Plus, an interview with Roma Agrawal about her work on infrastructure
Apple kerfuffles
Apple has been vindicated (for a brief moment anyway) in its long-standing dispute with Qualcomm. From Stephen Nellis at Reuters:
A
U.S. federal judge has issued a preliminary ruling that Qualcomm Inc
owes Apple Inc nearly $1 billion in patent royalty rebate payments,
though the decision is unlikely to result in Qualcomm writing a check to
Apple because of other developments in the dispute.
Judge Gonzalo
Curiel of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of
California on Thursday ruled that Qualcomm, the world’s biggest supplier
of mobile phone chips, was obligated to pay nearly $1 billion in rebate
payments to Apple, which for years used Qualcomm’s modem chips to
connect iPhones to wireless data networks.
We have chronicled Qualcomm’s challenges for some time.
This long simmering dispute is complicated since Qualcomm needs the
revenues from its patents, while not pissing off its arguably most
important customer. The sooner the situation is settled and the parties
move on (regardless of financial outcome), the better.
In a lengthy statement on its site called “Addressing Spotify’s Claims”,
Apple walks through and dismantles some of the key parts of Spotify’s
accusations about how the App Store works, covering app store approval
times, Spotify’s actual cut on subscription revenues, and Spotify’s rise
as a result of its presence on iOS.
At the same time, Apple carefully sidesteps addressing any of Spotify’s demands: Spotify has filed a case with the European Commission
to investigate the company over anticompetitive practices and
specifically to consider the relationship between Apple and Spotify (and
by association any app maker) in terms of whether it is really
providing a level playing field, specifically in the context of building
and expanding Apple Music, its own product that competes directly with
Spotify on the platform that Apple owns.
2019 is the
year that most of the app stores are going to break on their revenue
models. And it isn’t just limited to Apple — Steam is also facing huge
challenges in the gaming market. As Chris Morris wrote for Extra Crunch a few weeks ago:
So
what’s the draw for game makers to sell via the Epic Games store? It
is, of course, a combination of factors, but chief among those is
financial. To convince publishers and developers to utilize their
system, Epic only takes a 12 percent cut of game-sale revenues. That’s
significantly lower than the 30 percent taken by Valve on Steam (or the
amounts taken by Apple or Google in their app stores).
According to Morris, Epic learned that it can be profitable at 12% based on its own experience with Fortnite, and therefore it wanted to rejigger the standard economics of game stores. Apple has a monopoly with its App Store on its own devices though, and so this sort of competition isn’t available. Given that Apple wants to increase services revenues in its financial model going forward, this is an important battle to watch.
One interesting model for improving the internet: praise groups
Media job cuts & Tumblr traffic crash
Why can’t we build things? The inevitable vs the avoidable