Their PR / legal team acting like children when they don't get what they want is a genuine harm to their brand. It's amazing to me that these press releases are approved.
Their non compliance was impressive. They changed the website to ensure users wouldn't see the footer with the link without scrolling. Then they edited the notice's wording by adding paragraphs in the middle of it - and sentences in the middle of paragraphs.
I really think there's some Americanism behind it. Like, "we don't care what you foreign authorities think".
I don't know who these statements are for, aside from the most devoted Apple fans. I feel like investors would be happier with shorter, more professional communication.
He pulled some childish moves that the public found out about (Engadget being banned from reporting on Apple when a reporter wrote about an iPhone prototype they found in a bar or something is one of the next examples I can think of) but it wasn’t Apple officially behaving childishly in public.
In any case, most of the broad public is not really aware of these things at all. So I doubt it really tarnishes their image much.
It says a lot that the €100 developer fee (I'd imagine Spotify pay for multiple licences in multiple countries) that Apple consider it nothing. It probably is 'negligible' given the size of Spotify but also don't even consider highly popular apps like Spotify 'contributing' to App Store ecosystem that has also helped Apple.
Their press statements are starting to become more and more snarky. They would do better to keep their chin up and keep going. This sort of snark is more befitting of Ryanair than Apple.
The App Store is packed with apps because developers saw an opportunity and wanted to seize it. Everyone's in it because it serves their interests.
They literally do consider it nothing. I've talked to some of the devs that were responsible for implementing it and they consider it entirely a spam prevention measure. They determined that $100/account was a high enough bar to prevent people from creating hundreds of them and doesn't have the overhead of manual human ID verifications.
The most recent numbers I can can find is that there are 34 million registered devs which is a cool 3.4 billion ARR and that is 0.89% of their $380 billion revenue last year.
Apple's attitude towards developers complaining about App Store was largely "Deal with it" but seems like they themselves can't deal with it.
The solution is pretty simple, let people use the devices they own as they want; allow multiple app stores; allow people to download binaries and install on their devices.
What some people may not understand is that a large percentage of Apple customers are buying iPhones because of those restrictions and not in spite of them.
But more likely than not, people choose iPhone because everyone has an iPhone. People choose iPhone because when both parents have iPhones they buy their kids iPhones and then when their kids grow into young adults, well, they're already invested in the ecosystem to such a degree that it's impossible to get out.
More likely than not, they choose iPhone because iPhones are just what people think about when they think smartphone. Because Samsung phones seem "complicated".
I really doubt people even care about privacy and security. I mean, sure, if you ask them if they care they will say yes; because that's how polls work, no one wants to say they don't care and be judged. But if you were to ask people "why iPhone" I'd say the answer will be more on the lines of "because iPhone".
The modern world is made on marketing and Apple is the best company in the world at it.
Citation needed. Do you have polls or other consumer research to back this claim?
Please answer.
Huh?? This is an extraordinary claim, given the plain fact that if someone really doesn't want apps from 3rd-party stores on their device, they could just, you know... not install any...?
Why should Apple have that much leverage? They didn't even "build the platform", they took an Open Source platform, put the Apple logo to it, and then proceeded to EEE like good old Microsoft.
Apple is in the wrong here, or they charge the Apple tax to music apps, or they have Apple music. They can't have both.
OTOH, I don't see Apple paying 30% of their revenue to the Open Source maintainers that made "the platform" possible.
But that's not the case. And Apple themselves know this as they charge premium prices for the brand alone.
If Apple drops their prices by 30% there's no guarantee that it would "destroy spotify" at all. For one, no one on android would think of switching to apple music anyway, the concept just seems so foreign. Second, Spotify is winning the marketing/cultural battle with their wrapped. It might sound silly but the advertisement feature of Spotify wrapped is worth a lot of money.
So what's more likely to happen if Apple drops the price? Well, I'd say they'd be locked into a PR nightmare everytime they need to raise prices because there's a precedent that the service is cheaper. They wouldn't really gain significant market share against Spotify and they would just end up leaving money on the table.
In these things, price is a component of the decision that is made, it's not really the deciding factor. Not to mention that a significantly lower price also signals "worse quality" to costumers. People might easily go "Spotify costs 3 dollars more because it is worth 3 dollars more". Because people will try to justify higher prices with higher quality even when that's not the case.
Apple owes their existence to the Open Source maintainers the same way Apple claims I owe my existence to their proprietary APIs.
It's rather obvious that problems started when Apple decided to build a services business the size of a F100 company by directly and unfairly competing with said developers, unchained from all the constraints and costs they impose on them.
If so, don't ask me to pay $99 every year for installing my own app on a device I bought.
Apps signed with a free developer account are severely limited with a short validity period and Apple enforces a limit on the number of apps that could be installed this way on a device.
> We’ve even flown our engineers to Stockholm to help Spotify’s teams in person.
Some level playing field. Apple certainly hasn't flown any engineers to my town.
No Apple, you deliberately cripple the competition all the time — especially with music — and you're getting what you deserve.
