Spotify says Apple won’t approve a new version of its app as it doesn’t want competition for Apple Music

February 1, 2025
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Spotify says Apple is making it tougher for the streaming Tune employer to compete by blocking off a new version of its iPhone app.

In a letter sent this week to Apple’s top legal professional, Spotify says Apple is “causing grave damage to Spotify and its customers” by rejecting an update to Spotify’s iOS app.

The letter says Apple grew to become down a new version of the App while mentioning “business model rules” and demanded that Spotify use Apple’s billing device if “Spotify desires to use the app to gather new clients and sell subscriptions.”

The letter, sent via Spotify, popularly recommended Horacio Gutierrez to Apple standard and suggested Bruce Sewell on June 26. It tells that Spotify intends to use the standoff as ammunition in its combat over Apple’s rules governing subscription services that use its App save. (Correction: An in advance model of this story incorrectly pronounced the date Spotify despatched the letter.)

“This cutting-edge episode increases critical issues underneath each U.S. And European competition regulation,” Gutierrez wrote. “It maintains a troubling pattern of conduct with the aid of Apple to exclude and diminish the competitiveness of Spotify on iOS and as a rival to Apple Track, particularly when seen against the backdrop of Apple’s previous anticompetitive behavior aimed toward Spotify … we can not stand utilizing as Apple makes use of the App store approval technique as a weapon to harm competition.”

Spotify has dispensed copies of the letter to some Congressional body of workers in Washington, D.C. The day before today, Senator Elizabeth Warren criticized Apple, Amazon, and Google for anticompetitive practices; Warren said that “Apple has long used its manage of iOS to squash competition in Tune.”

Spotify declined to remark; Apple hasn’t replied to the request for comment.

For the past 12 months, Spotify has argued publicly, and to numerous regulators in the U.S. And Europe, that Apple’s subscription guidelines correctly punish 1/3-celebration Track offerings that use Apple’s platform, at the same time as boosting Apple Music, the home-grown service was released in June 2015.

Apple doesn’t require subscription services to use its iTunes billing carrier, but it doesn’t allow them to use a trade fee device within the App, as Google does. Apple expenses a monthly price of up to 30 percent for those who use its billing device — and it doesn’t need app makers to apply the apps to promote change subscription alternatives outdoors the apps. (And, of the route, app makers like Spotify can’t distribute their apps onto iPhones out of doors of Apple’s shop.)

Those rules created masses of drama when Apple brought them in 2011, but maximum publishers have agreed to apply Apple’s in-app billing choice and pay Apple its fee.

Like Amazon, a handful that doesn’t offer more limited variations in their apps in Apple’s app shop, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos lately suggested that Apple’s subscription policies led Amazon to forestall selling the Apple Television container in its save.

In Spotify’s case, the business enterprise has used Apple’s billing gadget for years; however, it passed on Apple’s price to clients by charging $13 a month in preference to the $10 a month the provider sells for out-of-doors Apple keeps. Closing yr, after Apple released its personal Music carrier, Spotify became more vocal about encouraging customers to pay for the provider outside of iTunes.

Final fall, Spotify began a brand new stop-run via a promotional campaign providing new subscribers the risk of getting three months of the carrier for $0.99 — if they signed up through Spotify’s website. This month, Spotify revived the campaign, but Gutierrez says Apple threatened to remove the App from its save unless Spotify stopped telling iPhone customers about the advertising.

Spotify stopped advertising. However, it grew to become its App save billing choice, which has brought about the current dispute.

Spotify, nevertheless, has a commanding lead in the subscription Track race. It stated it had 30 million paying subscribers; this month, Apple said it has 15 million paid subscribers for Apple Tune.