Apple Broke a Key Spotify Connect Feature

Apple is up to its usual shenanigans, artificially hobbling competitors while it pretends to conform to its legal obligations under the EU Digital Markets Act (DMA). In this case, the consumer electronics giant quietly “discontinued the technology” Spotify uses to let its users control the playback volume for speakers and other devices they connect to from their iPhones and iPads. This materially impacts the user experience, forcing those users–all of which are shared customers–to use less elegant and easily accessed on-screen controls instead.

Spotify has been in a long-running legal feud with Apple, and its complaints triggered an EU antitrust investigation and, more ominously for Apple, the moves that led to the DMA itself. Since being found a gatekeeper, Apple has resisted the DMA’s legal requirements at every turn, pretending to comply through a series of malicious compliance acts that don’t meet the spirit or letter of the law.

As bad, Apple continues to lash out at those companies, like Spotify and Epic Games, that have the temerity to stand up to its abusive business practices. This year, for example, Apple violated the DMA by rejecting Spotify app updates that provided pricing information to its customers, forcing the smaller company to complain to EU regulators. The European Commission found that Apple was indeed violating the law and fined the company €1.8 billion. And then Apple finally relented by allowing Spotify to update its app. But only in the EU, of course. That’s part of its malicious compliance strategy too.

This latest move is nothing less than passive-aggressive retribution against Spotify, which offers a technology called Spotify Connect that allows users to connect with and manage Bluetooth and smart speakers and other devices outside of Apple’s similar AirPlay technology. Using this feature, Spotify customers enjoy the content they’re controlling on their phone or tablet on other devices, remotely controlling playback, volume, and other common media player functions.

But not anymore. As Spotify notes, “Apple has discontinued the technology that enables Spotify to control volume for connected devices using the volume buttons on the device.” And while those using Apple Music and AirPlay can still control volume that way, Spotify users no longer can. They have to access the app’s on-screen controls instead, controls that are less precise, harder to find, and less convenient to use.

This is a violation of the DMA, Spotify points out.

“The gatekeeper [Apple] shall allow providers of services [Spotify] and providers of hardware, free of charge, effective interoperability with, and access for the purposes of interoperability to, the same hardware and software features accessed or controlled via the operating system … as are available to services or hardware provided by the gatekeeper,” the DMA notes. “The gatekeeper shall allow business users and alternative providers of services provided together with, or in support of, core platform services, free of charge, effective interoperability with, and access for the purposes of interoperability to, the same operating system, hardware or software features, regardless of whether those features are part of the operating system, as are available to, or used by, that gatekeeper when providing such services.”

According to Spotify, Apple had previously “degraded” this functionality by making volume control via the hardware buttons “unstable.” But now it doesn’t work at all. Google, meanwhile, doesn’t prevent partners like Spotify from using similar functionality via Google Cast and Android. Only Apple is behaving in this fashion with regard to media playback.