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> I’m guessing though that the South Korean market is be significant enough for Apple and Google to not just pull out it’s business from South Korea and call it a day.

I think that's right. The next step would be for a large enough market to have a similar law, and then they'll just have that as their policy globally. That probably means EU or US.

> That probably means EU or US.

Or the UK, which has a larger economy than South Korea. Although going after big tech is not, as far as I know, on the radar of the UK government.

> Or the UK, which has a larger economy than South Korea

Wait for the Brexit dust to settle and IndyRef2 to happen.

The next step is Apple completely disabling IAP in Korea with a message that pops up telling the user which law is responsible.

> home-grown web-based payment systems have… like super shitty UX

They now have a reason to make it better, since they can now actually compete with Apple Pay and Google Pay.

They already do that on the Web.. I'd be surprised if, when available (eg. an iOS visitor using Safari on a Shopify site), people chose manually entering their payment info more than Apple Pay.

Apple Pay is already available as an API, you can even use it on the web.

Indeed would be nice to centralize all subscriptions, we have yet to see how they would interface with 3rd party payment options. But on the whole this should be a win - if anything, those competitors will have a strong incentive to improve their UX.

Why not create a credit card startup that makes it easier to cancel subscriptions instead of being the devil's advocate?

"significant enough for Apple and Google to not just pull out it’s business from South Korea and call it a day."

I always found this line of argument disingenious and disturbing.

Disingenious because it doesn't happen historically, so it sounds like a tired threat

Disturbing - are we saying we would rather kneecap our democratic institutions, right or wrong, than live without iPhones?

We'd die to defend our lands and laws from demands of foreign governments, but fold to demands of foreign megacorps?

Companies pull out of countries all the time when changes in the socio, political, economic and most importantly regularly environment make their business untenable.

Case in point: China or post-Brexit UK.

You use this hyperbolic rhetoric to describe the situation but it really is an every day occurence.

>Case in point: China or post-Brexit UK.

How many companies have pulled out of China or post-Brexit UK? I can't think of many.

> are we saying we would rather kneecap our democratic institutions, right or wrong, than live without iPhones?

No, it's just that this is the choice these companies have. They can completely stop doing business in a country (or countries) if they don't want to obey the relevant laws/court rulings of that country. The only thing SK could do then is sanction Apple products so it becomes illegal to import them (reminder that a sizable portion of SK's economy is directly attributed to Samsung/LG).

> Disingenious because it doesn't happen historically, so it sounds like a tired threat

Hasn't this happened several times with Google-news?

> I’m hoping that Apple will provide APIs for showing payment screens and Apple will still control the ability to show all subscriptions, cancel them in one single place, etc… but I don’t think Apple will ever do that. Unfortunate…

I'm not sure that Apple can do it without being an intermediary in the process - managing the billing. And... well... that's what Apple Pay is.

In order for Apple to be the one to show and cancel subscriptions, they need to be the ones billing you and then processing that transaction (possibly batching it up with others to reduce processing fees).

Likewise, if there's a dispute - for example a child made a few hundred dollars of in app purchase and the parents would like to refund that... Apple can reverse those transactions ( https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT204084 ). If you're dealing with a 3rd party payment system... you're going to have to deal with the 3rd party payment system on your own.

Another "it can be gotten around" when you leave the App Store and payment processor is the in app purchase constraints ( https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204396 ) in that a developer wouldn't have to honor that check at all.

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The future of 3rd party payment processors that developers ask for really means taking Apple and its APIs out of the process. Entering in the credit card information (making sure that developers aren't trying to bypass access constraints on the wallet) and sending that out themselves.

For example, PayPal charges 4.99% plus a fixed fee that's about $0.10 per transaction ( https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/mpp/merchant-fees ). This is comparable to what a developer would have to pay to Visa or any other payment processor for doing micro transactions of their own. Having Apple do it means that Apple would really like to charge at least 5% + $0.10/transaction which for a $0.99 is $0.15 and that's 15%... which is the amount that a small developer shop would have to pay for doing it through Apple.

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And so, I return back to the question - how would you see Apple opening up the APIs for doing payment processing without doing the payment processing themselves (and insuring extra expenses)?

This is not true. Apple can absolutely (but probably won't, as unfortunate as that is - and I hope I'm wrong on this) build APIs for hooking into the views used in the current system, while the actual transactions happen outside of it. They can't guarantee that the data shown is what is actually being charged though, which is why they probably won't do that.

Traction brings improvement over time. SV companies enjoy enormous first mover advantage and megaphone that pushes their products to the masses early to capture them, and then iterate on UX.