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Comment by evilduck | Hacker News Reader

Spotify doesn’t even let you buy Premium in the App on iOS anymore, it’s the same price for everyone. So no, it isn’t increasing prices since Spotify isn’t giving a 30% cut to Apple in the first place. As a consumer there’s literally no way for me to funnel money to Apple via Spotify. Spotify could choose to charge 30% more for an App Store IAP, but they’d rather be hostile to consumers and just offer nothing through that mechanism.

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That's Apple being hostile to consumers, not Spotify. And the fact that Apple Music does offer subscriptions and doesn't need to pay 30% was appreciated in Europe with $2B just to make a point to Apple that they absolutely need to stop their BS.

So we’re just going to collectively agree to pretend that Spotify is more expensive due to a made up 30% cut they don’t actually pay?

The same way we're agreeing that Spotify never took in-app payments and decided to withdraw it's payment processing from IOS for reasons unrelated to Apple, yes.

I don't understand what you mean.

The complaint was that a Spotify subscription is more expensive due to Apple taking a 30% cut. Which they don’t do, because Spotify elected to not use IAP at all. I don’t understand this complaint either, since it’s fictional.

I don't have an iPhone, Spotify was just an example, where Apple is in direct competition with another app and abuse their position as the phone manufacturer to charge fees from their competitors that they don't charge from themselves. Do you think Spotify wouldn't like to be able to have the nice UX of IAP if that didn't cost XX% of revenue?

And in the past they used to allow, apparently their deal with Apple was 15%. Why should Apple earn 15% of all revenue on Music streaming for a service that isn't even their service.

> I don't have an iPhone

Yeah, we all knew that. You and about 95% of the other complainers in this thread obviously don't know what you're talking about and keep getting exposed as bad faith actors. It's tiresome and only serves the opposite of what you intend. When someone sees claims like yours and then finds the first result on Google proving you're full of shit, they don't believe the next complaint about Apple that could be legit.

You might be right, I still don't see Spotify being cheaper for Spotify customers if Apple let Spotify users sign up through their iOS app. What's the customer impact? The inconvenience of switching to a web browser for a one time transaction? There are tons of other reasons this happens all the time in other situations.

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