Spotify, Basecamp, and others write to Margrethe Vestager, calling on the European Commission to take action against Apple's “unfair practices”, like IAP fees
Music streaming service Spotify Technology (SPOT.N), along with other media firms such as Deezer …
Context & Ripple Effects
This letter is the latest move in a six-year campaign by Spotify and its allies against Apple's App Store terms. The same coalition — Spotify, Deezer, Rocket Internet — first pressed the European Commission for antitrust action in a 2017 open letter, then escalated to a formal complaint when Spotify filed its anti-trust case over App Store rules in March 2019.
The January 2023 letter to Margrethe Vestager adds Basecamp and Proton to the signatories and narrows the ask to concrete practices like IAP fees. A year later Spotify was still pressing, accusing Apple of forcing developers to stay with the status quo — evidence the Commission's silence between complaint and action is itself part of the story.
First-order effects
- Apple faces a consolidated bloc of high-profile European developers publicly demanding enforcement on IAP fees, raising political pressure on the Commission at the exact moment it weighs Spotify's 2019 complaint.
Second-order effects
- Other subscription app makers gain cover to join or echo the complaint, since Spotify, Basecamp, Deezer and Proton have absorbed the reputational cost of confronting their main distribution channel; Apple's counter-lobbying must now answer a named coalition rather than one aggrieved customer.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — letters in 2017, a formal complaint in 2019, renewed pressure through 2024 — platform fee structures stop being a private contract dispute and become a standing regulatory question in Brussels, with the Commission's eventual ruling setting the template for how gatekeepers charge for app distribution across the EU.
The trend: App Store economics are migrating from bilateral developer-Apple disputes to formal EU regulatory proceedings, with Spotify's coalition converting public pressure into enforcement leverage.