Apple EU Antitrust Protest a Weird Thing to Do Just as the DMA Is Taking Effect

Fighting Spotify on this so hard remains really weird to me for a few reasons:

* Apple is a direct competitor to Spotify in multiple areas, they obviously benefit from putting Spotify at a disadvantage and keeping them there.

* Apple has vertical integration Spotify can't compete with, where their competing product(s) ship with their phones.

* Apple gets to pocket 30% of what their competitor earns, and their competitor isn't allowed to do anything about it.

* In practice, even without the anti-steering policy, very few people are going to go to the trouble of subscribing to Spotify in a browser when they could do it conveniently through the app via Apple's streamlined UX instead.

At some point it should have been obvious to Apple that it was best to just cave slightly on anti-steering to the point that developers stop getting mad about it.

In the past I recall that Apple prohibited Facebook from disclosing that 30% of what you thought you were paying to people for event tickets was going to Apple instead of the event operator. That's another case where aggressively enforcing policy makes them look like jerks for no upside. The money in question is effectively pennies.

Apple so focused on a walled garden in this time and age is going be their undoing.

why does apple "need" third party developers who develop apps on their machines who sell on their own store to customers who have already paid apple the full price of an iphone at the time of purchase?

its like ford or tesla demanding fuel companies and utilities the privilege to allow them to sell their products to customers to put into their vehicles because "they enabled the car to be so good and tech and R&D and shit"