131–140 of 688 posts
Corporations bickering out loud in public like neighbours. Quite a spectacle. Having read both Spotify's and Apple's claims, I am confused. Both seem legit.
Both sides are exaggerating: Spotify's claims that Apple is blocking their apps and preventing them from shipping features are likely bogus, while Apple's claims that they don't selectively implement rules when doing app review is false as well.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apple does not have a monopoly on Smart Phones or App Stores. They're able to as much as anyone to control how their platform is used - there's no law against maintaining a closed and curated platform and your product or platform is not considered a Market in by itself. There's also no law against having a monopoly, only for abusing your monopoly in one market to gain an unfair advantage in a different one.
> There's also no law against having a monopoly, Yes there is. It's called anti-trust law and a large part is about pure market share. It's also illegal to use your monopoly in a market to get advantages in that market. Most notably, you can't use your monopoly to keep your monopoly. (I.e. intel making a deal with dell where dell cannot use AMD processors)
It's legal to have a monopoly and get advantages in the market.
It's illegal to have a monopoly and then try and extinguish your competition in the current or any adjacent markets.
> 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…
Wow! Thats a new one. Pay the open source world who Apple have been heavy contributors to themselves. Apple are such hypocrites indeed.
> 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…
They owe nothing for anything they legitimately use: that’s the consequence of open source licensing as a developer. If a developer expects a project to get a fair share of revenue from projects that use it, they are free to adopt a licensing model that dictates that. That is a perfectly reasonable licensing model. I get it: I had an open source project that HP built a product around many years ago, but modulo a coup…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Spotify’s aim is to make more money off others’ work Moreover, that's the pot calling the kettle black. That's the app store in a nutshell -- Apple supplies the marketplace, but is also making a substantial chunk of money off of others’ work.
Exactly what my local store does. They pay the wholesaler 10 and sell to me for 15.
> 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…
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 and scams.
I agree that Apple's article is more hostile than it needed to be, but it is only in response to an unreasonable attack by Spotify on Apple's IAP policies.
Regarding the walled-garden App Store policies of Apple, it's not friendly to enthusiasts and some developers, but it is good for most Apple consumers, and helps less tech-savvy users trust Apple's App Store.
Android has freer permissions on installing apps, because that is necessary for vendor adoption. However, it is unclear if this is still ultimately a better decision for consumers on aggregate.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, not exactly. You're free to buy from other stores, and suppliers can sell to them. A very important distinction.
I use spotify and netflix without going through apple, the former on my linux desktop, the latter additionally on my smart tv.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, not exactly. You're free to buy from other stores, and suppliers can sell to them. A very important distinction.
I use spotify and netflix without going through apple, the former on my linux desktop, the latter additionally on my smart tv.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly what my local store does. They pay the wholesaler 10 and sell to me for 15.
No, not exactly. You're free to buy from other stores, and suppliers can sell to them. A very important distinction.
Whether what Apple is doing is legal or not I guess the courts will decide. But it's certainly factually incorrect to imply that you're not free to buy from anywhere else.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Spotify would and does exist on all the other platforms, like Android, Windows or the open web. Apple created a lot of value with its first iPhone, but the world evolved since then. And yes, in your definition, Apple too is a middleman, because a big reason for why many people buy overpriced smartphones is to use apps. That you can't move those purchases easily to another platform, that's the lock-in effect of Apple'…
> That you can't move those purchases easily to another platform You do realise that there are technical reasons for that. You can't just lift an iOS, Linux, Windows, Android, PS4, Xbox etc app and just run it on a different platform. Especially if your target platform is a resource constrained one.
For example I use Gimp and Inkscape, irregardless of the OS. The experience is a little shitty on MacOS, but they get the job done.
It's also the reason for why Microsoft was able to provide the "Subsystem for Linux" on Windows 10, because the Linux kernel is much easier to mock than Windows is, being a much smaller effort than what the Wine project has to handle. Speaking of Wine, it has been doing a decent job of running Windows apps on Linux, many Windows-only games are playable on Linux due to it. And Steam has been using Wine to make games available on Linux.
iOS on the other hand is another matter entirely. First of all you don't have direct access to the binaries, without hacking the OS and Apple is doing everything they can to make that OS unhackable.
No, we are not talking of technical limitations, as those aren't insurmountable.