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From the article: > Spotify Pays Apple Nothing This sound like a child not getting their ice-cream. Why does Apple feel entitled to get anything from Spotify?

From the article: > Spotify Pays Apple Nothing This sound like a child not getting their ice-cream. Why does Apple feel entitled to get anything from Spotify? There has never been any precedence that application developers owe the platform they publish their applications on anything. Also, Spotify never asked for an app store. They have been imposed an app store. And now Apple feel entitled to payment for that service? You have to be a government to set taxes.

criddell 3y ago
There's more than 45 years of precedent if you want to count video game consoles.
- grishka 3y ago
  Video game consoles are seen by most people, and marketed by their manufacturers, as appliances for playing video games. iPhones and iPads, on the other hand, are seen and marketed as general-purpose computing/communication devices. It's unprecedented for such a non-appliance to be locked down like this.
  - nozzlegear 3y ago
    I’d contend that it’s not unprecedented, given that the iPhone is now 17 something years old.
    - grishka 3y ago
      I mean, no other platform did that neither before nor after the iPhone came out. To my knowledge, all other smartphone OSes ever made had some way of sideloading apps.
      - nozzlegear 3y ago
        True, I guess what I was trying to say is that everything's unprecedented until somebody makes the precedent.
      - criddell 3y ago
        Checkout the i-mode. Something like 50 million people were using them in 2001 and they were even more locked down than the iPhone. This was the era when ringtones were $2.99 and cell phone networks were trying their hardest to hold on to that revenue. Closed was definitely the norm back then.
        grishka 3y ago
        I don't know about i-mode, but the main difficulty with custom ringtones in early 00s was that it wasn't easy to load them into your phone. Most of those phones (in my own experience) came with a ringtone editor where you entered them note by note. They could also be sent and received via SMS, but that in general only worked between phones of the same brand (try sending a ringtone from a Nokia to a Siemens and you get three screens of garbage characters, ask me how I found out). Later ones could be connected to a computer with a "data cable" that was a somewhat rare accessory, but you could then just load MIDI files. Oh, and IR ports. People used them all the time to share ringtones and images and games. Same with Java games when they became popular. The hardest part was getting them onto your phone. You either used a data cable, or had GPRS set up in "internet" mode (as opposed to "wap"), or someone else shared them with you via IR port or Bluetooth. Yes, there were paid ringtones/images/games, or course. But carriers themselves never sold them. It was third-party companies. A ringtone usually was $1. Carrier-locked phones never really caught on in my country. It always worked such that you bought a phone for the full price and provided your own sim card. Some carriers tried the US model early on as an option, but people just weren't having it.
- aeyes 3y ago
  No there is not, one example would be the yellow tab EA cartridges for the Sega Genesis. EA reverse engineered the Genesis to get around the high licensing cost and Sega knew that they wouldn't be able to challenge this in court.
  - westhanover 3y ago
    The yellow tab was nonvolatile memory so season progress could be saved. This comment is a complete lie and should be disregarded.
    - aeyes 3y ago
      You could at least spend 1 minute on the Genesis Wikipedia article which includes several sources to verify my claims. There you'll also find another case where Sega lost in court against similar reverse engineering done by Accolade to run their games on the Genesis without a license from Sega: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_v._Accolade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_v._Accolade
gorbypark 3y ago
I agree with the sentiment, but that's not entirely true. Video game console have pretty much always relied on this model to make money.
- izacus 3y ago
  Then let's kill that too. We don't need rent seekers killing free market competition.
  - quesera 3y ago
    It is not rent-seeking when you built the house and perform the services for which payment is demanded.
    - GardenLetter27 3y ago
      They should be able to opt-out though. E.g. sell games but use no Xbox services on Xbox. I wonder if the DMA will bring Steam to consoles.
    - izacus 3y ago
      It's literally the definition of rent seeking and it's toxic to free market society. We don't want your landlord to get a cut of every thing you buy in their apartment. We don't want them to get a cut of every service you order. We dont't want them to get a cut of every single thing you buy while living in that apartment. We don't want those things for digital landlords either just because they deigned to put together some eletronics they were already paid for.
      - shuckles 3y ago
        Landlording is rent seeking because the landlord did not create the primary value of a property: place. This is not the same at all.
        izacus 3y ago
lozenge 3y ago
Spotify does pay - 30% of subscription fees.
- CubsFan1060 3y ago
  I thought that you couldn't subscribe to Spotify via the App. Am I wrong?
  - piva00 3y ago
    You are correct, and Spotify can't steer people to a subscription flow outside of the app through the app to not infringe into App Store's policies either. That's one of the main issues, either you pay the 30% Apple tax or you can't even tell your users "click here to subscribe" to a checkout flow outside of the app and App Store.
- shadowfiend 3y ago
  They do not. This entire case is about them not being able to use in app purchases (in which case they would pay 30%) or steer people to their site to pay for subscriptions. Spotify doesn’t sell subscriptions from the apps, and thus they pay nothing.
brtknr 3y ago
Surely Spotify wouldn't be able to publish if it wasn't paying $100/year fee to Apple. I guess $100 is nothing to Apple.
matwood 3y ago
> Why does Apple feel entitled to get anything from Spotify? Apple has argued they do not sell a piece of hardware, but a platform. It includes hardware, software, and a marketplace (like a video game console like others have said). Apple will also say that they have cultivated the platform to have the most affluent users (like a console again). This shows up in the stats. Even with iOS having a minority marketshare in the EU, all developers want to be on it because that is where the money is. What is access to a market and platform like that worth? Apple thinks 15%-30%. Yes, it has been symbiotic between Apple and devs, but Apple has done something that differentiated it from Android wrt the type of user. Otherwise, all the devs could have left and Apple would have been forced to change long ago.
- EMIRELADERO 3y ago
  > Apple has argued they do not sell a piece of hardware, but a platform. It includes hardware, software, and a marketplace (like a video game console like others have said). Can this even be quantifiably measured? Usually when selling something you describe, itemize and bill for it. The Apple developer agreement offers the developer tools and access to Apple's App Store and related services. The dev's argument is that Apple is forcing them to enter into that contract to distribute apps to iOS users even when they explicitly wish to opt out of using Apple's developer tools and services.
  - matwood 3y ago
    > Can this even be quantifiably measured? Apple thinks it's worth 15%-30%. While app developers may complain, most still stay on the platform. Or are you talking about how much the market is worth? A new analysis has shown that iPhone users spend seven times more on apps than Android users, far higher than the 4x rule of thumb suggested by purely anecdotal data. https://9to5mac.com/2023/09/06/iphone-users-spend-apps/ https://9to5mac.com/2023/09/06/iphone-users-spend-apps/
    - EMIRELADERO 3y ago
      I'm talking about the goods or services that are sold.
wil421 3y ago
How’s this so much different than Nintendo? I’ve never been able to play any game I want to and I’ve always been forced to go through Nintendo or Sony to play games on consoles. (Or Xbox)
- madsbuch 3y ago
  You house hold AI is your friend: So in summary, in 2021: - Number of Nintendos sold in EU: Over 7.1 million game consoles were sold total, and Nintendo Switch was the best-selling console. - Number of iPhones sold in EU: Around 56 million iPhones. Another commenter mentioned in another discussion something that is very much applicable here: I'm under impression that Americans freak out because they tend to go full technical on laws, that is, they don't care much what the governments are trying to achieve with the laws but work within the limits of strict technicality. So a lot of Americans were freaking out here on HN when GDPR was introduced, some shutting down personal projects because were afraid to get in trouble with the EU laws and find themselves in huge and expensive lawsuits.
  - shuckles 3y ago
    So Americans freak out because they believe in rule of law?
    - madsbuch 3y ago
      That is not what the quote says, so no.
      - shuckles 3y ago
        Yeah the quote says Americans freak out because they interpret the law as written. Implicitly, the Europeans defer interpretation to various bureaucrats leading to absurd situations where, eg, member states are retroactively punished for facilitating tax schemes that were allowed by the laws on the books at the time. You might argue that’s a better system with better outcomes, but it’s not rule of law.

criddell 3y ago

There's more than 45 years of precedent if you want to count video game consoles.

grishka 3y ago
Video game consoles are seen by most people, and marketed by their manufacturers, as appliances for playing video games. iPhones and iPads, on the other hand, are seen and marketed as general-purpose computing/communication devices. It's unprecedented for such a non-appliance to be locked down like this.
- nozzlegear 3y ago
  I’d contend that it’s not unprecedented, given that the iPhone is now 17 something years old.
  - grishka 3y ago
    I mean, no other platform did that neither before nor after the iPhone came out. To my knowledge, all other smartphone OSes ever made had some way of sideloading apps.
    - nozzlegear 3y ago
      True, I guess what I was trying to say is that everything's unprecedented until somebody makes the precedent.
    - criddell 3y ago
      Checkout the i-mode. Something like 50 million people were using them in 2001 and they were even more locked down than the iPhone. This was the era when ringtones were $2.99 and cell phone networks were trying their hardest to hold on to that revenue. Closed was definitely the norm back then.
      - grishka 3y ago
        I don't know about i-mode, but the main difficulty with custom ringtones in early 00s was that it wasn't easy to load them into your phone. Most of those phones (in my own experience) came with a ringtone editor where you entered them note by note. They could also be sent and received via SMS, but that in general only worked between phones of the same brand (try sending a ringtone from a Nokia to a Siemens and you get three screens of garbage characters, ask me how I found out). Later ones could be connected to a computer with a "data cable" that was a somewhat rare accessory, but you could then just load MIDI files. Oh, and IR ports. People used them all the time to share ringtones and images and games. Same with Java games when they became popular. The hardest part was getting them onto your phone. You either used a data cable, or had GPRS set up in "internet" mode (as opposed to "wap"), or someone else shared them with you via IR port or Bluetooth. Yes, there were paid ringtones/images/games, or course. But carriers themselves never sold them. It was third-party companies. A ringtone usually was $1. Carrier-locked phones never really caught on in my country. It always worked such that you bought a phone for the full price and provided your own sim card. Some carriers tried the US model early on as an option, but people just weren't having it.
aeyes 3y ago
No there is not, one example would be the yellow tab EA cartridges for the Sega Genesis. EA reverse engineered the Genesis to get around the high licensing cost and Sega knew that they wouldn't be able to challenge this in court.
- westhanover 3y ago
  The yellow tab was nonvolatile memory so season progress could be saved. This comment is a complete lie and should be disregarded.
  - aeyes 3y ago
    You could at least spend 1 minute on the Genesis Wikipedia article which includes several sources to verify my claims. There you'll also find another case where Sega lost in court against similar reverse engineering done by Accolade to run their games on the Genesis without a license from Sega: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_v._Accolade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_v._Accolade

gorbypark 3y ago

I agree with the sentiment, but that's not entirely true. Video game console have pretty much always relied on this model to make money.

izacus 3y ago
Then let's kill that too. We don't need rent seekers killing free market competition.
- quesera 3y ago
  It is not rent-seeking when you built the house and perform the services for which payment is demanded.
  - GardenLetter27 3y ago
    They should be able to opt-out though. E.g. sell games but use no Xbox services on Xbox. I wonder if the DMA will bring Steam to consoles.
  - izacus 3y ago
    It's literally the definition of rent seeking and it's toxic to free market society. We don't want your landlord to get a cut of every thing you buy in their apartment. We don't want them to get a cut of every service you order. We dont't want them to get a cut of every single thing you buy while living in that apartment. We don't want those things for digital landlords either just because they deigned to put together some eletronics they were already paid for.
    - shuckles 3y ago
      Landlording is rent seeking because the landlord did not create the primary value of a property: place. This is not the same at all.
      - izacus 3y ago

lozenge 3y ago

Spotify does pay - 30% of subscription fees.

CubsFan1060 3y ago
I thought that you couldn't subscribe to Spotify via the App. Am I wrong?
- piva00 3y ago
  You are correct, and Spotify can't steer people to a subscription flow outside of the app through the app to not infringe into App Store's policies either. That's one of the main issues, either you pay the 30% Apple tax or you can't even tell your users "click here to subscribe" to a checkout flow outside of the app and App Store.
shadowfiend 3y ago
They do not. This entire case is about them not being able to use in app purchases (in which case they would pay 30%) or steer people to their site to pay for subscriptions. Spotify doesn’t sell subscriptions from the apps, and thus they pay nothing.

brtknr 3y ago

Surely Spotify wouldn't be able to publish if it wasn't paying $100/year fee to Apple. I guess $100 is nothing to Apple.

matwood 3y ago

> Why does Apple feel entitled to get anything from Spotify? Apple has argued they do not sell a piece of hardware, but a platform. It includes hardware, software, and a marketplace (like a video game console like others have said). Apple will also say that they have cultivated the platform to have the most affluent users (like a console again). This shows up in the stats. Even with iOS having a minority marketshare in the EU, all developers want to be on it because that is where the money is. What is access to a market and platform like that worth? Apple thinks 15%-30%. Yes, it has been symbiotic between Apple and devs, but Apple has done something that differentiated it from Android wrt the type of user. Otherwise, all the devs could have left and Apple would have been forced to change long ago.

EMIRELADERO 3y ago
> Apple has argued they do not sell a piece of hardware, but a platform. It includes hardware, software, and a marketplace (like a video game console like others have said). Can this even be quantifiably measured? Usually when selling something you describe, itemize and bill for it. The Apple developer agreement offers the developer tools and access to Apple's App Store and related services. The dev's argument is that Apple is forcing them to enter into that contract to distribute apps to iOS users even when they explicitly wish to opt out of using Apple's developer tools and services.
- matwood 3y ago
  > Can this even be quantifiably measured? Apple thinks it's worth 15%-30%. While app developers may complain, most still stay on the platform. Or are you talking about how much the market is worth? A new analysis has shown that iPhone users spend seven times more on apps than Android users, far higher than the 4x rule of thumb suggested by purely anecdotal data. https://9to5mac.com/2023/09/06/iphone-users-spend-apps/ https://9to5mac.com/2023/09/06/iphone-users-spend-apps/
  - EMIRELADERO 3y ago
    I'm talking about the goods or services that are sold.

wil421 3y ago

How’s this so much different than Nintendo? I’ve never been able to play any game I want to and I’ve always been forced to go through Nintendo or Sony to play games on consoles. (Or Xbox)

madsbuch 3y ago
You house hold AI is your friend: So in summary, in 2021: - Number of Nintendos sold in EU: Over 7.1 million game consoles were sold total, and Nintendo Switch was the best-selling console. - Number of iPhones sold in EU: Around 56 million iPhones. Another commenter mentioned in another discussion something that is very much applicable here: I'm under impression that Americans freak out because they tend to go full technical on laws, that is, they don't care much what the governments are trying to achieve with the laws but work within the limits of strict technicality. So a lot of Americans were freaking out here on HN when GDPR was introduced, some shutting down personal projects because were afraid to get in trouble with the EU laws and find themselves in huge and expensive lawsuits.
- shuckles 3y ago
  So Americans freak out because they believe in rule of law?
  - madsbuch 3y ago
    That is not what the quote says, so no.
    - shuckles 3y ago
      Yeah the quote says Americans freak out because they interpret the law as written. Implicitly, the Europeans defer interpretation to various bureaucrats leading to absurd situations where, eg, member states are retroactively punished for facilitating tax schemes that were allowed by the laws on the books at the time. You might argue that’s a better system with better outcomes, but it’s not rule of law.