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0 pointsavianlyric5y ago0 comments

Would a better comparison be a cruise ship? You pay thousands to board, and you literally can’t leave at will.

While you’re aboard you can only purchase food, drink and entertainment from the cruise company. I don’t think a cruise ship would ever allow competing companies to provide those services.

I’m personally a little mixed on the App Store. I don’t a have fundamental issue with the App Store model, and as an Apple customer I personally see it’s limitations as an advantage.

However I do agree that Apple using its App Store to harm competitors in other industries, like Spotify and Netflix, as very harmful. Although I don’t know how fix that without fundamentally changing the App Store, or banning Apple from competing with App Store services like Spotify and Netflix.

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scarface745y ago· 2 in thread

How is Spotify and especially Netflix being harmed? If I search for a movie on either my iPhone, iPad, or AppleTV and the movie is available on Netflix, I’m told that I can watch it for free instead of being guided toward Apple’s movie store.

Spotify whined for years that they couldn’t stream music to the Apple Watch or download music to the Watch. Apple allowed third party integration over a year ago. Pandora added the feature - Spotify didn’t.

Spotify also doesn’t allow in app purchases so Apple doesn’t get a cut.

avianlyricOP5y ago

> Spotify also doesn’t allow in app purchases so Apple doesn’t get a cut.

This is how Spotify and Netflix are harmed. They have to pick between funding their competitor, or not providing simple signups and subscriptions on one of the worlds largest computing platforms.

This directly harms either their revenue stream or cost-of-acquisition. Both to the advantage of one of one of their largest competitors who has artificially introduced this barrier.

scarface745y ago

So can we also regulate Spotify for taking a much larger cut from artists? Spotify has a much larger share in streaming music than Apple has in phones.

Also. I can’t sign up for a Netflix subscription on my Roku either.

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