You sure Apple has no role in making the things you are buying. They do design and build the phones, SDKs, Developer Tools etc that makes these apps even any good.

I used to build apps for Blackberry and Palm devices and I can assure you that their contribution should not be understated.

I will say the subscription stuff is nice because if I want to cancel something I don’t have to play games, make a tedious phone call (with “exit interview/sales pitch”) or go around in circles on support pages that promise to tell you how to cancel and then lead to a page that doesn’t exist, or actually cancel and have them “forget”, or have them cancel immediately but not give me a prorated refund, or any other shenanigans companies have pulled.

I just click a button and it’s done. The service continues through the date I’m paid up until and then is properly canceled.