Music-stream app Spotify hasn’t been letting customers subscribe to its Premium membership via Apple’s in-app purchase system for over seven years now. Taking a step forward in the same direction, Spotify is now on its way to drop the support for Apple’s payment system completely.
According to a report by Variety, the streaming company has sent an email to its legacy Premium subscribers who are still using Apple’s App Store to notify them that in order to continue their services, they would have to resubscribe using an alternative payment method at the end of this billing cycle.
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The email read, “We’re contacting you because when you joined Spotify Premium you used Apple’s billing service to subscribe. Unfortunately, we no longer accept that billing method as a form of payment. If you wish to keep your Premium subscription, you will need to re-subscribe after your last billing period has ended and your account has been moved on to the Free account.”
Spotify has also given its statement confirming that it has started informing “a small number of users that a legacy payment method, that their Premium account is attached to, is being deprecated.” The spokesperson speaking to media also added that these steps taken by Spotify will “help ensure that [it] can continue to provide a consistent best-in-class subscription experience for all our users.”
We should mention that Spotify stopped accepting Premium subscriptions via the App store in 2016 because Apple’s in-app purchases charge a commission of up to 30%. This happened just two years after the payment method was added to the streaming platform. In addition to this, customers who continued to pay via App Store were charged an extra $3 per month so that the burden of Apple’s commission fee didn’t fall on Spotify.
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In 2019, Spotify also filed an antitrust complaint against Apple with the European Union, saying that the Cupertino-based tech giant’s App Store policies harmed competition. The company had taken issue for Google Play Store’s fee structure, but the two companies had found a solution that worked for both. Google and Spotify announced a pilot program in select markets where users would have the option of paying from both their payment systems. Google charges 4% less than its standard rates for these purchases.
Considering that most of Spotify’s existing users had already moved from App Store payments to other methods, the move by the streaming giant is not very likely to affect too many people.
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