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Even if Apple didn't have a competitive offering to Spotify, it'd be a terrible idea to adopt a third party's standard/SDK that impacted such a core part of the
by npunt 6y ago
Even if Apple didn't have a competitive offering to Spotify, it'd be a terrible idea to adopt a third party's standard/SDK that impacted such a core part of the ecosystem and UX as controlling and handing off audio. The reason people buy into ecosystems is so there's a single entity that is weighing and making decisions about what creates the best user experience, which necessarily means having control over the roadmap of standards and interfaces.
Even if we were designing the perfect tech ecosystem that was free of business or competitive constraints, it still wouldn't be a good idea to have an app developer, with their own motivations that may not be aligned to users, dictate SDKs and standards to ecosystems or platforms. It's a weird and unsustainable power dynamic that misaligns incentives. It'd only be viable if in the process the app developer opened the standard and shared control of its future.
As much as Spotify wants to be a platform, what they offer is just a service, and they're not positioned to be controlling such standards. I love Spotify and much prefer it to Apple Music, but what they're doing is choosing not to build features that their customers want on platforms their customers have chosen in order to gain leverage in the regulatory battle over the 30% cut. I respect the desire to have a more level playing field but their other complaints are disingenuous and are not in the best interest of their customers.
- barrkel 6y agoApple has a position as a gatekeeper and is charging a toll, unjustifiably. It's disingenuous to say that other people submitting to Apple's tolls are not working in the long-term best interest of their customers.
- npunt 6y agoSpotify is slow to implement features their customers want (see: Watch, HomePod, TV, Siri), which is not in their customers best interest. Other smaller services like Pandora seem to be able to do this [1], leading one to reasonably conclude Spotify is choosing not to. This has nothing to do with the 30% cut, except that its likely Spotify is crippling themselves to make their regulatory case (similar to Epic's approach). See sibling comment [2] regarding Spotify's slant on their timeline post, in which they seem like they're entitled to certain things that the platform is not yet capable of (e.g. Watch apps in 2015 when the APIs were very crude). Fast forward to 2020 when these issues have long since been sorted out and Spotify still lacks an offline Watch app. As a Spotify customer I'd love to be able to listen to music while on a run, but Spotify has decided this core use case of an extremely popular platform is not worth building. [1] https://9to5mac.com/2020/04/29/pandora-shows-spotify-how-to-make-a-proper-apple-watch-app/ https://9to5mac.com/2020/04/29/pandora-shows-spotify-how-to-... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24771000 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24771000