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On September 15th, Spotify openly criticized Apple’s new digital subscription bundling offer they had brought out, as anti-competitive. Apple has come out with the new Apple One watch and offers it in a bundle. The bundle includes a collection of Apple services, such as Apple Music, 50GB Apple Storage, Apple TV and Apple Arcade. It only costs $14,95 a month and is about $6 cheaper than buying them individually. Apple also has different versions of this bundle. The Family one, costing $19,95 and has 200GB storage instead of 50GB and the Premier one for $29,95, which not only has 2TB storage but also the news service and the upcoming fitness service.

Apple has always been busy on making their customers buy deeper into their services, while making these services or bundles not accessible by third-party companies.

As mentioned before Spotify did not like the introduction of the Apple One bundle, stating:

Once again, Apple is using its dominant position and unfair practices to disadvantage competitors and deprive consumers by favoring its own services,” a Spotify spokesperson said in a statement to CNN Business.
“We call on competition authorities to act urgently to restrict Apple’s anti-competitive behavior, which if left unchecked, will cause irreparable harm to the developer community and threaten our collective freedoms to listen, learn, create, and connect.”

It is not the first time Spotify called regulators on Apple. Last year, Spotify also filled a complaint against Apple with European Antitrust Officials for giving its own music services an unfair advantage over competitors, thus again for being anti-competitive.

Apple is also being sued by Epic games, which is the maker of the very popular game called Fortnite. Apple removed Fortnite from their Apple store, stating Fortnite did not comply with the policies&rules. Again Apple is to powerful, considering Apple store and Google play store being monopolists in offering mobile games.

 

To come back to the bundle…. In my opinion, the bundle is anti-competitive. The bundle offers all the mentioned Apple services for a relatively cheap price of $14,95 a month. Considering both Apple Music and Spotify have their normal prices at $9,99 a month, consumers will get all these other services for only $5 dollars extra. Other companies can not compete with this bundle and price.

 

Apart from this bundle being ant-competitive, is Apple becoming ‘to’ powerful….?

 

 

 

 

 

 

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/09/19/tech/apple-one-spotify-antitrust/index.html

https://edition.cnn.com/business/live-news/apple-event-september-15/h_ddc2de85a6964f8f0e114f97583355be

 

https://www.apple.com/nl/apple-one/

 

 

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Already in May, England had tested their COVID-19 contact-tracing app on a small island called Wright. The app lets you know quickly if someone with who you had contact with, has symptoms. Your phone connects with other phones through bluetooth, if these phones were less than two meters away from your phone. As soon as a person is having symptoms and he clicks on symptoms in the app, everyone who he has been in contact with (bluetooth-linked) will receive a message.

The app used a centralized datacenter to successfully storage the recovered data. Problems were quickly to arise as people felt like being used for testing. Even more so, people did not like the idea of a centralized datacenter owning personal information about you. The government chose to use this centralized datacenter, because the government wanted to test the quality of the app, resulting in its downfall.

Germany is following a different approach to install its Corona-Warn-App. It was launched in June. The Robert Koch Institute (RKI) in Germany is the government’s central scientific institution in the field of biomedicine and is closely monitoring the Corona-Warn-App progressions. The RKI stated that 16 million people had installed it. They are going in the good direction as they learned from Englands mistakes. Germany only has the information stalled on the mobile phones itself and therefore the acceptance is higher. The only problem now is measuring the quality of the app, because of the government not knowing how many people were infected and used the app to warn others they had been in contact with.
However, there are about 83 million people in Germany, and for the app to be effective more than half of the population needs to use the app. Again the problem of success still arises. Acceptance is there, but the success depends on the quality the germans can’t measure, because of not having a centralized datacenter.

As for now, Holland is still testing their Corona-app called ‘Coronamelder’.

The problem of acceptance and quality (measuring) was described in this blog.

What to do about the problem of quality measuring? Should we make some enormous changes, such as making it mandatory for people to download the app…  Wouldn’t that be a success… (hook for new research)

 

 

https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/onderwerpen/coronavirus-app
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/16/germany-appeals-to-nation-to-download-coronavirus-app
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-53485569