I read a comparison on another forum that I thought made sense... Consider Apple is Walmart and Spotify is wanting to sell their product in Walmart. Is Walmart going to take a cut? Of course they are! What if Spotify asked Walmart to give their product box away free from their stores and inside there was a message that said "Hi there, please come to our website and pay to signup for our service!". How is this any different? Does Walmart have an advantage in its store when it sells its own Great Value products? Yes of course they do. If you don't like it, start your own Big Box store!
Apple doesn't get a 30% cut from any user who uses Spotify on iOS, that would be pretty blatant anti-trust. However Apple gets 30% from anyone they handle billing/tracking for.
Spotify, if they allow subscriptions purchased in app, is paying Apple for a service. They're free to think that price is way the hell to high and not sell there.
What if Spotify got their way? What if any app could embed their own payment system minute? Now Apple has hundreds of millions of users who could easily be defrauded and have their credit card stolen from stuff downloaded from their store. They get sued.
As a user, I wouldn't use any of them. The reason I buy so much on iOS is because I trust Apple. I know that if I signed up for a subscription for something it turns out to be a piece of junk, I can easily cancel it with one click. No weird cable company style negotiations. No worrying if some unscrupulous company is going to steal my credit card. Apple has some pretty reasonable reasons for this policy (besides all the obvious selfish/monetary ones).
> What if Spotify got their way? What if any app could embed their own payment system minute? Now Apple has hundreds of millions of users who could easily be defrauded and have their credit card stolen from stuff downloaded from their store. They get sued.
No, they don't get sued.
> As a user, I wouldn't use any of them. The reason I buy so much on iOS is because I trust Apple. I know that if I signed up for a subscription for something it turns out to be a piece of junk, I can easily cancel it with one click. No weird cable company style negotiations. No worrying if some unscrupulous company is going to steal my credit card. Apple has some pretty reasonable reasons for this policy (besides all the obvious selfish/monetary ones).
Then Apple should let you as a user decide whether to use those apps. Apple should let other users decide if they prefer Spotify's billing/tracking in-app. After all Apple would still control the iOS App Store so they can ban any unscrupulous companies that try to steal credit cards. It's absurd though that Apple insists that beforehand that they are the only billing/subscription company that their iOS customers can trust; Amazon for example has been handling ecommerce longer than Apple
Why should they though? This is their monteization strategy and it seems to be working well for them. Why should they provide a platform free of charge for Spotify to make money off of? After all, they are only charging for Spotify customers that became paying subscribers through their platform (App Store). If Spotify advertised and captured a user outside of their platform they don't charge for those subs. How is this difficult to make sense of?
The company owned the land, built the stores, so it only seemed right that they payed their workers in scrip and only allowed merchants to accept scrip in the town, yes? Eventually the country decided that such monetization platforms were too controlling and unfair...
