When I buy a coffee I also don't have to worry about it charging me $5 once a month forever unless I go through a maze of menu options (possibly involving phone calls) to get it to stop.
An hourly paid person must manually prepare fresh coffee using distributed physical goods multiple times a day and brew the cup full at every brick and mortar location.
This is not a very good analogy at all. Free market and competition have already decided the price of quality apps and quality coffee. The only way you can prove this wrong is by actually disrupting the market.
We can take the free market purist view that there needs to be no further discussion on the issue: the market has decided that high-quality journalism doesn't generate enough revenue to support itself, therefore, its intrinsically valueless.
Or, we stipulate that high-quality journalism is valuable becauae it has positive effects on society that are beyond the ability of the market to determine. If we think so, it makes sense to talk about how to fund these endevours that aren't reliant on free market forces.
(I realize you're talking about apps, but the topic of the article is content, and the same basic principles apply to both)
For coercion, people are naturally resistant to it, even when it is "good for them". Do you think it is a worthwhile investment to spend political capital on laws, regulations, enforcement etc to apply such coercion? Maybe if we use one of the subtler methods, i.e. taxation and subsidy? There's also the problem of the 1A which tends to negate most government action you can take in this sphere.
I'm not quite convinced here (extending the 'app' concept to other software). Some of the price is subsidized by VC money, and some by advertising. In both cases the consumer/purchaser may not be aware of the real value of their purchase, nor the real cost. So the market hasn't finished speaking IMHO.
Plus, you get an email confirming every subscription and renewal before the renewal is charged, with a link directly to that subscription so you can cancel it.
Not sure how it could be made much easier than that...
I actually don't think its purposely hidden. Saying I'd be impressed if anyone found it without googling it was probably a slight exaggeration, but it certainly isn't intuitive to me.
As far as emails go, I didn't know that, and you must be seeing something I'm not. I get a receipt with a bunch of links to Apple support. Tried every link and none of them take me directly to the subscription.
The point is less to do with Apples implementation of subscription service and more to do with my lack of trust behind them in general. Apple might do better than most, but I've been burned one time too many.