It is interesting how that timelines blames the 30% Apple tax as the reason why they had to up the price to 12.99/mo; but they somehow did not bring it back to 9.99/mo when they managed to go around the tax.
I am not defending Apple’s practices, I just find the omission on a website called “time to play fair” sweetly ironic.
But Spotify is the same way. They underpay the artists in the market they dominate. Everybody with Monopoly in any market is abusing it and pointing fingers at the others.
How and when did they manage to go around the 30% fee[1]?
[1] Not sure if "fee" is the correct term, but it's certainly not a tax, because those are issued by governmental organizations by definition (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax).
Every day I learn something new that Apple does that sucks.
They're an absolutely terrible company, and are actively ruining something I love which is general purpose computing with the user as owner. Fuck Apple.
its because apple is taking a cut that it costs more. If you don't want to pay it, subscribe on a platform like a normal web browser that doesn't force spotify to pay a cut to apple.
Devils advocate: why should Apple be obliged to ‘play fair’? The success of the App Store doesn’t change the fact that it’s their product on their platform and they can do whatever they want with it.
I find everything that Spotify says about the Watch to be disingenuous.
> Us: "Hey Apple, we love your watch; can we make an app for that?" Them: "nah
The first Apple Watch was slow, and didn’t have any real third party apps at all. They were basically all running on the phone and displaying things slowly on the Watch.
> Apple rejects Spotify's proposal for an Apple Watch app yet again (2016)
This was before the cellular watch came out. How much good would any streaming service be with wifi only? Even then, for battery saving reasons, the Watch really preferred Bluetooth to communicate with the phone
> This app update means that rival apps have to agree not to “directly or indirectly target iOS users to use a purchasing method other than IAP or discourage the use of IAP.”
No retailer is going to let a company advertise how to buy products cheaper somewhere else.
> Apple finally allows enhanced functionality for the Spotify app on the Apple Watch (2018)
And it took Spotify over two years to support streaming music from the Watch.
And now they introduce their own “podcast player” that can’t play podcasts - ie audio hosted on a server where I can subscribe to a RSS feed.
> No retailer is going to let a company advertise how to buy products cheaper somewhere else.
That was an odd way to elide over the idea that a "retailer" can now stay in your pocket for 2-60 years and become a middleman to every financial transaction.
If you sign up for a streaming service via Roku, Roku gets a cut as a middleman - forever. you can sign up outside of Roku just like you could sign up for Spotify outside of the App Store.
You don't need cellular for a streaming service to be useful on a watch. You can download music to the watch while on WiFi and then can play it while out on a run or whatever while your phone is at home.
Yes, I have approximately zero trust in anything Spotify says regarding the Apple Watch. They have dragged their feet repeatedly on it, and even now their implementation is shit.
I have no horse in this race, and, thus, no valid opinions on the Spotify/Apple spat.
However, I have written a few Watch apps.
It’s quite difficult, and there are severe limitations, due (I suspect) to power-saving and limited display size stuff (in addition to all the private SDK restrictions, and privacy/sandbox safeguards that all Apple platforms have). The SDK is frustratingly hobbled, and the Watch, itself, wasn’t really (in my opinion) usable, until Generation 4. Nowadays, I see them everywhere (but I live in a fairly affluent area, so I see Apple kit all over the place).
I can’t imagine hybrid apps (like Ionic or React Native) working on the Watch, so it needs to be done in native Swift and/or ObjC. There’s actually a dearth of true native developers (I am one, and find it difficult to connect with others that I can talk to).
I mean I totally get that the watch is a constrained environment and you can’t just slap Electron on it and call it a day or whatever. I have also worked with the SDK and I agree it’s quite limited.
But we’re not talking about a fly-by-night startup - Spotify has a good deal of resources and the requirements for their application are pretty straightforward. Yet every single time I use it it fails in some stupid, unintelligible way. It has a couple of very obvious race conditions in the UI, and it took years to get to this state. I have some sympathy for the difficulty of the implementation but at this point it’s a bit of a joke.
There was a third party developer who made a Spotify app for the watch. Spotify hired him and then dragged its feet for 2 more years. Even now there are third party apps that perform better than Spotify. I think Spotify is finally releasing a decent app but they’re absolutely not without sin in this fight. Even after Apple added some functionality they wanted they didn’t want to build anything because that would’ve made their case weak. They put their petty grievances over caring about their loyal customers.
> They put their petty grievances over caring about their loyal customers.
Could that not also be used to describe Apple's business practices, who forces Spotify to charge higher prices on their platform? Or their move to block Epic Games from releasing their own software storefront? Or how they force people to use a single browser engine?
Petty grievances make the world go round, friend. If you want to throw stones at Spotify though, I should first warn you that your glass house is awfully fragile.
There's a big issue with the reliability of communications between the phone, and the watch.
We can't assume that communications will happen in realtime. Even Apple's apps have some weird lag, and unpredictability. It's far better on the newest Watches. I've watched it improve, over generations (I currently have an 8, but my earliest one was a 2).
Any app that requires realtime sync with the phone is gonna have issues (I have tried writing them, and learned this, the hard way).
> the requirements for their application are pretty straightforward.
Surprisingly, not entirely straightforward. Source: working at Spotify.
Should the app be better? OF COURSE. But the scenarios it can be used in can be weird and complicated by legal matters.
If a user on free tier joins a group session over wi-fi at a friend's house, when the friend has premium subscription, what happens to queues, song skips, and what status is displayed on which devices? :) Note: even getting the device name is often tricky.
And there are hundreds of such use cases per device because different devices have different capabilities and limitations (on some devices you don't even have control over the UI presented to the user).
Without revealing too much, there's an ongoing work to make this stuff better, faster, more seamless, and from personal experience Spotify has been better across devices in recent years. But... It's still weird, brittle at times, and takes time to propagate to some devices and apps.
But it should get better (don't quote me on that :)) )
I really do appreciate your view and want to stress that it’s not a personal attack on you or any other engineer at Spotify. Like any software project it’s very easy for someone outside to point at it and say “this is simple and you are bad for not doing better”, and that rarely reflects the complicated reality.
But the flip-side of that is that every single time I try to use this software—something I fork over money for every month—it fails in some baffling, opaque way. At that level it’s more of a management and prioritisation issue - this is exactly the sort of thing that is likely to make me throw my hands up and switch to an alternative.
Also, and I suspect that you would know better than I, there's usually an issue with The Corporate Library, in $BIGCORP.
Most corporations, over a certain size, tend to develop an internal SDK/dependency, that needs to be reflected in all their software. This can bring all sorts of issues.
Spotify is just doing the age-old cycle of getting out-competed despite first mover advantage and then appealing to government authorities to try and stifle competition. When your only idea for innovation is trying to monopolize podcasts while your competitor is rolling out features like spatial audio (which is actually phenomenal) the writing is on the wall.
Is it free competition?
As far as I know Apple always attempts to screw with competitors, Apple apps using private functionality, ignoring privacy settings etc. Can I compete fair with Siri, say I have a better quality version that works 10 times better? |
I can't , but I am free to create a phone and OS first, bundle my app in and compete with Apple like this... so the better Siri will not happen , users suffer a lower quality app and will ignore Siri because is garbage, only Apple wins.
This point has been debated extensively in thousands of threads with strong arguments made on both sides so I won't dive into it again as it's somewhat off topic to the actual response I made.
I'll instead ask- what has Spotify actually done to stay competitive in streaming music since being founded in 2006? Apple has actually innovated in this space and frankly has a much stronger offering today despite launching 9 years later (higher stream quality, spatial audio, more money to artists, larger library). I won't claim Apple is perfect by any means, but Spotify really doesn't garner my sympathy either as the company who's chief "innovation" has been trying to snuff out independent podcasts and lobbying the EU for protectionism.
Stream quality and catalog sizes are both legal issues with music rights holders and have nothing to do with streaming innovation. Unless you consider Apple having a boatload of money to make legal issues go away a kind of innovation.
Streaming music is a bad product to base your entire business on period. It’s the classic “DropBox problem”. It’s feature not a product.
The music industry will always get 70% of revenue for streaming music. The video streaming services for the most part negotiate a fixed cost license and then as they grew, they could theoretically spread the cost.
I am surprised that on HN, supposedly technically people still tout the “vendor uses private functionality” trope.
Of course every OS has “private functionality” that is not exposed to untrusted third party apps. Do you want every application to have root level access to your device? The private enclave?
Apple usually dog foods any new APIs before making them public. Once you make an API public, you’re stuck with it warts on all. Apple can also do things in ways that would be insecure for third parties to have access to.
For instance, in iOS 2 (?) Apple had an internal app extensions framework and in the US, was hard coded to support Facebook and Twitter.
A few years later, Apple had extensions framework where the extension was in a separate process for security and opened it up.
It took years for Apple to come up with a decent Siri intents framework for any third party and still Spotify took years to support all of the features that they complained about after Apple implemented the APIs.
You have completely missed the point. Let me back things up and you can tell me where things stop making sense for you:
Nobody is mad about iOS existing or using custom entitlements. Nobody is mad about the App Store existing or charging 30% on top of most IAPs/transactions. Nobody is angry at Apple for shipping Safari by default, or even for loading up iOS and MacOS with uncontrollable telemetry.
We're mad that we don't have options. Apple has no reason to arbitrarily limit our options besides personal profit, which is something they objectively do not need. That's what people are going to bring up during antitrust hearings, and it's the stuff you can't refute with "oh muh security". Apple is a hardware vendor that uses their status to abuse the software market, much like Microsoft did with the early web before they were brought to heel by antitrust hearings. The writing is on the wall for Apple, private entitlements or no they're headed straight to the hot-seat.
Sure you do, you have the same option that 70% of mobile users exercise - buy an Android device.
> much like Microsoft did with the early web before they were brought to heel by antitrust hearings
This is another false trope. Absolutely nothing happened in the US as a result of the anti trust trial with respect to Microsoft bundling IE with Windows. There was no forced unbundling, no “browser choice” nothing.
> That's what people are going to bring up during antitrust hearings
Those same arguments landed with a big thud during the Epic vs Apple trial.
I am not defending Apple’s practices, I just find the omission on a website called “time to play fair” sweetly ironic.