Leading music streaming platform Spotify has said that Apple is ruining its audiobook store by “choking competition”.
Apple’s limitations are harmful to both creators and users, as it continues to prevent Spotify and other applications from offering a seamless user experience, the company said in a blog post.
According to the platform, Apple’s restrictions are “far too complicated and confusing,” and they change “arbitrarily, making them impossible to interpret.”
The market for audiobooks has huge potential for growth and more authors could be discovered by new listeners, but the buying flow the company has been forced into is unnecessarily restricting that possibility.
“Apple continues to dictate what online innovation looks like, doing serious harm to the internet economy, choking competition and the imagination of app developers. Apple has shown time and again that it will not self-regulate and has no real incentive to change,” said Daniel Ek, CEO of Spotify.
“With our audiobooks launch, Apple has once again proven just how brazen it is willing to be with its App Store rules, constantly shifting the goalposts to disadvantage their competitors,” he added.
Meanwhile, recently, the company announced that it had acquired Dublin-based Kinzen, a global leader in protecting online communities from harmful content.
