Spotify ends legacy support for Apple App Store Payments

It’s been more than seven years since Spotify stopped allowing new customers to subscribe to its premium tier through Apple’s in-app purchase system, and now the streaming giant is discontinuing support for the payment method entirely. Used to be. as reported DiversitySpotify recently emailed old Premium customers who are still paying through the Apple App Store to inform them that they will need to use an alternative payment method, such as PayPal or a credit card, at the end of their final billing period. will need to re-subscribe to the service. ,

“We are contacting you because you used Apple’s billing service to subscribe when you joined Spotify Premium. Unfortunately, we no longer accept that billing method as payment,” Spotify informed affected customers in an email that their account would automatically be automatically transferred to the platform’s free, ad-supported service after the final payment was taken. will be switched on. “If you want to keep your premium membership, you will need to re-subscribe after your last billing period ends and transfer your account to the free account.”

in a statement to Diversity, a Spotify spokesperson confirmed that the company “has begun notifying some users that a legacy payment method to which their Premium account is linked is being deprecated.” According to the spokesperson, these actions will “help ensure that (it) can continue to provide a consistently best-in-class subscription experience for all of our users.”

Spotify has stopped accepting premium subscriptions through the App Store in 2016 That comes just two years after the audio streaming company introduced a payment system on its platform to avoid paying Apple a commission of up to 30 percent for in-app purchases. Customers who subscribe through the App Store were charged an additional $3 per month to prevent Apple’s fee from cutting into Spotify’s revenue.

Spotify later filed an antitrust complaint against Apple in the European Union in 2019, arguing that the iPhone maker’s App Store policies were harming competition. The streamer also took issue with the same fee for Google’s Play Store, but last year Spotify and Google announced a pilot program that would give Spotify customers in select markets the option of paying using Spotify or Google’s payment system. Will give Google is still charging for these purchases, but has said it is 4 percent decrease Versus standard rate.

The update to App Store payments is unlikely to affect many of Spotify’s existing customers. In 2019, Diversity Note that Apple has published a regulatory filing disclosing that it has collected subscription payment fees 680,000 Spotify subscribers — less than one percent of Spotify’s 100 million Premium subscriptions at the time. According to Spotify’s Q4 earnings report for 2022, the service has crossed 200 million paid subscribers.