This is extremely noticeable in a couple of areas.
Subscription - you get an email from apple BEFORE renewal, and can easily cancel subscriptions - all located in one place - no phone calls or other stupidity (try cancelling a myheritage account by contrast!)
They have integrated monitoring so if you delete an app, it will ask if you also want to cancel out the subscription for the app.
The prompting for purchase and trials is VERY explicit. So for example, NY Times has a banner (not on ios) saying signup for $1/week. Great, you do it. Then you find out that in a month it switches to something like $15/month- I mean, the scams and tricks are endless off app store.
Especially with elderly relatives or younger folks or just folks who don't want to be hassled with this game playing, these features are what make using apple so nice and help drive the premium users are willing to pay (which can be ridiculous!).
One tip - if you have elderly folks, scan their bank statement / cc statement 1x per year, you usually can save them thousands on auto-renewing stuff they no longer use.
I really wish government or credit card companies would impose rules on merchants that prohibit this kind of behaviour. It's very easy to get bitten by subscription scams, even from companies that appear legitimate.
The lack of regulation on this matter just leaves Apple with justification to act as a payment gatekeeper.
I know this is not popular on HN (ie, anti-trust claims to allow devs to abuse users the way they can elsewhere).
They haven't been stupid / annoying about it. You contrast their controls with those outside ios.
The russian site I visit with the cookie notice, they can still track me and what am I going to do about it? So the cookie notice is both annoying an ineffective against bad actors. On iOS, I decline a permission, and it's done.
> So for example, NY Times has a banner (not on ios) saying signup for $1/week. Great, you do it. Then you find out that in a month it switches to something like $15/month
Out of curiosity, I went incognito (as I'm an NYT subscriber) and clicked that banner just now, and it says it's $1/week for a year, not a month ($4.25/week afterwards). I'm pretty sure I've been seeing that offer for years, too.
Maybe you're in a different cohort or something but that's a weird and antagonistic way to treat a customer that's going to drop people out of a funnel so I'm wondering if you're misremembering.
Indirectly sure - it pays for the app store and all of the curation that goes on there. Admittedly there's a crazy healthy profit for Apple, but I believe you are arguing principles so the amount shouldn't be relevant.
