But there is a customer experience reason. As an iOS user, I very much appreciate that I can ask Apple to cancel some bullshit subscription that used to otherwise try to lock me in behind a labyrinth of added friction and timewasting.
Not every problem is technological.
Also, thinking that all businesses will lock one in using friction and timewasting is not a rational argument. There are a lot of honest businesses there forced to pay the Apple Mafia's tax.
But for every one of those, there are many who might want to transact with the business directly.
FWIW, I trust Spotify equally as Apple - so if I get a Spotify subscription, I'm more than happy to get a 30% discount and deal with Spotify directly. Heck, I can do that on my MacOS (another fine product the Cupertino company makes) but when it comes to iOS - OMG, virus, malware, user privacy!!
This way, I know if I'm dealing with something on my phone, I have a trusted channel for commerce. I am sophisticated enough that I can probably ascertain what alternative payment schemes are reasonable and which are scams, but Apple's imposed payment monoculture means unsophisticated users are protected as well.
A more permissive payment setup would necessarily mean more scammy apps, or maybe just vendors with gross, dark patterns designed to obfuscate cancellation without quite being fraud. No thanks.
People say this stuff, but recently I re-examined my subscription to a multi-platform VPN service through the App store and found that they priced it cheaper than getting the same package through their website or through their windows client.
No idea why.
Edit: Not sure if up to date but for example: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/pdfs/App-Store-Pricing-Update...
Or Apple could do one of those virtual credit card things. Or do they already? So you could use an Apple virtual credit card with any processor.
But then the 30% extra fee would be visible to the user. Apple's whole schtick is making things way more expensive and hiding the competition pricing from the user. If "$10 with Stripe" was placed side by side with "$13 with Apple Pay", Apple would immediately lose all of their payment customers and about $2,000,000,000 in revenue, which is a lot. They can only prevent this by preventing "$10 with Stripe" from being there at all. (And if they did it with virtual credit cards, they'd have to tell users there's a 30% fee on each transaction)
If customers want to pay more for Apple to facilitate, there isn’t an incentive to not keep apps in the App Store too. If a company has other reasons not to be in Apple’s store, why should they be required to?
The problem is they don't allow apps to come from anywhere else, this is the core of the issue and what everything eventually comes down to.
Make it possible for users to control their own app installation sources on the hardware they own, show them what is happening when they do so, that they are replacing Apple as the source of trust with the developers of the app marketplace or app they are installing, but only do it once, it can't become a nag.
If they do that, then whenever anyone complains about App Store rules Apple can just tell them to do everything themselves instead, no APNS, no convenient installation from a pre-installed App Store, no seal of approval from a partner the user trusts, no free hosting, no infrastructure for app updates, etc.
You can get your clothes from Target or Saks Fifth Avenue. For most folks, Target is fine, but there are people that insist on paying $30 for every pair of skivvies. I think that they should have that choice. If they can afford it, then let them eat cake (for the record, I tend to be a Costco type of guy, but have not regretted occasionally getting something from Saks).
Selfishly, I would like them to allow sideloads, because the App Store approval process has slowed to a crawl, lately, as well as APNS calls. I’m certain that’s because of thousands of AI-generated submissions. I think many of those submitters would much rather avoid the hoops they need to jump through, for the store.
But I doubt that Apple sees things that way. The secondary app stores are likely to make a lot of money, which they would miss.
The more damaging thing, however, is that Apple’s brand image could get corroded, and there’s a very good chance that they could be strongarmed into supporting side-loaded crapplets. I’m a bit cynical on this, myself. I feel that Apple has been doing a great job of damaging their own brand, in the past few years. I feel as if the quality of their internal engineering has declined precipitously.
Agreed. The quality of Apples own software has declined, as has the outcome of app reviews, there's never been as much crap on the App Store as there is today.
And obviously Apple wants to "have their cake and eat it too", who doesn't? I'm just saying that this is the reason why they're being dragged to court now, because they aren't "playing fair" when they're acting as both store operator and store participant in multiple segments, and are acting as gatekeepers of software for literally hundreds of millions if not billions of devices now (congrats to them).
That said, their argument that the payment policies disproportionately impact apps trying to create sustainable business models that don’t monetize user data is a compelling one that I very much sympathize with.
I’m a Proton subscriber, but I went through their website, just because I tend to do that for any service that isn’t exclusive to Apple or the App Store. The same is true for Kagi, another privacy focused service I subscribe to. I never thought about it, but maybe that’s my way of avoiding lock-in. If I ever leave iOS at some point, I don’t want to have to cancel and resubscribe to something that could cause a service interruption. I also want to make sure that the subscription is everywhere, not just on my Apple devices, and it’s tied to the email I choose.
Also, as a customer, presumably you could choose to use apple's store.
In order for this argument to be true, Apple would need to have market power.
Having market power is the thing that makes tying etc. an antitrust violation.
Because it can be used for more than allowing people to cancel subscriptions. Like charging a 30% margin in a market where it's normally 3%, or excluding apps that compete with Apple software or services, or requiring customers to use a specific combination of hardware, operating system, app store and services, even if the customer only wants one of those things and binding them together then eliminates competition from any company that can't supply all of them. Which are exactly the sort of things that antitrust rules are meant to prevent.
It is one thing to say "listen, people are using our product even though there's another choice" but it is another to say "if we give them a choice, nobody will use us"
if apple was saying you had to support their payment processor alongside others (so you could opt into paying +27% and getting easy cancellations), that would be one thing, but they don't allow you to have any other options available in the app, which i think is where the anticompetitive complaints start to feel more valid.
This makes sense because companies are used to making 70%, so obviously when given the choice to make 30% more overnight they will simply lower prices to avoid having to deal with all that extra revenue
Which means that if you remove 30% of revenue as a cost, one of two things happens. Either the price comes down because the suppliers who lower their price get more business, or the customers aren't very price sensitive in which case developers who use the additional money to improve their apps get more of the market and then users get better apps.
Either of those is better for the customer than having the money go into a megacorp's money bin and have them use it for competition-reducing M&A or unrelated empire-building projects or just have them add it to their cash mountain and have the customer paying that money in exchange for nothing.
I would love to live in the world you're living in where companies have 70% margin on $5 apps and $10/month subscriptions. And where they ever had those margins.
That is bad enough. But here comes the infuriating part. Many app devs don't want their customers to pay extra. But Apple forbids them from providing an alternative payment interface or even informing the customers that such an option exists. And the icing on the cake is that Apple used to forbid the app developers from even providing an alternative, until the courts forced their hand. Is this an anticompetitive practice or just plain extortion?
But if you ask Apple or their fanbase, they would say that it takes resources to review and host the apps. But that rings hollow when you consider all the other ways in which Apple wrings both app developers and customers dry. Then perhaps allow the users to sideload the apps? Oh no! That will break Apple's perfect safety record. How about just making it slightly hard instead? No! The user must be protected at all costs, including by holding them hostage! At this point, I'm convinced that either Apple is astroturfing, or the fans suffer from an extreme form of Stockholm syndrome, or both.
In reality, everyone other than Apple has created as much friction as possible in the cancellation process. With Apple, I simply subscribe and then immediately go and unsubscribe.
Anyhow I do see your point that narrowing user options can lead to better UX - if you actually like all the tradeoffs they make. The problem is if you don't, your SoL. And in this case the trade-off is Apple taking a giant extra cut so... I think it's reasonable that folks don't like that trade-off.
