Google was “concerned that the Epic Games app would have the ability to potentially install and update multiple games with a silent install bypassing the Google Play Store.”

https://mobilesyrup.com/2020/08/14/epic-google-oneplus-prelo...

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

#846

Post by heavyset_go »

helsinkiandrew wrote: post #627
heavyset_go wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can always Jailbreak your device? No, you can't and this isn't a serious alternative, especially since Apple goes out of their way to prevent and break jailbreaks. > Once an App is allowed to break out of the sandbox or be installed away from the AppStore the likelyhood of an average users phone getting into a broken mess at best and becoming infected with a virus at worse goes up my an order of magnitude. And…

I'm not sure what your point is - both of those articles are making the case that Apple should be doing more rather than less. If users don't understand how to cancel an App subscription from their phone how much fun will they have when the same apps and more have tied their credit cards into recurring payments.

Apple is clearly incapable of securing their own App Store and consumers should have the option of using app distribution methods run by more competent engineers with better track records.

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

#847

Post by juve1996 »

starik36 wrote: post #814
juve1996 wrote: post #783

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Android is a very real and clear alternative. Android dominates market share. How you can say there isn't a clear alternative, I don't know.

Given the vendor lock-in and Apple's 50% market share, it's not much of an alternative.

That doesn't justify your argument. 50% is not a dominant position.

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

#848

Post by michaelmrose »

bnj wrote: post #609
michaelmrose wrote: post #568

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then don't install it or only install it if its worth the trade off. The only real reason for 99.9% of apps to want to do that is to prevent Apple from taking a huge portion of the revenue. Decrease the tax and this problem virtually goes away.

Not OP, but the thing which bothers me about this is that it’s not a real choice from an end user perspective. So many employers quasi-require people to use their phones as part of their work. I can just see something like Microsoft teams becoming a wedge that pushes people to disable lockdowns from apple that, in their personal lives, they’d rather keep. I do think that could be solvable. Something like different pe…

Motorola makes a decent android phone for $170. Buy for work and only use for work.

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

#849

Post by m463 »

fingerlocks wrote: post #368
m463 wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to be arguing that only apple (or google) has the ability to protect your device. Honestly, the best protection would be the ability to control your own device, and make apple just one of many ways to help you secure it. I would love to be able to firewall my device. To see what apps are doing and to prevent them from doing things you don't like. Then you can trust but verify. By the way, apple does TONS of…

> Look at deep linking, iBeacon, and lots of other silly things. iBeacon is 1-way read-only. Deep Linking is an app url scheme. Not much to look at.

you don't know what they do because apple does not allow introspection into the device you own.

afaict ibeacon allows apps to locate bluetooth beacons. think department store beacons and department store app. deep linking allows apps to (silently) intercept email/browsing/messages with specific urls. all of them and other schemes let apps wake up in the background.

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

#850

Post by dalbasal »

yobbo wrote: post #835
dalbasal wrote: post #706

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> It's not technically a monopoly What is the technicality? It's certainly a monopoly in layman's terms. Is the technicality monopsony? IE, the fact that Spotify have more power over artists than consumers? Is it the fact that there are other streaming services in existence, and spotify has I feel like people can specify "textbook-monopoly," if they need to use a hyper-strict definition of one kind or another. For r…

There are many alternatives to Spotify.

That's not the definition of a monopoly, unless we're describing some sort of textbook/theoretical concept. Spotify are certainly a monopsony in their relationship to artists/studios. The whole business model depends on and assumes market power. They're absolutely a monopoly in normal language.
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