The impact Apple's rules have on e.g. Spotify's business model cannot be understated. As an example: Spotify wants to get into Audiobooks, which we'll assume is

The impact Apple's rules have on e.g. Spotify's business model cannot be understated. As an example: Spotify wants to get into Audiobooks, which we'll assume is a reasonable and interesting expansion of their business. Traditionally, audiobooks are sold piecemeal; but its difficult for Spotify to find success doing this, because the majority of their users are on mobile, and mobile platforms would require a 30% cut, which far exceeds the meager margins Spotify would already be taking on the sale. One alternative people who aren't close to this topic propose is: Why can't Spotify just charge iOS users 30% more to compensate? Easy: Apple explicitly forbids this. You cannot charge iOS users more than other users. This leaves Spotify with two courses of action. (1): They can globally raise the price of their audiobooks by 30% (or, put another way, by some amount to compensate for Apple's 30% cut). (2): They can refuse to sell audiobooks in the Spotify app on mobile. Globally raising the cost of audiobooks is an entirely untenable path. Generally, the cost of audiobooks is set by the publishers; and Apple themselves is a competitor in this space. This means that Apple would get an implicit ~30% discount on every audiobook they sell over competitors; and consumers would obviously flock to that. Spotify has walked the alternate path: You cannot buy audiobooks in the Spotify mobile app. This is a better solution for their business, but it presents its own challenges because, again, a very significant portion of Spotify users likely have never launched the desktop or web experiences. This has pushed Spotify toward their newest initiative: Premium subscriptions come with a number of bundled audiobook listening hours. They can leverage the pre-existing subscription channel, which already bypasses IAP. They're not really turning more revenue from this, but its a value-add and eventually they'll raise the price of the subscription or add additional subscription tiers to compensate. An interesting further angle to this is the downstream impact on authors. Subscriptionizing has almost universally had the impact of hurting content creators; its a capitalistic efficiency-maximizer which has wrecked the movie industry, the TV industry, the music industry, and now its coming for audiobooks. What deals has Spotify made with audiobook publishers to make this "free listening hours" model possible, we may never know. But, its important to recognize that, while Spotify should bare some responsibility/blame for this shift, Apple is the one that forced them to change the model. Capitalism is a closed-loop system. Apple's tax isn't just hurting app developers: their pain gets passed down the supply chain. It hurts content creators, and it ultimately hurts consumers as well.