One of the better things Apple does with their position as a middleman is give customers more control over their relationship with app creators of all kinds. If the customer is unhappy about their experience, iOS gives them what amounts to a one-click "get off my phone and get out of my wallet" button. Compare this to the notorious New York Times cancellation rigamarole where cancelling a subscription required a phone call to a person whose job was to talk you out of cancelling. This level of autonomy is clearly valuable to customers: behold the widespread dissatisfaction about subscriptions vs. one-time purchases. People don't like the experience of being strongarmed into a business relationship any more than they like it with interpersonal relationships, and rightly so. However, because Apple exerted the degree of control that it did over what shape a customer relationship mediated by their app store could look like, it hasn't been clear exactly _how_ valuable that control is to consumers.

Once app creators have options for customer relationships other than Apple's app store, I expect that we'll find out exactly how valuable that autonomy is to customers, and I'm personally fascinated about what the answer might be.