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Spotify has filed a lawsuit against Apple with the European Commission accusing the US company of unfair practices on the App Store. In a text posted on the official Spotify Premium Free Apk, company president Daniel Ek accuses Apple of undermining fair competition with new rules for developers.
According to him, the new guidelines of the official iOS app store "purposely limit choice and stifle innovation at the expense of the user experience", causing Apple "to act at the same time as a player and judge to deliberately cause disadvantages for other apps ”.
He specifically mentions the “Apple fee”, the 30% charged by the company for any transaction made in applications distributed through the App Store . In the case of Spotify, this amount is charged even when a user subscribes to the Premium plan. "If we pay this fee, we are forced to artificially inflate the price of our Premium subscription well above the price of Apple Music."
But is there a way to process payments on iOS without going to Apple? Yes, but the way out is not very feasible, as highlighted by Ek. "If we choose not to use Apple's payment system, avoiding charging, it then applies a series of restrictions with technical and experience limitations to Spotify, " reports the executive.
Among the limitations are things like the inability to maintain your own customer support service and connect Spotify to Siri and Apple smart devices like HomePod and Apple Watch. In short, everything would be tied up so that companies would not choose to circumvent Apple's payment system.
To reinforce its campaign for fairer practices, Spotify launched the Time to Play Fair website , which gathers information about the case, questions and answers and much more.
The European Commission is due to look into the case soon and it has been relentless against practices like those maintained by Apple in this situation. Of course, it is still early to predict some type of punishment, but taking into account the sanctions applied to companies like Qualcomm and Google , it is possible that Apple will have some difficulties soon.
2:22AM, 23 March 2021 PDT
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