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Comment by mrdrozdov | Hacker News Reader

Apps have existed with subscriptions long before now. I suspect you will still be able to buy a flashlight app for a fixed price, but maybe you'll subscribe to Hulu through Apple rather than Hulu's backend.

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As someone who signed up for HBO Now and Pandora through Google's Play service in exactly this manner, I imagine this is the reason they are adding it. It's very easy. The one downside I encountered is that when my card changed and billing failed, it automatically unsubscribed me after what appeared to be a single failure, and I had to sign back up after adding my new card. That looks to be an implementation problem though.

That already exists in the app store.

What's new is for someone who makes a Twitter client to be able to say "You can buy TweetMaster17000, but it's a subscription that totals $6 a year. That way I can afford to continually update it for existing users."

That's not a bad thing, but it may be a hard sell to many users.

The problem is that Apple is now encouraging subscription pricing by dropping their cut to 15% in the second year. This is going to incentivize more apps to go to a subscription model if they can.

The good part of this is that it should strongly incentivize developers to make sure their subscribers are happy. Otherwise they won't make it to the second year.

I think that's only partially true. While Apple promised that there will be an easy way to manage subscriptions, at least some users will just forget that they've subscribed to something and will continue to be charged regardless of whether they are even using the app. This is especially true if they have a mix of intended subscriptions and small unintended ones.

This is part of the time-honored business model for places like fitness clubs.

I get an email every single time I am charged for a subscription, so unless you make it a habit to ignore invoice emails, you won't be likely to forget more than once.

How will this scale to dozens of app subscriptions? If I'm getting invoice emails for 10+ apps every month I doubt I'll be paying really close attention to each one.

So you get the email after the charge took place? I would appreciate it before the charge happening...

I was already doing this with ABCMouse for a while for my toddler, paying for a subscription through iTunes, which allowed me to use the app. So this isn't new, its just now not through a iTunes subscription, just directly through the app store, which is the same account and CC anyway.

I would still expect Hulu to be loathe to give Apple even 15% of their subscription revenue.

In other news, Hulu raises their prices by 40%.

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