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Comment by spanhandler | Hacker News Reader

As a user, I'm torn. I want to see enough pressure put on Apple that their app store cut is reduced, and ideally (though somewhat unrelated to this) the store experience for users improves.

But I definitely don't want to see more stores or payment methods for digital goods on my i-devices.

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Why would an additional option be a bad thing? I assume all the apps would move to something similar to what epic is doing: offer apple pay _in addition_ to another option. What is the downside to that other than pressure on apple to reduce their cut to be more competitive?

I have no problems paying through a wide variety of payment processors on the web: Shopify, Stripe, PayPal, Braintree, Amazon, whatever.

What’s the concern? All cards are zero liability, and you should be checking your statements anyway due to fraud risks.

It's not. That only applies to the US & Canada. In a lot of other countries it can be extremely difficult to impossible to do something in case of credit card fraud.

Besides that, entering card info is a chore. Same as I don't want to signup for every app (which is solved by apple login mostly), I don't want to enter payment info for every app (and update it whenever the card expires lol).

It's nice to have one part of my life where I don't have to figure out who to ask for a refund if things go sideways, wonder how much of a hassle that'll be, and don't even have to think about whether a transaction is reasonably safe. Do I want that to be my entire life? No. But I'm very, very happy not to have to wade through a shady bazaar to pay for commercial software on my phone and tablet. I've got enough stress navigating private bureaucracy in the entire rest of my life. Having one that's very simple is nice. I don't want it to get less simple.

You can have competition or you can have simple, you can't have both.

I benefit from competition between app providers in a variety of ways on the App Store, just not competition on payment methods. That competition is provided by Android—if that weren't around, and thriving, I'd worry a lot more about Apple's mandating a payment method on iOS. As it is, as a user, it's pretty much purely a benefit to me.

In my opinion, more competition is better for the consumer, even if these is a slight hit to convenience. That's simply the nature of more choices -- the freedom to choose results in the burden of choosing.

But obviously I cannot make a blanket statement on all consumers since many of them do value a small increase in convenience very highly.

>I definitely don't want to see more stores or payment methods for digital goods on my i-devices.

Why don't you not use it or go elsewhere then? Everyone who uses iPhone to play games just got told to switch to Android. It's easy to switch!

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