331–340 of 688 posts
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You are free to buy a smartphone from other manufacturers. No one is forcing you to use an Apple product.
It's either Android or iOS really. I'd love for a decent alternative to exist but if you don't want Google tracking everything you do, Apple is the only option.
> 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…
Is anyone else bugged by the "Let's be clear/To be clear" prefix that gets thrown around a lot these days? It seems unnecessary. If you're being clear then that will be self-evident. It seems like a way to preemptively trick the reader in to taking whatever follows as correct and authoritative.
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But that's a too simple way to look at it. I am not trying to defend the 30%, but just saying 'their own apps do not have to pay 30%, so they can easily replace any app with their own' doesn't go far enough. They got two options: a) make a 30% on $10/month from Spotify -> $3 in Apple's bag for no work or effort at all. Almost pure profit. b) sell their own music solution for $10/month (INSTEAD of that customer going…
Apple: $ to build the app, $ to maintain the music label relationships, $ to manage paying royalties, $ to manage server infra, $ for bandwidth. Spotify: $ to build the app, $ to maintain the music label relationships, $ to manage paying royalties, $ to manage server infra, $ for bandwidth, $ to Apple for the "privilege" of being listed on the App Store and using Apple's payments system (which they have no choice ove…
Some apps pay for that effort with a cut of the app's retail price. Spotify pays for it with the tiny fraction of their users which (a) pay for it at all and (b) pay for it through their iOS device.
"Let’s be clear about what that means. Apple connects Spotify to our users. We provide the platform by which users download and update their app. We share critical software development tools to support Spotify’s app building. And we built a secure payment system — no small undertaking — which allows users to have faith in in-app transactions. Spotify is asking to keep all those benefits while also retaining 100 percent of the revenue."
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The issue I see is this, Apple Music does not play fair, it is similar priced with the competition but it is in fact subsidized by Apple, any application or service it is in danger because if Apple wants and it is competent it can create an Apple version of it and give itself smaller prices(or free), native integrations that the competition does not have. This is not fair for the users (it may be fair f5rom other POV…
Apple Music is priced about the same AND they pay the artists more. Sorry but what's the scam? Consumers pay the same price. Artists earn more. Who cares how Apple shuffles fictional numbers in their internal accounting?
1 I have an app or service say X and I sell it for 5$ and this is the lowest price I can afford
2 Apple wants a 30% cut, so I will have to make my app 7$ .
all is fine so far, the problem is at step 3
3 Apple clones my app names it iX(my original app was named X), makes it 5$ (or bundles it with some gift cars or other deals if you give them more money).
4 Apple's iX gets access to private APIs, is cheaper(or free) since is subsidized, Apple also forces me not to remove from my X app any links to my webpages if I sell things there
Now, please, consider THE USER, what does the user get:
- the user gets less options if my app X is killed or I remove it from the store
- the user pays more if I raise the prices
- the user does not see m,y sale pages because I can't show it in the app
- the X app that some(a big number of ) users consider it better can't access native features like iX can
So, get 30% or whatever you want but compete fair.
> Underneath the rhetoric, Spotify’s aim is to make more money off others’ work. And it’s not just the App Store that they’re trying to squeeze — it’s also artists, musicians and songwriters. Uh, I seem to recall Apple being forced to reverse some brazenly greedy policies for their music service when a high-profile artist called them out and withheld content in protest. For Apple to characterize itself as a champion…
There's this poem about big fleas having smaller fleas. Clearly Apple is about as hypocritical as they come for calling out Spotify wanting to 'make money off others' work' because they themselves do just that, and not just of Spotify, but also of every artist in the Apple music department and of course of all the App developers. It's a pity that nobody has been able to come up with a direct-to-consumer model for mus…
So, naturalists observe, a flea
Has smaller Fleas that on him prey;
And these have smaller still to bite ‘em,
And so proceed ad infinitum.
Jonathan Swift
It makes it hard to justify another MacBook Pro / iPhone purchase going forward.