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Comment by pedroaraujo | Hacker News Reader

> There are significant costs associated with the app store, no? Part of the reason users gravitate towards the iPhone is because you can download high quality apps without malware, viruses, etc.

That should be covered by the one time fee that developers pay to Apple in order to publish apps into the App Store. I am not sure if a simple binary needs a 30% cut of the entire Spotify profit to keep up with the costs of hosting an app there.

> Why? They've made the hardware. Why should they have to let Spotify run on it in the exact way Spotify wants? (You can Airplay Spotify to Homepod.)

Because Apple is using a completely different market, which they have a strong presence on, to increase the value of Apple Music and consequently devaluing any other competing music streaming services.

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> Because Apple is using a completely different market, which they have a strong presence on, to increase the value of Apple Music and consequently devaluing any other competing music streaming services.

This is the core issue. Apple using their dominant market position in the hardware/operating system markets to push anticompetitive practices for their product in a different market (Apple Music).

I don't see how this is much different than IE. Maybe even worse in some ways. But regardless, it is very clearly manipulating the market artificially in Apple's favor.

Apple is not dominant in the hardware market in the same way IE was. Nowhere near.

For those who have significant sums invested in the App Store, they are effectively dominant as there is no way to switch app licenses to a different app store.

Sure, but the rules are _reasonably_ unambiguous and unchanging. The 30% cut has been in place since day one. If Spotify didn't like it, they had the choice to focus their attentions exclusively on other platforms. That wasn't the case with Windows+IE, when effectively there were no other platforms of any size.

And worth noting that Spotify grows by millions of paying subscribers every quarter without the app store. They're currently choosing to focus exclusively on other channels rather than try to pay the 30% and… doing better than Apple Music…

> Apple using their dominant market position in the hardware/operating system markets to push anticompetitive practices for their product in a different market (Apple Music).

Allegedly anticompetitive.

Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Facebook all engage in similar behavior by giving preferential treatment of their products/features/services.

I would be upset because I bought the hardware and they arbitrarily won't let my music from Spotify play on it while their own music does.

Remember it's my device, but theirs. Not apples. If they are going to allow third party apps then do so, but there's no technical reason to not allow the service.

Imagine Ford says you can only use a certain brand of tires on your new car, or can only buy tires through the dealership. That's what's going on here.

My device *not theirs.

That's the reason I don't buy Apple stuff to begin with.

Wha? You buy an Amazon Alexa and it only supports certain music services. Certain Bose speakers have Spotify integration https://www.spotify.com/uk/bose/ - how is this not the same?

It's your device that you bought, which quite clearly doesn't support the things you want, so why did you buy it?

> That should be covered by the one time fee that developers pay to Apple in order to publish apps into the App Store. I am not sure if a simple binary needs a 30% cut of the entire Spotify profit to keep up with the costs of hosting an app there.

We're now into the murky world of trying to tell other people what their cost base or margins should be.

Another view is that Apple fairly charges a consistent 30% to all customers in the app store. In the same way as Amazon doesn't pay to list its own products on Amazon, and Google doesn't pay to advertise Chrome on google.com, Apple should not have to pay to market its own services on its own marketplace.

>That should be covered by the one time fee that developers pay to Apple in order to publish apps into the App Store

As a developer I can push a hundred updates per day if I want to, and they all have to be reviewed by a human. How large of a "one time fee" should be expected to cover the cost of that review?

> That should be covered by the one time fee that developers pay to Apple in order to publish apps into the App Store.

That seems quite unrealistic. Apple certainly has recurring costs to keep the app store running. Taking a one time publishing fee wouldn't be sustainable long term.

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