SPOTIFY has announced it is banning a common payment method that can automatically downgrade users’ plans if they fail to update.
The music streaming app is no longer allowing users to pay their streaming plan through Apple’s App Store, per Phone Arena.
In 2016, Spotify announced it would no longer allow users to pay their subscriptions through Apple’s App Store.
The streaming platform was no longer happy that Apple was taking a 30 percent cut of its in-app transactions when processing Spotify’s in-app payments.
Although this may seem abrupt to Spotify users, the app gave users a window of time informing them this would come.
Users were notified of this change through an email from the music-streaming platform.
“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,” Spotify said.
If users who pay their Premium subscription through Apple’s App Store do not switch their payment method, they will automatically be dropped down to a Free ad-supported subscription.
Although this may be news to some Spotify users, a majority of users are already paying their subscription through payment methods approved by Spotify.
A regulatory filing from 2019 found that Apple took a 15 percent cut of 680,000 Spotify Premium subscribers.
However, that is only .68 percent of the 100million Premium subscribers Spotify has using already approved payment methods.
Spotify has filed complaints with government commissions about the 30 percent cut the tech giants receive from in-app payments.
Apple has come out saying Spotify has used its app store to increase the growth of its platform and should expect Apple to receive a cut of those profits.
In the end, this change will only affect less than 5 percent of Spotify users, but it illustrates the contention between tech giants.
