Executives from Spotify and Match Group, the company behind dating app Tinder, testified Wednesday at a Senate hearing examining potentially anticompetitive conduct by Apple in the company’s App Store and by Google in the Google Play Store. The executives accused Apple of abusing its power over software developers that depend on Apple’s App Store to reach users.
David McLaughlin for Bloomberg News:
“Apple abuses its dominant position as a gatekeeper of the App Store to insulate itself from competition and disadvantage rival services like Spotify,” Horacio Gutierrez, Spotify’s chief legal officer, told lawmakers. Apple’s restrictions on developers, he added, “are nothing more than an abusive power grab and a confiscation of the value created by others.
App developers have complained for years that Apple and Alphabet Inc.’s Google force them to give up too big a portion of revenue collected from app sales. They also complain that rules governing app stores are overly strict and sometimes inconsistent…
Kyle Andeer, Apple’s chief compliance officer, and Wilson White, a senior director of public policy and government relations at Google, also testified at the hearing. Andeer told senators that the App Store revolutionized software distribution by making it possible for developers to reach users in a new way. He said the commissions are lower than what was charged for software distribution when Apple introduced the App Store more than a decade ago, and that its tight controls over which apps are allowed are aimed at meeting privacy, safety and performance standards.
MacDailyNews Take: Spotify sees the writing on the wall. Apple Music is growing 2.5 times faster than Spotify.
So, Spotify runs whining to governments around the world.
“This boils down to the fact that Spotify wants to use the platform that Apple built and maintains at great expense for free.” – MacDailyNews, March 13, 2019
Spotify is good at three things: Losing money, whining to authorities, and gypping artists.