Some iPhone buyers and developers have been asking Apple for years to support sideloading on iPhone, as well as third-party app stores and third-party payment systems. Apple has never budged on these issues. But iOS and the App Store have been declared gatekeepers in Europe. That means Apple will have to open them to competing services.

I already told you that sideloading and third-party app stores are imminent on the iPhone. The same goes for third-party payment systems. Should iMessage also get the gatekeeper designation, Apple will have to open it to rivals — and Google is dying to have RCS support in iMessage.

Apple has never announced these iPhone features for the Europan Union (EU). However, the iPhone maker filed new paperwork with the SEC that essentially confirms these changes are coming to the App Store experience in Europe. In turn, the changes might impact Apple's bottom line.

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Subscribers who pay for Disney Plus and Hulu access should be happy to hear the two platforms will be available in a single app next month. However, the upcoming app will be a beta test ahead of a wider rollout planned for the first quarter of 2024.

Disney CEO Bob Iger confirmed the move during the company's earnings call for the September quarter. Considering Disney recently confirmed its plans to buy Comcast out and become the sole owner of Hulu, merging the two services into a single streaming app is hardly a surprise.

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Everything that Google creates is essentially tied to Google Search, the original Google product, and the main moneymaker. All of Google's products are extensions of online search. Google offers plenty of useful products, many of them available to the user as free software, to steer people to Google Search rather than alternatives. Then, Google Search ad revenue then pays for everything.

The iPhone should, therefore, be one of Google's biggest worries. Apple's iPhone user base is expanding, with plenty of buyers being loyal to the ecosystem. But the iPhone is easily one of Google's biggest wins in mobile. A high-end beloved product that, strangely enough, makes Google a lot of money.

So much money that Google reportedly paid Apple $18 billion in 2021 for Google Search to the default search engine on iPhone. So much money that Google wants to keep reaping the rewards while diminishing the fee it has to pay Apple.

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Did I get you? Did you think Phil Spencer left?

For anyone who clicked on that headline in a panic, thinking that the legendary Phil Spencer has left Xbox, rest easy. If you — for some reason — don't keep track of org charts as some of us do, Spencer was recently promoted to a new position as CEO of Microsoft Gaming. The beloved Xbox boss now runs both Xbox and gaming on the PC, cloud, and everywhere else the company meets gamers.

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I definitely didn't have BP of all companies on the bingo card for buying a ton of Tesla Superchargers.

But, that's exactly what's happened. BP, one of the biggest oil companies in the world, is actually making a sizeable investment in renewable energy in the form of a purchase of Tesla's Supercharger technology. In a press release, the company announced that it has made a $100 million investment in its own charging network that will be powered by Tesla's Superchargers — a first-of-its-kind deal for Tesla.

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Daniel Ek is at it again. The CEO of Spotify -- which is the #1 music app on iPhone, according to Apple -- has penned an op-ed in The Daily Mail, of all places, in which he bashes the iPhone maker as such a "barrier to innovation" that he doesn't even think he could have launched Spotify at all if he'd started today.

The sticking points, stop me if you've heard this before, are Apple's supposedly prohibitive rules that govern its App Store -- including the 30% cut that Apple takes whenever a user makes a payment within an iPhone app. Spotify users on the free tier also can't upgrade to the Premium tier within the app.

In fact, Apple doesn't even let Spotify communicate to its users how to do so. Try to upgrade your free account inside the app, for example, and you're taken to a screen that lists the different Premium versions, explains the benefits of each, and laments in small print: "You can't upgrade to Premium in the app. We know, it's not ideal."

In his op-ed, Ek writes that "While Apple has long been unwilling to share any detailed breakdown of its App Store profits, all indications point to the fact that it has generated at least $100 billion thanks to the high 30 percent tax it imposes on innovators here in the UK and around the world.

"How many more start-ups would have succeeded and grown into successful businesses if Apple wasn’t extracting this rent and reaping massive rewards at the expense of the broader tech economy?"

Image source: Mateusz Slodkowski/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

None of this, of course, is new to anyone who's followed the Spotify story. Two years ago, for example, Spotify's then-chief legal officer wrote a screed in The Wall Street Journal targeting the iPhone maker, titled “The Monopolist Worm in Apple” that's even more pointed than Ek's is.

“Apple’s ability to strange its competitors is unprecedented,” that earlier op-ed reads, seemingly oblivious to the fact that Google has an order of magnitude more Android users than Apple does, and that so many apps like Netflix, Flipboard, and Google Maps are as or more popular than Apple's own. That comment was a dumb thing to say then, and it's just as dumb now.

I get that every business, Spotify included, wants acquiring customers to be as inexpensive and easy as possible, but what Ek is really saying is that he wants to acquire those customers at the expense of someone else's business -- and, moreover, that there shouldn't be a single barrier to doing so. Sort of like if I were a fashion designer, and I traipsed into Wal-Mart demanding that my clothes be allowed on the shelves without any prerequisite whatsoever.

Image source: KIRILL KUDRYAVTSEV/AFP via Getty Images

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: I have a member of my household who is an iPhone owner and currently a Spotify Premium subscriber. Not a moment’s thought was given to the fact that the subscription needed to be done through Spotify’s website as opposed to the iPhone (which sort of seems like it undercuts Ek's assessment that he couldn't have launched Spotify today because of Apple).

If your product is great, people will do whatever they need to do in order to buy it over the competition. Whining about life not being fair is what losers do.

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Grumble, grumble, grumble... Apple One is getting more expensive again.

I remember when Apple originally announced Apple One — the company's first subscription bundle service that brought together all of the different services that Apple offers for one price. When the company first introduced Apple One, it priced the Premier tier at $29.95 per month.

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Social media seems to be following the road that the streaming services have paved with X right at the forefront.

When Elon Musk took over Twitter and renamed it X, the company soon after launched X Premium (or Twitter Blue, if you're feeling nostalgic). The subscription service gave you the now controversial blue checkmark, the ability to edit posts (I instinctively still wrote tweets at first), and the ability to upload videos in higher quality. It also features a ton of other things, like cutting the amount of ads that you see on the platform in half.

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Many of Netflix's US subscribers are being hit with a price increase starting today, the company announced as part of its third-quarter earnings announcement. The streaming giant disclosed the news, which had been rumored about in recent weeks and led angry customers to start bracing for the company's latest price hike, in its newly released quarterly letter to shareholders. That letter, specifically, revealed that two of Netflix's four monthly subscription tiers are getting the price increase.

"Starting today," Netflix's letter announces, "we’re adjusting prices in the US, UK, and France. In the US, our ads ($6.99) and our Standard plans ($15.49) will stay the same, while Basic will now be $11.99 and Premium $22.99."

For context, that's a $3/month increase for the Premium ad-free plan, the benefits of which include the ability to enjoy four streams at the same time. The Basic plan, meanwhile, is getting a $2/month increase (this is Netflix's cheapest ad-free plan, by the way, and is no longer available to new subscribers).

Netflix's letter continues: "While we mostly paused price increases as we rolled out paid sharing, our overall approach remains the same -- a range of prices and plans to meet a wide range of needs, and as we deliver more value to our members, we occasionally ask them to pay a bit more."

Price increases like these tend to come all at once from streaming services, which don't want to be left out when all of their competitors are squeezing customers for more money. And that's exactly what's happening right now. Nearly every other streaming service besides Netflix has introduced a price hike in recent weeks and months. Hulu, Max, Disney+, Peacock, Paramount+, and Apple TV+ are all more expensive than they were in January 2022.

Prime Video has even taken the dramatic step of making customers pay extra just to avoid watching ads starting in early 2024.

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If you didn't know you could buy merch directly in the Spotify app already, the company wants to make sure every user knows.

Artists have been able to sell merch through the Spotify app for a while now, but it's surprisingly difficult to find which artists sell merch through the streaming service. Spotify is trying to fix that with a dedicated hub for merchandise in the app.

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