App makers sue Apple and claim it uses ‘monopoly power’ to charge fees
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
One of Apple's arguments in that case was that Apple couldn't be sued by app purchasers because they could be sued by app developers. Think of it sort of as Apple claiming a sort of "Double Jeopardy" defense. The Supreme Court wrote that this argument was not persuasive:
It is true that Apple’s alleged anticompetitive conduct may leave Apple subject to multiple suits by different plaintiffs. But Illinois Brick did not purport to bar multiple liability that is unrelated to passing an overcharge down a chain of distribution. Basic antitrust law tells us that the “mere fact that an antitrust violation produces two different classes of victims hardly entails that their injuries are duplicative of one another.” 2A Areeda & Hovenkamp ¶339d, at 136. Multiple suits are not atypical when the intermediary in a distribution chain is a bottleneck monopolist or monopsonist (or both) between the manufacturer on the one end and the consumer on the other end. A retailer who is both a monopolist and a monopsonist may be liable to different classes of plaintiffs—both to downstream consumers and to upstream suppliers—when the retailer’s unlawful conduct affects both the downstream and upstream markets.
This new lawsuit appears to be app developers taking that quote to heart.
Small app developers who use apple infrastructure to reach millions of people should not complain about the fees.
On the other hand, companies with own infrastructure should not have to pay apple 30% for doing very little. The article mentions Spotify and I am 100% behind Spotify/Amazon/Netflix/... on this.
Those large suppliers who use the App Store to market their products are also capturing an outsize amount of the profit.
"Okay, instead of 30% we will take 0%. In return, you owe us $x/month to store your app on our servers and CDNs, then $y per download to deliver it onto the phone. And $z per query to show up in the search engine.
And we'll need $10,000 up front on deposit to make sure you don't skate on the bill."
Apple built an app store, it built a reputation for its app store, and now its featuring your app.
And then there is engineering costs for the toolkits, compilers, libraries that are being used to create the binaries they publish. And not a stagnant toolkit, but the expectation that the toolkits evolve. So Engineering as a Service rent fees.
"We'll also need $50/hour to review the app...no upper bound on the time..."
Remember the time apple placed Spotify app on review-limbo for months when they were to announce Apple music?
It’s entirely possible that Spotify was trying to get Apple to change a store policy during that time, perhaps even with the threat of an antitrust complaint that they are now following through on.
You can make it sound like Apple is the bad guy abusing its store policies, but it’s equally the case that Spotify is just trying to leverage a few obvious features that into a giant payout through legal bullying.
I think HN's servers are powered by bad analogies.
Lets not forget how Apple uses store rules as an excuse to handicap competition.
Btw, can an artist get around paying 30% percent of revenue to Spotify to distribute their music?
Can I add music I bought from some other place and include it in my Spotify library?
From Freakonomics' interview with Spotify founder and CEO Daniel Ek [1]:
"DUBNER: So that 70 percent flows then to the rights-holders , which are primarily still the three big music labels.
EK: Yep."
I can already answer the above question - because the app store's primary intent is to exert Apple's control over what software even runs on hardware apparently owned by the end user. Imagine a fridge maker controlling what groceries their customers can stock in the fridge, though they've bought the fridge outright - that's exactly what Apple has normalized in general purpose computing
That Spotify is beholden to another party (record labels) is not really Apple's problem. It's Spotify's problem. And the problem is that they're not really bringing much value to the table. They don't own the content and they don't own the customers. They thing they provide is listening suggestions. Turns out that's not actually all that valuable. If it was valuable, they would be able to negotiate better terms with the labels, since the labels would be worried that customers would stay with Spotify despite not having access to the music from a given label. But customers don't actually give a shit about Spotify, they care about the music. And Spotify doesn't own the music.
Google tried that, that’s why Apple built Apple Maps. If the iPhone did not have Google Maps less people would use Google Maps. That’s why Google makes it available.
[1]: http://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/united-stat...
For the same reason Apple Music is available on Android.
I uninstalled Spotify long ago and just run the browser player now. It's more limited functionality, but that's Spotify's fault.
Can we please stop assuming we need native app support for everything?
(better background operation, lower memory usage, less battery drain)
But you knew this.