Spotify may offer its own payment option – what does that mean for you?

It’s not entirely clear how this will work yet, but if the experiment is successful, more applications may come.

Choosing a payment method yourself, you are faced with roughly two options: Do you contribute to the further development of the Play Store infrastructure or do you want the money to go to the developer of an app?

We’ll see if you really notice anything from the choice you make. For example, Epic Games has tried to run payment options for Fortnite on its own outside of the Apple App Store and Google Play Store. The game publisher has lured customers by offering lower prices for in-game items, making shopping through the Apple or Google platform less appealing. Of course, the two companies are not happy with this, so now Epic has been sued.

So it’s not clear that a Spotify subscription will soon be cheaper if you pay for your subscription outside of the Google option. After all, Google started the experiment itself.

If you pay your premium subscription directly to Spotify, you know that a larger portion of the amount goes to the streaming service. You could say it’s a good development.

The payment option offered by Google provides great convenience. All your subscription data and payment information are stored in one central place. You can see all your subscriptions at a glance through your Google account and you can turn them on or off easily.

If your payment details change, for example because you have a new credit card, you just need to notify Google and all your subscriptions will continue. You don’t need to update your data in each app separately. On the other hand, you provide full information about sensitive financial data to Google, but it is not yet clear whether this will change if you allow all payments to go through the relevant applications.

Spotify will make the payment option available in all markets in which it operates. Time will tell if Apple will launch a similar experiment in the long run, but hard work is being done behind the scenes to give users more freedom of choice.

The European Commission, European Parliament and EU member states are currently working on laws to limit the tech giants’ market power, including stricter rules for the app store.