Despite a thriving business that saw Spotify amass 195 million paid subscribers, company co-founder and CEO Daniel Ek discussed his frustrations with Apple, pointing out that the company continued to "dictate" how it interacted with its customers. He expanded stating that Apple controlled how Spotify customers paid for its service, giving them only one option. He also discussed how Apple made it harder for outside parties to thrive in the App Store by purposely hampering the app's experience or making arbitrary changes to policies in order to gain an edge against competitors. In light of all of this, it appears that Spotify has now removed its audiobook offerings from its iOS app.

Following a recent update, the Spotify app for iOS no longer offers audiobooks for purchase. When you head to the audiobooks section to make a purchase, the app now states that users can no longer make audiobook purchases in the app. Perhaps the most bizarre part of this is that the message doesn't offer another solution and just leaves people hanging. At this point, if you want to purchase audiobooks from Spotify, you can head to the web version of Spotify or use the desktop app to make audiobook purchases.

So why is this happening now? If you're not familiar with how Apple's App Store works, to put it simply, it takes a cut from anything sold through its platform. Apple also requires that all digital purchases be made through its own checkout service. In Spotify's situation, that means Apple takes a 30 percent cut from each audiobook sold, which is quite significant. It's unclear how Spotify will combat this, maybe just raises its subscription prices, but unfortunately, there doesn't really seem to be many options, especially when there are only so many platforms and only one Apple App Store that caters to millions of iOS device users.


Source: The Verge