Apple Allows iTunes Competitor on App Store

The approval of spotify is a sign of change at Apple

Apple Senior Vice President of Worldwide Product Marketing Phil Schiller has made it his personal mission to fix the iPhone's App Store. Phil Shoemaker, Apple’s Director of Application Technology is also playing a hand. Why would the top brass at a company like Apple be having to work so hard to "fix" a wildly successful marketplace that sold over a billion apps? It boils down to one thing -- perception.

Apple has consistently shown inconsistency, approving usenet applications designed to assist in filesharing, while rejecting others that monitor your torrent client. Likewise it rejected Google Voice, while approving a similar app from VoIP service Vonage. Still other controversial apps -- like the infamous "Babyshaker" app -- it approved only to later reject. However, there are some signs that Apple may finally be loosening up when it comes to its app store censorship.

This week Apple approved Spotify Mobile, a European music download service's application. The app will compete directly with iTunes in digital music sales.

In the past, Apple forbade most applications that competed with the handful of applications it offers for the iPhone. It relaxed this restriction slightly, recently allowing rival web browsers -- but only those based on WebKit, the rendering engine Apple's Safari browser uses.

For those interested, Spotify offers 6 million songs on-demand for $16. You can stream songs to your phone, or download songs to listen to when offline.

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Spotify iPhone App - learn to music on your iPhone

Free iPhone Music - Only if Spotify is Allowed on the AppStore

"If Spotify has its way, iPhone owners will no longer be slaves to iTunes, song-by-song payments or finite disk capacity," Adam Taylor reports for TIME Magazine.

"Last week the Swedish company behind Spotify's streaming music provider announced plans to release a free iPhone application that will let users listen to songs played directly off of its online service, with no need to download," Taylor reports. "That would give iPhone users instant access to any of Spotify's 6 million songs, without taking up precious memory space — way more than the maximum 7,000 tracks that a 32GB iPhone can hold."

Taylor reports, "Songs can also be temporarily stored, or cached, ready to play during those moments when web connection drops, like when you're going through a tunnel or underground. Spotify's new application could change the way iPhone users listen to music. But first, it has to get the okay from Apple."

"Spotify's new application won't be available to everyone, only those who opt for the premium service, which costs $15 a month for unlimited streams... access to pre-releases and better audio quality than the free service, which forces users to listen to ads after every few songs," Taylor reports. "Spotify hopes to have its new application available on the iPhone within the next few weeks. The trick is getting Apple to approve an application that some observers see as a potential challenger to Apple's own iTunes."

[via Mac Daily News]

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