Spotify Wants to Get into Audiobooks but Says Apple Is in the Way

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/25/business/spotify-apple-audiobooks-app.html

by fourmajor • 4 years ago

26 5 4 years ago

nytimes.com

supermatt• 4 years ago

Ah, they just have to wait until 2 May 2023, then it wont be an issue :D

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...

joshl32532• 4 years ago

Apple is bullying app publishers like how Spotify is bullying artists.

Whoever owns the dominant platform have the power.

MichaelZuo• 4 years ago

The actual information is buried at the very end:

When Spotify later submitted an app update with features unrelated to audiobooks, Apple rejected it. App Store reviewers told Spotify that the audiobooks offering, which had previously been approved, violated rules requiring apps to use Apple’s payment system to unlock new features, according to Spotify.
Mr. Zicherman’s team changed the email customers would receive, stripping out the purchase button they had previously included. They replaced it with an email that gave customers a link to browse Spotify’s audiobook titles.
Apple rejected Spotify’s change days later, saying that offering customers a button to receive an email about other purchase options broke App Store rules. An Apple spokesman said that Spotify also had a discrepancy in an external link in its app, which sent people to a different web address than one that Apple had approved. Spotify said the link was unrelated to audiobooks and that it has resolved that issue.
Mr. Zicherman said his team consulted with Spotify’s legal staff before deciding to strip out the email phase of the audiobook process. In its place, they told listeners to go to Spotify’s website to buy a book.
“What we have now is effectively a dead end,” Mr. Zicherman said.
On Monday, Spotify said that Apple had rejected Mr. Zicherman’s latest redesign. He and a team of product designers, engineers and attorneys worked until early Tuesday morning on four other options. They stripped away Spotify’s website and directions for more information about audiobooks, putting the onus on customers to go online and figure out how to complete a purchase. The changes won Apple’s approval, Spotify said.
“You can’t buy audiobooks in the app,” the landing page now says. “We know, it’s not ideal.”

Seems like Spotify wanted to sell their audiobooks without giving Apple their standard cut via some weird email linking scheme.

The wording seems deliberately ambiguous to give the impression that Apple is denying them for some unclear reason. Which they'd be very silly to try to do.

It's a lot more sensible that they're not willing to grant Spotify a carve out to their most well publicized and discussed rule regarding in-app transactions.

ezoe• 4 years ago

The App ecosystem is harmful. We had the web browsers for decades. How did we regressed to this unfortunate state?

dublinben• 4 years ago

All those lawyers in the product development process must have cost Spotify a lot of money. All five of their top choice books are available DRM-free on Downpour.com for significantly less.

Spotify Wants to Get into Audiobooks but Says Apple Is in the Way

Related Stories