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Comment by asou | Hacker News Reader

Considering Tinder's parent ( The Match Group ) got sued by the FTC for fraud, not very smart to include them. Intentionally making subscriptions hard to cancel is one of the behaviors Apple's payment system seeks to prevent.

As much as I like Tim Sweeney's arguments for lower royalties, he doesn't have half a toe to stand on.

Don't want to pay the Apple tax, make your own phone. This fairness coalition is free to manufacture Android phones with a no royalties store . Hogan's Law on YouTube has done a very good take on this. The government can not compel two companies to engage in a contract. If I set up a newspaper stand and decide anyone who wants to sell news papers needs to cut me in for 30%, you can't demand special treatment.

I could see Apple making an example out of Epic and banning them for life. You don't sneak in hidden functionality, and then flick it on via a server side command

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> Don't want to pay the Apple tax, make your own phone.

Oh, so the price of entry to the mobile app market is just: "creating your whole mobile device, mobile hardware, app ecosystem and operating system". Sounds simple and really in line with benefits that free market competition brings to users!

Maybe we should put this in the physical world as well - anyone trying to open a new store on the corner with different margins needs to found its own town, build all the roads, complete all infrastructure and persuade people to mov e to this town.

Bad analogy. All of that stuff is paid for by taxes. All of the stuff offered by Apple is paid for by hardware sales and software fees.

You're closer to suggesting wanting to open a store in a town but refusing to pay property taxes, income taxes, and payroll taxes because you feel they're too high. You're welcome to go open your store somewhere else that doesn't have those taxes but presumably there won't be too many people that live there that would frequent your store and you know that.

> The government can not compel two companies to engage in a contract.

It seems like there ought to be exceptions to prevent certain gatekeeping behavior. As a very extreme example, suppose a company bought up a set of private roads in such a way that without their roads, people in a certain area could not access the rest of the country. One would hope that the government would compel the gatekeeper to do business with everyone! (Perhaps with some reasonable fees, weight limits, etc.)

Apple decided to insert themselves as a gatekeeper between iOS users and developers, so it shouldn't come as a surprise to them that deciding to "not engage" with some parties raises antitrust concerns, since it means blocking users and developers from engaging in mutually beneficial relationships.

Everyone can access all the above the services via the original personal computing device, a PC.

Other roads exists. If I have a private road, but 3 or 4 other roads still go to the same place you can't drive over my gate since you feel like it

But apple didn't buy up anything preexisting -- they created the smartphone market from scratch and grew the user and developer base organically. You could argue that they leveraged their Mac developer base for this, but 1. the first iPhone didn't support third party apps and 2. there was nothing to leverage this developer base against because there was no smartphone market when the iPhone was released.

Also, if we accept that smartphones are a necessity on par with roads, iPhones aren't the only smartphones, and Androids aren't really that inferior. As a user, if you don't like iPhones, get an Android. As a developer, if you don't like developing for iPhones, develop for Android. If either group feels like they can't leave for Android because iPhones are that much better, well, that's Apple's reward for creating a good device and growing its user- and developer bases -- should they really be punished for that success?

You make it sound as if there was no market for phone applications before the iphone, which at least in europe is not true.

And the punishment would not be because a company succeeds, but because a company abuses its success position to stiffle competition and artificially placing their other offerings in a better place.

In the world I inhabit, Apple is the one that intentionally makes it really hard to cancel subscriptions. You literally cannot cancel a subscription to an iOS app from an Android phone or Linux PC.

You can't subscribe without an IOS Device , Mac or Windows PC.

If your in some strange edge case where your subscribing to services and then discarding your IOS devices before canceling , that's on you. In a worst case scenario you could borrow a friend's Windows PC. As much as I love Linux I can't imagine most Linux users don't have at least one windows PC or Mac.

If we really want to get technical, spin up an AWS instance, RDP into it, install iCloud for windows and then cancel your subscription.

There are a few services you can sign up for without any of those... but Apple has a support page telling you how to unsubscribe from those from the devices you signed up from: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT211011

Said support page also says you can contact Apple Support about it, which I imagine would also work for the "canceling an arbitrary in-app subscription" issue.

No, what the fuck? It's not "on me". It's on Apple to make it easy to cancel even if I no longer have an Apple product or Windows PC on hand.

Borrow a friend's PC? Spin up an AWS Windows instance? Seriously, WTF?! I can cancel my Android subscriptions from anywhere with a web browser.

It's not an intentional trick to force you to keep paying.

The vast vast majority of people have access to a Windows PC or Apple product. How you ended up in this edge case I'll never know.

To take this to it's logical conclusion, what if you don't run JavaScript on your browsers. Would they also need to give you a cancelation page which doesn't require JavaScript.

How about this? An email reminder N days in advance of the charge date with a cancel link.

Companies get regulated for a reason, and facilitating the cancelation of subscriptions sounds reasonable to me.

Apple does send those emails, but the link to unsubscribe simply doesn't work on Linux or Android. It's the most absurd thing.

Of course you should be able to cancel without requiring JavaScript.

Alright, after returning my iOS device I became Amish.

I fully expect Apple to cancel my subscription via Mail and refund me back dated to when the letter was post dated !

My point is Apple isn't doing this on purpose to you, you're just in a very strange use case

Yes, Apple should let you cancel by mail. And the web.

You keep making these claims that I'm sure sound more outlandish to you, and I think all of them are quite reasonable.

The purpose of a system is what it does.

How many users as a percentage do you think are signing up for IOS services , discarding their IOS devices and then don't have access to a Mac or Windows PC ?

Very few people use Linux as their desktop is. To be honest they should allow you to reply to the email and allow a cancelation, but you following into an edge case isn't deliberate.

This also applies if you sign up for, say, HBO from an iOS device. You can keep using the same subscription on Android but can't cancel.

If you subscribe to HBO on Google Play, you can keep using it and cancel it on iOS.

The asymmetry is bad and Apple should be held responsible for it.

Good point. I stand corrected. I still don't think Apple is doing this intentionally, but rather as a side effect of it's ecosystem. Thanks for your insight

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