> Which raises the question: to what degree does a platform owner have a responsibility to support the businesses of others?
I wish you'd stopped here because this is an interesting question, but the rest of your comment feels like it stretches things a bit.
What Spotify seems to be saying (correct me if I'm wrong), is that Apple does provide the technical capabilities for third parties to do as they're asking, but Apple is rejecting proposals purely on whim. It's not like there's not a API to stream music on the Apple Watch or play music through HomePod. It's all there. Apple's just blocking them from using it.
Once you publish an API you’re stuck with supporting it. When I’m hacking around with a library I wrote for my own use, I might do all sorts of things while I’m iterating but don’t want others to consume until they are fully baked.
The same thing about not allowing others to use “private APIs”. No guarantees are made about any methods that I didn’t make public. If I change that method in future releases, and your software that depends on it breaks - so be it.
Windows is full of backward compatibility hacks because one piece of software that wanted to use an undocumented method.
Apple has since day one had APIs that it used privately until they were fully baked and made public. Do you think that Apple waited two or three years to make share extensions public because of competitive reasons?
I wish you'd stopped here because this is an interesting question, but the rest of your comment feels like it stretches things a bit.
What Spotify seems to be saying (correct me if I'm wrong), is that Apple does provide the technical capabilities for third parties to do as they're asking, but Apple is rejecting proposals purely on whim. It's not like there's not a API to stream music on the Apple Watch or play music through HomePod. It's all there. Apple's just blocking them from using it.