Spotify and Google Announce User Choice Billing

Pretty standard Google playbook these days.

Instead of building something and then cancelling it later when it doesn't gain traction to get their PR win, they decide to cash in on the PR win upfront with a big partnership announcement, then cancel the product before building it if it doesn't gain sufficient traction, thus saving on engineering costs and streamlining the typical Google technical offering lifecycle.

Behind the scenes, Google usually gives the partnering company some pretty nice discounts. Usually no one does any engineering until someone else sees the PR and also wants in on this "exciting new feature" and they're the one actually beta testing the product that they thought the announced companies already used.

Agreed. I mostly use Spotify on a Raspberry Pi using Spotifyd and a display driver I wrote myself, on Linux. Now who should get a cut of my subscription? Do I get any of it?

For services which exist and function perfectly well outside of the Google/Apple binary, why should they get any more than a nominal fee for hosting the app download?

I don't think there is much fanfare. Obviously Google and Spotify want to make a big deal out of this for when regulators come knocking, but as a Spotify user who pays directly to Spotify outside of Play Store, this news is nothing more at a mild irritation at them both patting each other's backs over nothing.

Google sees the writing on the wall. Their billing monopoly is under threat, and is probably not going to last forever.

This situation looks like Google allowed Spotify to add their own payment system with some terms. The obvious one is that they need to keep Google's payment system alongside their own. A less obvious (but IMO likely) requirement may be that Spotify cannot offer a much lower price through their billing system to incentivize users to switch (100% assumption here).

From the outside, this looks like a pro-consumer move: consumers get more choices (even if the prices are the same). But the reality is (probably; I'm just assuming here) that Google still has the power to shove their billing system down developers' throats, since there aren't yet any laws or rulings to prevent it.

So even though the writing in this press release makes it seem like a pro-consumer move, I hope it doesn't take any momentum away from all of the antitrust lawsuits. Google's (and Apple's) monopolies need to end. In an ideal world, Spotify would add Google billing (and others) as options to attract more customers, not because Google is forcing them to.

keep in mind that it's not for everyone, it says: "pilot will allow a small number of participating developers"

it's also an agreement, so it's very likely that they are requiring price parity.

in that case the only benefit of picking a different payment processor for end users would be for they joy of typing their billing information again.

regardless, looks like a step in the right direction