Apple has come forward to lower prices for Amazon’s Prime Video app on mobile devices and Apple TV, an agreement that seems to contradict what CEO Tim Cook told Congress Wednesday at an antitrust hearing, where he said Apple isn’t giving a special. processing to a specific application or developer.
For apps like Spotify and Hulu, Apple has a 30% reduction in the first year of in-app purchases and a 15% reduction each year thereafter.
According to emails published through the Camera Antitrust Subcommittee, Apple reduced payment to 15% during the first year and disposed of them entirely for consumers already subscribed to download the Amazon Prime Video app on iOS devices and Apple TV.
Apple said it would also take only 15% of consumers who buy as Showtime or Starz through the Amazon app.
The deal was negotiated in 2016 and Amazon’s Prime Video app was incorporated into Apple TV in December 2017, in the end it is unclear whether those were the final terms of the agreement.
The offer to be contradicts the spirit of what Cook said at a Congressional hearing on the anti-competitive habit on Wednesday: “We apply the regulations to all developers equally,” Cook said.
Apple did not respond to a request for comment from Forbes.
“15% of the percentage of revocation for consumers who use the app (they use our payment); there is no share of profits for consumers who are already subscribed,” Eddy Cue, Apple’s chief executive, wrote to Jeff Bezos in November 2016.
Cook, Bezos, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified Wednesday at a virtual congressional hearing on the strength of great technology. Republicans have been working out long-standing court cases of anti-conservative bias while Representative Jerrold Naddler (DN). And.) asked Cook if he kept rating corporations like ClassPass and Airbnb with a 30% pay while they were moving their facilities online for the pandemic, which equates to a “earnings pandemic.”
Apple has escaped much of Big Tech’s complaints from Facebook and Google, but the competition giant and the little ones have publicly and privately criticized the policies of the company’s App Store that allegedly favor their own services. Epic Games and Spotify have complained about the so-called “Apple Tax,” or Apple’s 30% reduction in in-app purchases. The dispute has recently become a public dispute between Apple and the Basecamp allocation control tool. Apple first rejected an update to Basecamp’s messaging app because it did not use Apple’s payment system, and The founder of Basecamp described the regulations as “capricious, abusive, and inconsistent repression policies.”
I’m a San Francisco-based journalist, the latest news in Forbes. I have already reported on USA Today, Business Insider, The San Francisco Business Times and San
I’m a San Francisco reporter covering the latest news in Forbes. In the past, I have worked for USA Today, Business Insider, The San Francisco Business Times and San Jose Inside. I studied journalism at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications and was editor-in-chief of the Daily Orange, the university’s independent student newspaper. Follow me on Twitter @rachsandl or email me [email protected].