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Grow Up Spotify
The in-app purchase feature had been removed and replaced with an account sign-up feature clearly intended to circumvent Apple’s in-app purchase rules. That feature exists only for the purpose of avoiding having to pay Apple for your use of the App Store by emailing customers within hours, directing them to subscribe to Spotify on its website. A clear violation of the terms every other developer adheres to…. On June 10, Spotify submitted another version of the app which again incorporated the sign-up feature directing App Store customers to submit an email address so they could be contacted directly by Spotify in a continued attempt to get around our guidelines.
Apple general counsel Bruce Sewell - full letter on the clickthrough
This all seems to have started with Elizabeth Warren’s speech a couple of days ago. (Warning - you need Flash to watch this speech (seriously), so I haven’t watched it - but read enough that links back to that site …
Fortune : On Apple, Warren pointed to the company’s streaming-music service Apple Music, saying that the company has made it “difficult” for competing services, like Spotify, to compete with Apple Music. This is Gruber on that topic. I agree, particularly on that last sentence.
Cry me a river. Spotify has long charged $12.99 via in-app subscriptions to get around the 30 percent “App Store tax”. And Apple has now cut the long-term subscription split from 70-30 to 85-15. And Spotify is the streaming service most at war with artists over their abysmal royalty rates.
Fortune : She also seemed to side with allegations from “thousands of authors” that Amazon tries to “steer consumers to books published by Amazon to the detriment of other publishers.”
Ahem - does she remember this case that Apple lost around price fixing. Now THERE was an opportunity.