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I find everything that Spotify says about the Watch to be disingenuous. > Us: "Hey Apple, we love your watch; can we make an app for that?" Them: "nah The fir

I find everything that Spotify says about the Watch to be disingenuous. > Us: "Hey Apple, we love your watch; can we make an app for that?" Them: "nah The first Apple Watch was slow, and didn’t have any real third party apps at all. They were basically all running on the phone and displaying things slowly on the Watch. > Apple rejects Spotify's proposal for an Apple Watch app yet again (2016) This was before the cellular watch came out. How much good would any streaming service be with wifi only? Even then, for battery saving reasons, the Watch really preferred Bluetooth to communicate with the phone > This app update means that rival apps have to agree not to “directly or indirectly target iOS users to use a purchasing method other than IAP or discourage the use of IAP.” No retailer is going to let a company advertise how to buy products cheaper somewhere else. > Apple finally allows enhanced functionality for the Spotify app on the Apple Watch (2018) And it took Spotify over two years to support streaming music from the Watch. And now they introduce their own “podcast player” that can’t play podcasts - ie audio hosted on a server where I can subscribe to a RSS feed.

Omniusaspirer 4y ago
Spotify is just doing the age-old cycle of getting out-competed despite first mover advantage and then appealing to government authorities to try and stifle competition. When your only idea for innovation is trying to monopolize podcasts while your competitor is rolling out features like spatial audio (which is actually phenomenal) the writing is on the wall.
- simion314 4y ago
  Is it free competition? As far as I know Apple always attempts to screw with competitors, Apple apps using private functionality, ignoring privacy settings etc. Can I compete fair with Siri, say I have a better quality version that works 10 times better? | I can't , but I am free to create a phone and OS first, bundle my app in and compete with Apple like this... so the better Siri will not happen , users suffer a lower quality app and will ignore Siri because is garbage, only Apple wins.
  - Omniusaspirer 4y ago
    This point has been debated extensively in thousands of threads with strong arguments made on both sides so I won't dive into it again as it's somewhat off topic to the actual response I made. I'll instead ask- what has Spotify actually done to stay competitive in streaming music since being founded in 2006? Apple has actually innovated in this space and frankly has a much stronger offering today despite launching 9 years later (higher stream quality, spatial audio, more money to artists, larger library). I won't claim Apple is perfect by any means, but Spotify really doesn't garner my sympathy either as the company who's chief "innovation" has been trying to snuff out independent podcasts and lobbying the EU for protectionism.
    - prions 4y ago
      Stream quality and catalog sizes are both legal issues with music rights holders and have nothing to do with streaming innovation. Unless you consider Apple having a boatload of money to make legal issues go away a kind of innovation.
    - scarface74 4y ago
      Streaming music is a bad product to base your entire business on period. It’s the classic “DropBox problem”. It’s feature not a product. The music industry will always get 70% of revenue for streaming music. The video streaming services for the most part negotiate a fixed cost license and then as they grew, they could theoretically spread the cost.
  - scarface74 4y ago
    I am surprised that on HN, supposedly technically people still tout the “vendor uses private functionality” trope. Of course every OS has “private functionality” that is not exposed to untrusted third party apps. Do you want every application to have root level access to your device? The private enclave? Apple usually dog foods any new APIs before making them public. Once you make an API public, you’re stuck with it warts on all. Apple can also do things in ways that would be insecure for third parties to have access to. For instance, in iOS 2 (?) Apple had an internal app extensions framework and in the US, was hard coded to support Facebook and Twitter. A few years later, Apple had extensions framework where the extension was in a separate process for security and opened it up. It took years for Apple to come up with a decent Siri intents framework for any third party and still Spotify took years to support all of the features that they complained about after Apple implemented the APIs.
lozenge 4y ago
> No retailer is going to let a company advertise how to buy products cheaper somewhere else. That was an odd way to elide over the idea that a "retailer" can now stay in your pocket for 2-60 years and become a middleman to every financial transaction.
- scarface74 4y ago
  If you sign up for a streaming service via Roku, Roku gets a cut as a middleman - forever. you can sign up outside of Roku just like you could sign up for Spotify outside of the App Store.
  - mostertoaster 4y ago
    Soon your ISP will also get a cut of every online purchase you make. Since you did it on their “platform”.
matthewmacleod 4y ago
Yes, I have approximately zero trust in anything Spotify says regarding the Apple Watch. They have dragged their feet repeatedly on it, and even now their implementation is shit.
- ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
  I have no horse in this race, and, thus, no valid opinions on the Spotify/Apple spat. However, I have written a few Watch apps. It’s quite difficult, and there are severe limitations, due (I suspect) to power-saving and limited display size stuff (in addition to all the private SDK restrictions, and privacy/sandbox safeguards that all Apple platforms have). The SDK is frustratingly hobbled, and the Watch, itself, wasn’t really (in my opinion) usable, until Generation 4. Nowadays, I see them everywhere (but I live in a fairly affluent area, so I see Apple kit all over the place). I can’t imagine hybrid apps (like Ionic or React Native) working on the Watch, so it needs to be done in native Swift and/or ObjC. There’s actually a dearth of true native developers (I am one, and find it difficult to connect with others that I can talk to).
  - matthewmacleod 4y ago
    I mean I totally get that the watch is a constrained environment and you can’t just slap Electron on it and call it a day or whatever. I have also worked with the SDK and I agree it’s quite limited. But we’re not talking about a fly-by-night startup - Spotify has a good deal of resources and the requirements for their application are pretty straightforward. Yet every single time I use it it fails in some stupid, unintelligible way. It has a couple of very obvious race conditions in the UI, and it took years to get to this state. I have some sympathy for the difficulty of the implementation but at this point it’s a bit of a joke.
    - ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
      There's a big issue with the reliability of communications between the phone, and the watch. We can't assume that communications will happen in realtime. Even Apple's apps have some weird lag, and unpredictability. It's far better on the newest Watches. I've watched it improve, over generations (I currently have an 8, but my earliest one was a 2). Any app that requires realtime sync with the phone is gonna have issues (I have tried writing them, and learned this, the hard way).
goosedragons 4y ago
You don't need cellular for a streaming service to be useful on a watch. You can download music to the watch while on WiFi and then can play it while out on a run or whatever while your phone is at home.
- scarface74 4y ago
  Yes and Spotify could have supported that from 2016 forward and didn’t.
ViViDboarder 4y ago
> No retailer is going to let a company advertise how to buy products cheaper somewhere else. Many do. I’ve bought plenty of products that, inside the packaging or via product registration, try to get you to use their first party store fronts. I agree that nobody works allow you to advertise this on the packaging, but within the package is a different story.

Omniusaspirer 4y ago

Spotify is just doing the age-old cycle of getting out-competed despite first mover advantage and then appealing to government authorities to try and stifle competition. When your only idea for innovation is trying to monopolize podcasts while your competitor is rolling out features like spatial audio (which is actually phenomenal) the writing is on the wall.

simion314 4y ago
Is it free competition? As far as I know Apple always attempts to screw with competitors, Apple apps using private functionality, ignoring privacy settings etc. Can I compete fair with Siri, say I have a better quality version that works 10 times better? | I can't , but I am free to create a phone and OS first, bundle my app in and compete with Apple like this... so the better Siri will not happen , users suffer a lower quality app and will ignore Siri because is garbage, only Apple wins.
- Omniusaspirer 4y ago
  This point has been debated extensively in thousands of threads with strong arguments made on both sides so I won't dive into it again as it's somewhat off topic to the actual response I made. I'll instead ask- what has Spotify actually done to stay competitive in streaming music since being founded in 2006? Apple has actually innovated in this space and frankly has a much stronger offering today despite launching 9 years later (higher stream quality, spatial audio, more money to artists, larger library). I won't claim Apple is perfect by any means, but Spotify really doesn't garner my sympathy either as the company who's chief "innovation" has been trying to snuff out independent podcasts and lobbying the EU for protectionism.
  - prions 4y ago
    Stream quality and catalog sizes are both legal issues with music rights holders and have nothing to do with streaming innovation. Unless you consider Apple having a boatload of money to make legal issues go away a kind of innovation.
  - scarface74 4y ago
    Streaming music is a bad product to base your entire business on period. It’s the classic “DropBox problem”. It’s feature not a product. The music industry will always get 70% of revenue for streaming music. The video streaming services for the most part negotiate a fixed cost license and then as they grew, they could theoretically spread the cost.
- scarface74 4y ago
  I am surprised that on HN, supposedly technically people still tout the “vendor uses private functionality” trope. Of course every OS has “private functionality” that is not exposed to untrusted third party apps. Do you want every application to have root level access to your device? The private enclave? Apple usually dog foods any new APIs before making them public. Once you make an API public, you’re stuck with it warts on all. Apple can also do things in ways that would be insecure for third parties to have access to. For instance, in iOS 2 (?) Apple had an internal app extensions framework and in the US, was hard coded to support Facebook and Twitter. A few years later, Apple had extensions framework where the extension was in a separate process for security and opened it up. It took years for Apple to come up with a decent Siri intents framework for any third party and still Spotify took years to support all of the features that they complained about after Apple implemented the APIs.

lozenge 4y ago

> No retailer is going to let a company advertise how to buy products cheaper somewhere else. That was an odd way to elide over the idea that a "retailer" can now stay in your pocket for 2-60 years and become a middleman to every financial transaction.

scarface74 4y ago
If you sign up for a streaming service via Roku, Roku gets a cut as a middleman - forever. you can sign up outside of Roku just like you could sign up for Spotify outside of the App Store.
- mostertoaster 4y ago
  Soon your ISP will also get a cut of every online purchase you make. Since you did it on their “platform”.

matthewmacleod 4y ago

Yes, I have approximately zero trust in anything Spotify says regarding the Apple Watch. They have dragged their feet repeatedly on it, and even now their implementation is shit.

ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
I have no horse in this race, and, thus, no valid opinions on the Spotify/Apple spat. However, I have written a few Watch apps. It’s quite difficult, and there are severe limitations, due (I suspect) to power-saving and limited display size stuff (in addition to all the private SDK restrictions, and privacy/sandbox safeguards that all Apple platforms have). The SDK is frustratingly hobbled, and the Watch, itself, wasn’t really (in my opinion) usable, until Generation 4. Nowadays, I see them everywhere (but I live in a fairly affluent area, so I see Apple kit all over the place). I can’t imagine hybrid apps (like Ionic or React Native) working on the Watch, so it needs to be done in native Swift and/or ObjC. There’s actually a dearth of true native developers (I am one, and find it difficult to connect with others that I can talk to).
- matthewmacleod 4y ago
  I mean I totally get that the watch is a constrained environment and you can’t just slap Electron on it and call it a day or whatever. I have also worked with the SDK and I agree it’s quite limited. But we’re not talking about a fly-by-night startup - Spotify has a good deal of resources and the requirements for their application are pretty straightforward. Yet every single time I use it it fails in some stupid, unintelligible way. It has a couple of very obvious race conditions in the UI, and it took years to get to this state. I have some sympathy for the difficulty of the implementation but at this point it’s a bit of a joke.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
    There's a big issue with the reliability of communications between the phone, and the watch. We can't assume that communications will happen in realtime. Even Apple's apps have some weird lag, and unpredictability. It's far better on the newest Watches. I've watched it improve, over generations (I currently have an 8, but my earliest one was a 2). Any app that requires realtime sync with the phone is gonna have issues (I have tried writing them, and learned this, the hard way).

goosedragons 4y ago

You don't need cellular for a streaming service to be useful on a watch. You can download music to the watch while on WiFi and then can play it while out on a run or whatever while your phone is at home.

scarface74 4y ago
Yes and Spotify could have supported that from 2016 forward and didn’t.

ViViDboarder 4y ago

> No retailer is going to let a company advertise how to buy products cheaper somewhere else. Many do. I’ve bought plenty of products that, inside the packaging or via product registration, try to get you to use their first party store fronts. I agree that nobody works allow you to advertise this on the packaging, but within the package is a different story.