For a site filled with developers y’all really misunderstand the whole 30% cut thing. It’s an alternate way to pay for API, sdk, and platform access. Before t

For a site filled with developers y’all really misunderstand the whole 30% cut thing. It’s an alternate way to pay for API, sdk, and platform access. Before the era of phones, if you wanted to develop for some kind of gated platform, for example video game consoles, one would have to pay very high SDK fees. Fees that would scale based on licensed seat, enterprise size, and more. Then when you ship, you’d pay royalties on a per item basis. You sold a game cartridge or cd? Great, a portion of your sale prices goes back to Sony/Nintendo/whatever. If Apple and google were to provide un-marked up card services, they’d probably charge 3-5% like stripe: there’s a certain amount of fraud that would be priced in. Then they would charge for dev tools. A lot. They’d probably charge for API or SDK usage, perhaps tied to the sales volume and enterprise size. But instead they give the tools away for free, and charge at point of delivery. I think the current situation is actually a great deal for developers: you get access to an always improving platform, it’s free for personal/hobby use, and if you make sales, you get paid. And the first $X is fee reduced/free. And it’s a highly available distribution platform that scales world wide. Good luck getting your Indy game into every brick and mortar store. The world is really different, and way way better, for developers. This Spotify announcement is great for users, it’s handy to have all your subscriptions in one platform. And not having to sign up on a desktop or outside the app flow.