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owenwil

The claims in here are pretty wild, particularly around how Apple has favored its own products:

- Apple blocked Spotify from working with Apple Watch

- It blocked Spotify from building apps for HomePod

- It blocked Spotify from building apps for Siri

- It blocks Spotify updates on a regular basis

- It blocked Spotify from using a podcasting API after it acquired 2x major podcasting companies

I genuinely hope Europe takes this seriously. The issue of the 30% cut alone is enough for further investigation, particularly as Apple now uses that as an advantage to undercut Spotify with Apple Music.

View on HN

> - It blocked Spotify from using a podcasting API after it acquired 2x major podcasting companies

Interesting one since it is Spotify that is trying to close the currently open podcasting universe.

Let's not pretend that Spotify is either the white knight or the underdog here. This is two big companies negotiating over pricing.

Well Apple is one of the biggest companies in the world, Spotify may not be a white knight but they're definitely an underdog.

I'd be more likely to consider Spotify an underdog if they weren't a VC-fueled, still-not-profitable startup.

I'd like to think comparing a VC-funded company to one of the largest public companies on earth the very definition of underdog.

Especially one that isn't currently making money, presumably if Apple wasn't engaging in anti-market strategies they would have more revenue.

How much, I have no clue - but if they can't even have a "get premium now" button in the app then that's insane to me. The 30% fee Apple would take isn't a real alternative either, it's still not profitable.

Spotify is public

> Apple blocked Spotify from working with Apple Watch

I'm not sure this is 100% true. From browsing the spotify support forums many moons ago, some guy had built a spotify playing app for the apple watch, but spotify squashed it. Given that some random dev could do this, it doesn't seem like apple prevented anything.

If a random guy can make the app then Spotify could certainly have made an Apple Watch app.

If anything it makes the case that if it were so simple for a single random dev that unless Apple itself were preventing it there is no reason the app wouldn't have been released.

For god sake, it's about policy not tech inability! You don't even need to read the website to know that. WatchOS has APIs like iOS, it's not a matter of being 'hard' to program. It's because if you're nobody, the spotlight is not on you every step you take. But Spotify being your competitor is being close watched.

But it was Spotify that asked the random guy to take the app down. If anything I would have thought it would be in Spotify's interests to keep it up - "look it's possible, but Apple isn't allowing us"

Of course, because this guy had no rights. It’s already technically possible without having to keep an app alive that’s infringing your property just to say ‘hey look’

Counterargument: Apple's review process is more likely to let "some guy's" app slip through the cracks and make it in the App Store than the official app of one of its huge competitors with an install base of many, many, many millions of devices.

If I remember correctly the app wasn't on the app store (presumably because it couldn't get approved)

I have an install of Apollo for Spotify on my Apple Watch.

It streams Spotify directly without your phone and has a very flaky offline mode.

The developer tweeted that Spotify (not Apple) asked him to remove it four days after it reached the App Store.

I was lucky enough to get hold of it in that brief window and use it often.

And its frustrating because a company like Spotify surely isn't asking Apple ahead of time if they can build a watch app.

This is the correct answer. Some guy isnt Spotify. Apple wasnt going to let Spotify proper do it however they just dont care about Jim Bob tinkering.

Perhaps. No one has any evidence of this in this case though, so it sounds like you're just taking a side.

On the other hand Spotify did squash this guy's app. That's a thing that happened. So it's not like the APIs aren't there.

So now we're taking Spotify's word that Apple is keeping them off the app store, while ignoring the fact that said app is possible and they themselves have kept an app off the app store.

Sounds like PR bullshit all around.

True, I just offered a counterargument based on conjecture. So let's assume at least rational behavior on the part of Spotify. What do you think would be their rationale for not building a feature that would enhance their product and is desired by customers? What do they gain by blaming Apple for not building it? This isn't rhetorical... I think there are potential legitimate reasons they'd want to do this, I'm just curious about where your thinking is on this.

Spotify did not squash the random guy that made that app, they asked him to change the name and then hired him to work on the official app.

That was "Spotty". There was another in November called Apollo that Spotify squashed.

Spotify is available (on apple watch) now, for whatever that's worth... Took me about 2 minutes from reading the complaint to playing Spotify (already had an account) on my watch. That includes downloading from the store and then to the watch (which has in the past, with other apps, taken a while)

They state in their timeline that after many years Apple did allow Spotify.

The Apple Watch has almost been available 4 years... In the first year and a half all apps were extremely limited. I'm not sure if that leaves "many" years for them to not allow Spotify.

Until last year there was not an API that allowed apps to download music to the local storage of the watch and play it back in the background.

https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2018/504/

> They state in their timeline that after many years Apple did allow Spotify.

This is a VERY different statement than the true one which is:

Apple didn't allow ANY streaming music (or audiobook, or podcast) apps on the watch due to not providing the API's. They didn't specifically block Spotify.

I _believe_ the issue here is some app developers were invited to visit Apple and (perhaps) get access to certain APIs that weren't going to be made available to normal app developers.

- If you're deep into iOS development you know that Apple apps - the ones shipped with the OS - sometimes do things that 3rd party apps aren't able to. For example the Music app gets to be the _default_ app to live in the control panel even if you hardly ever use it and are using Spotify most of the time.

- I believe - for the Apple Watch - some of the 3rd party apps which were already available on the day of the launch were a) invited to preview the Watch ahead of other developers and b) in some cases allowed to use undocumented APIs. Uber may be one example of this - https://www.macrumors.com/2017/10/05/uber-removing-apple-gra...

Apple has been inviting 3rd party developers to preview technologies for a while e.g. https://appleinsider.com/articles/16/06/17/apple-invites-dev... so it seems to be standard practice.

As I read this "Time to Play Fair" website, it looks to me like Spotify is complaining they weren't invited to these preview sessions and thereby didn't get to learn about / get permission to use undocumented APIs.

Of course IANAL

It's one thing to make an app, it's an entirely different thing to get it through the App Store review process.

Did that guy's app make it on the App Store? He could have easily built it with private APIs which would work but wouldn't pass review (maybe, App Review is very inconsistent) or many other reasons why he could and Spotify couldn't.

My read from the linked timeline is that Apple didn't block Spotify from the Apple Watch, but rather wouldn't provide the API necessary to Spotify for offline-mode.

I inferred this from the vague wording in the earlier points and the clarifications in the later points.

> When Apple launches their new Apple Watch, they dismiss our proposals and won’t work with us to develop an app for it.

Notice, they didn't say they were blocked. Also why would building an app for the watch necessitate a proposal to Apple that requires Apple to work with them directly? Wouldn't you instead build your app and submit it for approval? This is probably because the Apple Watch SDK didn't provide all the functionality Spotify wanted, and so Spotify was trying to get Apple to add new functionality to the SDK.

> We submit a new proposal for a streaming app directly on the Apple Watch. Apple declines

> With WatchOS 4, Apple continues to make it challenging for us to deliver a workable streaming solution for the Apple Watch

Again, doesn't say they were blocked, just that proposals were rejected and the provided functionality made it difficult/impossible to do what they wanted.

> With Watch OS 5, Apple allowed the Spotify team to start developing offline functionality

Was this the functionality Spotify was proposing for Apple to make possible all along? In other words, was this the missing part of the SDK that Spotify had kept proposing to Apple and having rejected (not the app itself, which they didn't want to build without this functionality)?

EDIT: I'm also not saying they didn't build the app and submit it and have it rejected. They just never actually say that in the timeline.

If you read between the lines, it's clear that Spotify was able to make a normal watch app. But they wanted to make one that had special functionality not yet allowed by Apple, for any app, not just Spotify.

There is a fine line between reading between the lines and fabricating things. Can you point to what exactly in that website substantiates your implication?

Their timeline is a bit unclear. They claim that in 2015 and 2016, they were denied outright. In 2017 they say that "Apple continues to make it challenging for us to deliver a workable streaming solution for the Apple Watch". Then in 2018 they say that "Apple finally allows enhanced functionality for the Spotify app on the Apple Watch".

Until watchos 5, 3rd party apps couldn’t do lte streaming. That said, lte was new in watchos 4, the tslk was that apple wanted to initially restrict it for battery life reasons.

Spotify could have made a watch app that provided controls and had offline somgs. They didn’t, and kept shutting down spps that did, or buying them and shutting them. This was a major sore point against spotify on the apple watch subreddit. Even now they’re dragging their feet, iirc.

Their point is that Apple app could do that and it was unfair to block other apps to be able to do the same.

The watch is a new, battery constrained device. It doesn’t seem unreasonable to limit 3rd party apps for a bit while sorting out how to work with the size constraints.

I’m guessing apple will add lte support for 3rd party apps in watchos 6. Meanwhile, 3rd party apps have had the ability to make apps with offline support since June 2018. Most audio apps have added this.

Spotify....has not. What’s the holdup? Apple watch users are pretty frustrated with spotify: if all the other audio apps can do it, why haven’t they?

(Lte is an edge case: few watches have lte, and even fewer have an active lte plan. Offline audio is the main use case spotify still isn’t doing)

Ex-spotifier here. It's most likely that they wanted to use functionality available to Apple Music, but not any other app.

I don't know about the others, but Spotify is BSing about being blocked on the Apple Watch.

Until WatchOS 5 the APIs to do something like Spotify didn't really exist. There were workarounds, like by abusing the workout API, but unsurprisingly these has significant drawbacks, were unstable and Apple cracked down when they found API abuses.

Apple "blocked" Spotify only in that it hadn't (yet) released APIs that supported their use cases.

It makes me wonder how disingenuous their other claims are.

I do think services should have more options than Apple allows for accepting payment.

> - Apple blocked Spotify from working with Apple Watch / HomePad

But they've blocked every streaming music thing, right? It wasn't a vindictive campaign targetted at Spotify as this timeline is suggesting - no-one got to build streaming music apps for the Watch or HomePod IIRC.

I believe this is their point: Apple deliberately leaves those features unbuilt in order to give itself a market position that others can't compete with

Which raises the question: to what degree does a platform owner have a responsibility to support the businesses of others?

Rephrased, Spotify seems to think it has a /right/ to run its software on Apple platforms in an identical fashion to Apple's first-party software. Does that mean Apple has an obligation to provide an equivalent technical capacity for literally any software that runs on its devices? An app store? A payment provider? A cloud provider? A health data store? An update mechanism?

EDIT: This is no longer true, and doesn't exist in the guidelines

[---- obsolete info ----]

Yeah, it's a bit of a grey area.

However, App Store policies explicitly forbid apps that duplicate iOS and first-party functionality IIRC. Now that Apple has Maps, and Apple Music, and Podcasts, and..., and... should they enforce those rules?

[---- obsolete info ----]

> However, App Store policies explicitly forbid apps that duplicate iOS and first-party functionality IIRC. Now that Apple has Maps, and Apple Music, and Podcasts, and..., and... should they enforce those rules?

You should probably pull out the relevant quote from the guidelines. I don't think this is a thing anymore, at least in the way you're describing. If they did enforce it it would be a huge blow to the App Store.

You're right. This is no longer in the guidelines, updated my comment accordingly

> Which raises the question: to what degree does a platform owner have a responsibility to support the businesses of others?

I wish you'd stopped here because this is an interesting question, but the rest of your comment feels like it stretches things a bit.

What Spotify seems to be saying (correct me if I'm wrong), is that Apple does provide the technical capabilities for third parties to do as they're asking, but Apple is rejecting proposals purely on whim. It's not like there's not a API to stream music on the Apple Watch or play music through HomePod. It's all there. Apple's just blocking them from using it.

Once you publish an API you’re stuck with supporting it. When I’m hacking around with a library I wrote for my own use, I might do all sorts of things while I’m iterating but don’t want others to consume until they are fully baked.

The same thing about not allowing others to use “private APIs”. No guarantees are made about any methods that I didn’t make public. If I change that method in future releases, and your software that depends on it breaks - so be it.

Windows is full of backward compatibility hacks because one piece of software that wanted to use an undocumented method.

Apple has since day one had APIs that it used privately until they were fully baked and made public. Do you think that Apple waited two or three years to make share extensions public because of competitive reasons?

Is it really a platform if it doesn't support 3rd party businesses?

Who gets to define the term platform? I think this is just arguing semantics.

I think that's precisely the point.

If the Apple Watch and WatchOS is a device then I expect it to only contain Apple software.

If the Apple Watch and WatchOS is a platform then I expect to be able to install 3rd party software on it.

The real question is how much feature-parity should 3rd parties expect when developing on another company's platform?

Microsoft used to be roundly criticized for supposedly building private APIs into Windows that Microsoft Office was allowed to use either because they were undocumented, or Office got the documentation far ahead of anyone else.

I'd say if you're selling $1200 computer devices, one principle of that is ownership and that you get to run what you want, not what Apple wants. We seem to have come a long way on this site from fighting Tivoization of embedded platforms, and unrepairable, unfixable, unhackable consumer electronics, to people making excuses for a super locked down platform, and not even on the excuse that it helps security, but from a philosophical standpoint that somehow Apple is morally right to do whatever they want.

Yes, you have a choice of not buying Apple software, just like you had the choice of not buying Windows and using Linux, or building a MythTV instead of a Tivo, but keep in mind, in the latter case, this was only possible because the CableCard standard was forced by law on the cable industry.

Apple can maintain their high levels of security and privacy without their 30% cut of subscriptions, it's a false dichotomy to pretend their behavior is anything but rent seeking.

>Microsoft used to be roundly criticized for supposedly building private APIs into Windows that Microsoft Office was allowed to use either because they were undocumented, or Office got the documentation far ahead of anyone else.

At the same time though, Microsoft wasn't preventing other developers from using those hidden APIs (if they could find them) nor preventing them from publishing their own competing apps. Sure, Microsoft's behaviour at the time was anti-competitive and sometimes even predatory, but they were never so on Windows to the extent that Apple is today on iOS.

> Rephrased, Spotify seems to think it has a /right/ to run its software on Apple platforms in an identical fashion to Apple's first-party software. Does that mean Apple has an obligation to provide an equivalent technical capacity for literally any software that runs on its devices?

Yes.

> An app store? A payment provider? A cloud provider? A health data store? An update mechanism?

Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes and Yes.

To do otherwise, is to invite platform owners to be (potentially abusive) monopolists with a license to favor their own services instead of promoting and maintaining fair competition in markets on top of that platform. In western societies, since the last century, that has been behavior which has been regulated by law and courts.

For comparison, Android keeps a very clear line between the 'Platform', and the 'Apps'.

Every API on the platform is available to all apps which have the necessary permissions.

Sure, it might look like Google has taken over key low level features of the device like updates and wifi location, but in fact from the platform perspective, all those components have an open API and can be replaced.

The only fly in the ointment here is some of the API's require powerful permissions which aren't allowed in store apps, but you can still sideload them, or use an alternate store.

This may have changed recently, haven't used an Android in a bit, but this wasn't true (and still probably isn't).

Specifically my company wanted to break our app into multiple apps and give a way for people to easily install the companions. If you send the user to the Play Store page, about 75% of users would dropoff, in user studies much of it was confusion about what to do once they saw the play store page.

Google has an api that is a much simpler flow than the full store experience which has much lower user dropoff. If you're curious where it's used, one example is the Google Drive app to install the Docs, Sheets, etc.

The API validates that the calling app is an app signed by the Google dev cert.

This isn't a security issue, you could just ship one app with all the functionality. It's clear they just wanted to reduce user drop off in a flow, but now provide that option to others.

I understand the potential for abuse even though the api still checked with the user. It wouldn't bother me if no one had access to the API, we'd just have to deal with it. But it felt anti-competitive that Google had it and we did not.

IIRC there are a few other similar non-security private APIs and they also felt anti-competitive to us. That said, it was no where near on the order of Apple, where it's commonplace on iOS.

I believe that API is in the play store itself. If your user used a third party store, you could ask them to give you an API to install other apps with no user interaction too.

As far as the platform is concerned, any app with the right permissions can install any other app. It just so happens that only the play store and other stores have that permission.

That's true; you're right that there is a open platform between the AOSP layer and the APK apps that run on top of it.

As you point out there is a fly in the ointment (which is enhanced by Google making it very difficult to ship with anything but the Play Store).

As an app developer like Spotify, the platform is the base of devices out there in the wild and how I build on top of them which, for me, is inclusive of the play services and play store.

Android definitely is a lot more open than iOS. But when the Play Store enforces a mechanism that favors Google, it's not of a practical difference to my livelihood than when the App Store has policies that favor Apple. If you have a really loyal following, like Epic/Fortnite, it's better than nothing. But even then the barrier to your users is huge and even the most establish companies with technical user bases will have a hard time crossing it. Nevermind the fledgling startups or developers with non-technical user bases.

You can also ask if Netflix has a /right/ to send their videos to consumers using Comcast's network. Or if Bing has a /right/ to be accessible on Google Chrome.

Thanks to recent FCC rule changes, the answer in the USA is: "For Now...."

> to what degree does a platform owner have a responsibility to support the businesses of others?

Perhaps they should not be allowed (by law) to change the terms of the platform for X amount of time.

> Apple deliberately leaves those features unbuilt in order to give itself a market position that others can't compete with

There's a vast gulf between "Spotify was blocked" and "Apple didn't spend time and money building a service that Spotify wanted".

From a layman perspective: Why can Siri make Apple Music play artists, albums, playlists, and songs but I can't ask Siri to do the same with Spotify?

Clearly the technology is there, but Apple is not letting Spotify use it.

Spotify should be able to do this using the API provided in iOS 12.

It's not about the tech, it's about policy.

Tech is there, https://developer.apple.com/documentation/sirikit/media_inte...

I'm sure Spotify has no problems with the knowledge of its engineers, I just found the APIs in 5 min. In fact, number 4 of this page explains your comment: https://www.timetoplayfair.com/facts/

This is for the lawyers to make sense of, but in electing to be a platform provider, they should be held to higher standards in my opinion.

They did indeed have "the service" in question, it was just limited to Apple's own offering.

It's a scenario not unlike net neutrality: an infrastructure provider that is also a content provider can put themselves or select customers in a position where free market forces are hindered or suspended in order to achieve a monopoly-like status.

> They did indeed have "the service" in question, it was just limited to Apple's own offering.

Again, there's a difference between "Siri can talk to our music service" and "We have a stable public API that 3rd party vendors can hook into to connect up to a music service". They're not the same thing, and one is a lot easier than the other.

None of the above was an argument about how easy or hard it is to build a service (though Apple has enough resources to build anything they want within the scope that they operate).

Given that they are a platform provider, maybe doing the bare minimum to get their own stuff working, but not enough to get any alternatives to work, is a strategic choice on their part.

"If Homepod only works with Apple Music, more people will switch"

No, a hardware manufacturer has no requirement to support any specific software. An infrastructure provider, however, has (in MY opinion) a requirement to support what they support to an equal degree, or it amounts to… market manipulation? Something not quite fair, some kind of abuse of power which is to the detriment of all other participants in the market, customers and companies alike.

Obviously, America as of today disagrees, seeing as net neutrality is not held in very high regard.

I look forward to roads that only support Fords, water pipes that only support Nestlé water, and stairs that only support Nike shoes.

> I look forward to roads that only support Fords, water pipes that only support Nestlé water, and stairs that only support Nike shoes.

Thankfully, America is not (yet) stupid enough to let private companies build our critical infrastructure, and thankfully "voice controlled speaker" is as critical as chewing gum.

Except they have a history of later opening up some of these features to others - see password managers, ~streaming~music~on~the~Watch~, etc.

EDIT: I thought you could now stream on the Watch but further research suggests that's still not possible. In summary, confusion.

Can iOS natively or iTunes stream music through those devices?

Feels worse to me than what Google was heavily fined for.

Yes, every streaming music thing but Apple Music. Available in watchOS 4.1 (vs 5.0 a year later for spotify). And for HomePod since release AFAIK.

It's also funny because Spotify won't let other people integrate their streaming service on a device (even only for premium subscribers) if you don't follow a huge list of restrictions.

> It blocked Spotify from using a podcasting API after it acquired 2x major podcasting companies

Is this talking about the Apple Watch-Podcasting issue? Until recently, podcast apps on the watch had issues saving where you are in an episode because they couldn't constantly run in the background; you could still play audio in the background without your app, you just couldn't watch the percentage played. Fitness tracking apps were allowed to run in the background forever, so some podcast apps told the API they were fitness apps to get around the restriction [0]. Apple later removed this loophole and created the APIs necessary for podcast apps to work on the watch [1].

[0] https://marco.org/2017/08/10/removed-send-to-watch#fn:pLK9h4...

[1] https://marco.org/2018/09/17/overcast5

It's pretty clear that Apple is using a dominant platform position to raise prices and block competition.

By raising prices and blocking access to competing services, Apple is acting with malice to consumer welfare.

> The issue of the 30% cut alone is enough for further investigation,

Not really, it's 30% for everyone, not just Spotify.

Unless "everyone" also includes Apple Music, then it's anti-competitive.

That’s like demanding newpapers pay full price for ad space on their own pages. Just absurd. What does it even mean, Apple owns Apple Music.

Apple have a monopoly on the distribution of iOS apps, so they are required to offer fair terms to all app vendors, including themselves.

Apple could charge themselves the 30% App Store fee for Apple Music, demonstrating that the App Store is a fair marketplace that doesn't artificially advantage Apple's own services. It would then be incumbent on Apple to prove that Apple Music is priced fairly, rather than being deliberately operated at a loss to squeeze other streaming music services out of the market.

NYT Newspaper also has a monopoly on distribution of ads on NYT pages, so should they charge themselves to put their own ads?

Yes. So costs of putting up an ad are reflected in the relevant departments. Large corps do this all the time, transferring money from the left pocket to their right pocket.

It's somewhat similar to net neutrality proposals. AT&T doesn't have a monopoly as an ISP. However, if AT&T starts/acquires a video streaming service, they should not give unfair advantages to their own service because they want to compete with Netflix.

And Apple probably does this too.

What does it change ? Nothing.

Not absurd. Different departments in the same company have budgets of their own. If a department wants to buy an ad from their own paper, it should affect their remaining budget, just as it should show up on the Ad department's revenue.

Sure, but this would not affect Apple music, it’s not like they would shut it down. The Apple eco-system is so popular because Apple takes a holistic approach, they wouldn’t mind at all losing money on Apple music if it increased iPhone earnings.

.. that would just be Apple paying themselves.

Technically it does? Apple could be taking a 30% cut all Apple Music subscriptions for hosting the application and processing the payment. Apple then gets the remaining 70%.

Do they actually take a 30% cut? If they're accounting in that manner, then it's likely that Apple Music is running at a substantial loss, which would constitute predatory pricing under EU competition law.

Does it count as a loss if they’re both taking that loss on iOS users?

You have an overly simplified view of Apple Music.

It’s on multiple platforms, it’s tied to Beats, it has a relationship with iTunes Store, there is advertising involved etc. So there could be multiple licensing and revenue sharing deals that mean Apple Music is not running at a loss.

In fact I think it’s likely than you’re wrong.

Apple does pay artists a much larger cut than Spotify. At e.g. 5000 streams Apple pays the artist ca 37 USD vs the 22 USD that Spotify pays out.

$22*1.30 = $35.1

Interesting, so Spotify could pay nearly the same simply by paying the 30% to artists instead of Apple.

And of course, those 37 might already be partly paid by Spotify anyway.

22*1.3 = 28.6

Don’t worry, Apple takes a 100% cut of Apple Music’s revenue

Which might be negative.

> Not really, it's 30% for everyone, not just Spotify.

As they mention on the website. That's not true. It's not 30% for Uber or Deliveroo. And most importantly, it's not 30% for Apple Music.

It seems that 30% is for features that are delivery in app, since Uber and Deliveroo are delivered outside app they have a lower cut. It's just commission cut rules by Apple.

Regarding Apple Music I'm not sure what that supposed to mean. I'm pretty sure that Spotify doesn't charge the same for "Spotify Premium" and "McDonalds" ads.

And most importantly, it's not 30% for Apple Music.

What do you mean it isn't? Apple Store could trivially take a 30% cut of the Apple Music revenue, and the only thing that would change would be the distribution of revenue between Apple Music and Apple Store in Apple's revenue reports. The total revenue would be the same.

Exactly, but Apple can run their streaming service as a loss leader because they still get to book the 30% revenue on the store side. Spotify can't recoup that 30%.

This effectively gives Apple an extra 30% margin for their streaming music service.

So in that case we shouldn’t allow any VC backed company because they are all pretty much running at a loss.

I definitely couldn’t start a ride sharing company when Uber and Lyft are being funded by VCs...

It's 30% for "in-app purchases" which is a specific API which allows one-click payment for one-time purchases or subscriptions ONLY FOR digital goods, and the payment goes through the iTunes account (eg: credit card).

If you buy a real world product or service, you need to use a third party payment service like Stripe (or Apple Pay, if you want), there is a 0% commission fee from Apple. This is why Amazon can distribute an app on iOS that allows to buy whatever you want without Apple getting a cut; well, anything but digital goods, like Kindle books, which in fact can't be bought from Amazon iOS app.

Even if it's for everyone, the point is: it's egregious. Even more so when Apple competes in the same space.

I don't see how blocking a company actively trying to monopolize podcasts from using the Apple recommendation API is monopolistic. Apple podcasts (either intentionally or just from neglect) have always been backed by open RSS podcasting.

-Apple blocked Spotify from working with Apple Watch

The newest version of WatchOS does allow it. The first generation of watchOS really didn’t allow any apps - just remote views of iOS apps (yeah I’m simplifying it).

- It blocked Spotify from building apps for HomePod

Apple doesn’t have any apps on the HomePod. Now we are going to force all single purpose devices to ship with an SDK?

- It blocked Spotify from building apps for Siri

Apple also just came out with any third party integration with Siri a version or two ago. Again we want the government to dictate the timeline when they build features for apps?

- It blocked Spotify from using a podcasting API after it acquired 2x major podcasting companies

Netflix also blocked its API from most third parties years ago. Can we sue Netflix?

- Apple blocked Spotify from working with Apple Watch

How? By not providing API's to do what they wanted? yawn Next?

- It blocked Spotify from building apps for HomePod

How? By not providing API's to do what they wanted? yawn Next?

- It blocked Spotify from building apps for Siri

How? By not providing API's to do what they wanted? yawn Next?

- It blocks Spotify updates on a regular basis

Wakes up Ok here we have the first real issue, BUT even with that said this is SUPER one-sided. We have only Spotify's word and given their liberal stretching of the truth (or outright breaking it in some cases) I'm not willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.

- It blocked Spotify from using a podcasting API after it acquired 2x major podcasting companies

I'm going to need more info on this because it is super vague.

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