The penalty is for preventing Spotify and other music streaming services from informing users of payment options outside the Apple app store.
The European Commission’s decision was triggered by a complaint by the Swedish music streaming service over this restriction and Apple’s 30% fee.
The EU competition enforcer said Apple abused its dominant position in the market for a decade.
Margrethe Vestager said, Apple had done this by "restricting developers from informing consumers about alternative, cheaper music services available outside of the Apple ecosystem.
The part where Apple isn’t charging themselves 30% is easy to agree on it being unfair (they should lower the fee, a lot). This is why I posed the question about Amazon who, presumably also, is not charging themselves a fee to sell products on their own platform nor is Target by selling their own in-house branded goods.
Right, Apple Music comes preinstalled on the phone just as the default search result for a product on Amazon is Amazon’s offering. How is this fair to other sellers who have to pay a fee in order to be on the store?
At the same time, Apple / Amazon is doing work for the brand by hosting and advertising and facilitating the sale of an app or product. You can’t suggest a store should do this for free, right?
I’m not asking about Apple, I’m asking about how other stores are regulated by the EU.
As a seller, you can decide to sell on Walmart or on eBay if you want. On iOS you are forced to 1. Pay a yearly fee just to have the tools to build an app and 2. You are forced to use the App Store with all the restrictions that come with it.
Regardless of the store, you’re still paying the retailer a fee to sell your goods. You’re also forced to abide by the restrictions of any store you’re selling in.
There are always costs of doing business. I can’t think of anything other maybe standing in a “free” (taxpayer subsidized) open space and speaking your mind where you’re not paying someone something to conduct your business.
How is it that people can justify Apple and Google doing all the work while getting paid nothing? It’s a ridiculous argument to suggest that this shouldn’t cost developers anything.
As it is, the only thing Spotify is paying for is that $100/year (if I’m not mistaken) developer license. Spotify’s revenue for the last quarter alone was $4billon USD. I’m not arguing they should pay Apple billions of dollars but they should be paying them more than $100.