Apple and Google were complained to the European Commission by Spotify and other important companies because of the way they organize their application stores. These companies ask the European Commission to investigate the way AppStore or Google Play are organized and managed, because Apple and Google would have non-competitive practices.
Spotify and Deezer are among the companies that complain about the fact that Apple and Google benefit from their dominant position on the market to abuse the "power" they have. The two companies claim that Apple and Google use the AppStore, Google Play and the Google.com search engine to prevent the promotion of Spotify or Deezer services.
Apple and Google favor their own audio streaming services over their competitors', and that would affect their ability to compete effectively. Complaints also include the fact that these third-party companies cannot see information regarding subscriptions made through application stores, but also that they are not promoted in any way.
The companies also claim that they have to sell their services more expensively through the application stores, in order to compensate for the commissions charged by Apple and Google. In this idea, customers are obliged to pay 30% more for subscriptions bought from the AppStore compared to choosing to buy a subscription directly from the Spotify website.
The European Commission must also solve these problems through a clearer legislation regarding digital services, those from Spotify repeatedly asking for this, but it is unlikely that they will receive everything they ask for.
