The bug caught: Apple responds to Spotify, accusing the service of “appealing to rumors and half-truths”

Just yesterday we reported that the Spotify had sent a letter to the United States Congress accusing Apple of using its App Store's approval system as a "weapon" to benefit its own products namely the Apple Music and harm competitors who depend on the store.

Today, the service war streaming it got even hotter when Apple put its mouth on the trombone, responding to Spotify's accusations and claiming that the service is, after all, lying.

New dynamic area by rdio Beats 1 on Apple Music

A letter signed by Bruce Sewell, Apple's senior vice president and general counsel, and obtained by BuzzFeed, addresses the chief attorney for Spotify, Horacio Gutierrez, and shows Ma "disappointed" by the public attacks of the Swedish company. More than that, the letter states that Spotify is "appealing to rumors and half-truths" about the app approval system on the App Store.

() We find it problematic that you are appealing to rumors and half-truths about our service. Our guidelines they help competition, it doesn't hurt. The fact that we compete has never influenced how Apple treats Spotify or other successful competitors like Google Play Music, TIDAL, Amazon Music, Pandora or countless other apps on the App Store that distribute digital music.

Then, Ma reinforces changes in the rules for passing on profits from subscriptions that Spotify believes are not yet profitable enough.

Thousands of developers are benefiting from the In-App Purchases, including Spotify. Since it was launched, App Store rules have prevented developers from redirecting consumers within an app outside of it to buy content or subscriptions in order to avoid paying Apple's standard commission. Recently, we introduced a new subscription profit division () After one year of service, an 85/15 division goes into action. All current subscriptions are included in the rule if developers have subscribers for more than one year, division 85/15 starts to apply immediately.

At the end of the letter, the executive still gives more details about the reasons why Apple disapproved the latest version of the Spotify app:

Right after Spotify sent its app on May 26, our team identified a number of issues, including that the In-App Purchases it had been removed and replaced with a subscription feature that was clearly intended to deviate from Apple's profit sharing rules. () On June 10, Spotify sent another version of the app, which again incorporated the subscription system, this time directing consumers to enter an email address so that they could be contacted directly by Spotify in a continued attempt to avoid our guidelines.

The letter ended saying that "the Spotify app currently available on the App Store is still violating our rules", and reiterating that Apple is willing to review and quickly approve a new version of the app that does not break the rules of the App Store .

Let us wait for the next chapters of this novel. I'm sure I still see many

(via 9to5Mac)