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Honestly in some cases, yes. Subscription in-app purchases are the only subscriptions I have ever signed up for that are easy to cancel.

I prefer to subscribe to services through in-app purchases over the service's website itself because it's always easy to cancel subscriptions made through Apple, and I never forget I'm getting charged because I get payment receipts.

There’s tons of value in a unified payment system, which is why it’s app developers who were unhappy, not users. For instance, ease of cancellation of recurring fees is enormous. You can bet that’s going to get harder as developers get more control. And anyway, The app developers have no motivation to charge you less, the market already bears the fees, they just want to capture that profit for themselves.

Personally I probably just won’t buy things that require me to sign up for a new payment system, but I don’t play mobile games so I’m probably not representative of who this impacts the most.

> which is why it’s app developers who were unhappy, not users

The judge commented on that

>> "Apple created an innovative platform but it did not disclose its rules to the average consumer. Apple has used this lack of knowledge to exploit its position.

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> Personally I probably just won’t buy things that require me to sign up for a new payment system

You, as a consumer, will now have a choice, which you'll get to exercise! You will be able to send a market signal for products (either the service you might subscribe to, and Apple) to get better and attract more developers/users. This sounds like a win!

> This sounds like a win!

Not if I wasn't interested in having the choice to begin with. Now some apps will not be purchasable by me unless I go through their account flow, which I don't want to. It's strictly worse (for me).

There is now a market force for Apple to make its IAP services better, which makes it more likely for developers to make apps with it (theoretically).

There will be larger players who won't bother with any cut -- they want to own the relationship with the customer, and view any intermediary with hostility.

And before, they might not have bothered developing an app, or one for iOS. Now you have choice. Choice is good.

What big names haven't developed iOS apps but may do so now? I'm hard pressed to think of any. They may not always allow in-app purchases, of course, but they generally exist.

Well. Fortnite for example.

Sure.

They’re either already not on Apple’s IAP (Netflix or Spotify) or they are very sensitive to optimising conversions, and would pay a premium to give users an easier option (which Apple is now incentivised to lower)

No one wants to own the payment instrument. That's useless, causes missed sales, and is a security nightmare. Companies don't reinvent their own Visa or Mastercard, for example, because that's a huge pain and the fees for using the existing products are low.

App developers were mad about Apple's egregious 30% cut for doing payment processing. If Apple wants everyone to accept Apple IAP, it can simply lower its fees to competitive payment processing rates.

> App developers were mad about Apple's egregious 30% cut for doing payment processing. If Apple wants everyone to accept Apple IAP, it can simply lower its fees to competitive payment processing rates.

Apple has never characterized the 30% as "payment processing" -- it's it's always characterized it as a commission, which the court affirmed and explicitly mentioned that Apple is allowed to pursue that commission, even if the developer chose to use another payment provider. Apple's IAP has been an enforcement mechanism for that 30% cut.

It's not guaranteed, but one realistic outcome is that its IAP services get worse, because e.g. automatically saying yes to all refund requests is less feasible when margins are thinner. Retailers like large supermarket chains are only able to have no-questions-asked refund policies because nobody is actually taking a bad box of cereal back to a store, but in digital, it might too easy right now for a 3% cut + absorbing chargebacks to be sustainable. Similarly, having cancellation be one-click and done is great for the consumer but if you're in the razor thin margins game unfortunately making unsubscribing difficult is a competitive edge.

IAPs are only indirectly a product that app customers get a choice in; the primary customer is app developers who have vastly different interests. There may have to be a shift on some of these axes for Apple to compete on price.

I trust Apple will force developers to provide a drop down menu of options for payments. I don't think they'll allow dodgy redirects and webviews. That's not in line with Apple's design principles.

The infamously dodgy "link".

I already had a choice. That’s one of the primary reasons I chose iPhone and tend to recommend iPhones to friends and family. This decision will by definition reduce the amount of choice available to smartphone buyers.

> why it’s app developers who were unhappy, not users

IIRC, Epic was offering their in game currency more cheaply outside of the App Store, which Apple didn't like.

I bet plenty of people would use an alternate payment method to save money..right now they don't have that choice.

It was pretty genius from Epic, they knew they'd get banned, but it instantly showed how the consumer is harmed by this behavior (pay more, get less).

Every mobile game with a cash store would instantly give you a discount to go through a different provider.

I highly doubt every, or even many mobile game devs who could suddenly switch from IAP to Stripe would pass those savings on to the consumers... Let's be real here.

That’s getting into pretty basic economic theory, costs going down across the board in a very competitive market will generally bring down prices, eventually.

I think if you offered the two options to users with even partial differences in price, most users would go for the cheaper option even if they had to do cartwheels to process payments.

> Are you willing to spend 27% more for everything to use Apple payment gateway? Do you love it that much?

Honestly, yeah. I'm way more likely to click "subscribe at $5/mo using your normal payment flow" than go through a whole new account creation flow and wonder how cancellation will work somehow down the line or how trustworthy this vendor is with my data.

I would. I'm very careful about what I pay for anyway. If you want me to pay for your product it needs to be something that brings me real value. Even then I limit myself, as I only have a certain amount to spend anyway, so you're competing with other products for my limited amount of budget.

Apple's IAP makes it incredibly simple to cancel service. It's consistent as well, which means I don't have to keep hunting through your site to find it because you hid the location of canceling behind "Please contact us to cancel" type crap.

Do I think Apple is charging too much for their cut? Yea, I do. But as a consumer, the benefits outweigh it. As a potential business owner, yea... I would be upset too.

The ability to simply cancel any subscription without clicking through increasingly desperate "Don't go!!!" nag screens is easily worth an extra 30% for me, too.

Yup. As a consumer, Apple's IAP and Apple Pay driven experience is pretty darn good. I wish their business didn't revolve around subscriptions as much, but at the very least it does make purchasing really easy as a consumer.

which means the apple IAP is going to have a competitive advantage compared to third party IAP.

This means that competition is working, because you would choose apple's IAP, over the third party, even if it was more expensive.

> This means that competition is working, because you would choose apple's IAP, over the third party, even if it was more expensive.

Aren't you heavily assuming these developers would even bother integrating apple's IAP? This ruling will allow the developers to completely go around apple and never use apple's IAP at all.

>Apple's IAP makes it incredibly simple to cancel service.

This doesn't require Apple's payment monopoly. IAP would just need to make an API call to some 3rd party API. Besides did everyone forget they can call their credit card issuer and suspend payment?

> Besides did everyone forget they can call their credit card issuer and suspend payment?

This does not get you out of your contractual obligation to pay, if you have one. You could end up getting an annoying surprise from a debt collection agency a few years down the road. An important thing that Apple was able to provide that a credit card processor suspending payment can’t is to force the vendor to let you actually cancel the subscription, not just the payment.

Apple can't remove contractual obligations either. Any subscription which requires serious amount of money (enough to make a lawsuit worthwhile) should be very carefully managed.

Otherwise calling collections is a very bad deal for the vendor who will be penalized by the credit company and by the courts and by bad PR.

> Apple can't remove contractual obligations either.

They can’t remove them, but they can prevent them from existing in the first place. It’s their platform, and they can and do make it a requirement that the app vendor’s subscription contract conform to a standard where ending the subscription from within Apple’s subscription management UI actually terminates all future obligations for the customer. This is why many subscriptions that are otherwise quite hard to end and involve deliberate inconveniences like requiring calling in during business hours can just be cancelled from the subscription page if they were started via the app.

> Otherwise calling collections is a very bad deal for the vendor who will be penalized by the credit company and by the courts and by bad PR.

This is just not correct. Vendors do this all the time, credit companies don’t care and have no policies against it, since it’s the customer’s responsibility to have a legal justification to tell the credit company to refuse charges, and the PR blowback is demonstrably nonexistent.

Some of the services I pay via Apple's subscription workflow is cheaper. Unbelievable, but true. Pocket is one, Evernote is other. However, they later synchronized their pricing to be cheaper everywhere, but it doesn't matter. It makes my life easier.

If I'm paying for a cross-platform service, I can happily use their own methods, but if I'm paying for an app-store only application which either runs only on iOS or macOS, good luck to them. I won't subscribe via their methods, because it makes my life more complicated.

> Are you willing to spend 27% more for everything to use Apple payment gateway?

This is the argument Epic's tried to make, and it isn't particularly convincing. The iOS App Store is filled with cheap apps, to the point where many people react to a one-time price of $9.99 as disturbingly expensive. Apps and games that are literally identical on iOS to other platforms are frequently cheaper in their iOS releases because that's what the market expects. So in practice, the 30% cost is usually being eaten by developers, not passed on to consumers. There's a lot of good arguments to be made for cutting that 30% share down to 15% for everyone across the board, but "now you'll only be charged $4.99 instead of $5.99 for this game you would have paid $14.99 for on the Switch version" just isn't one of them.

> This is the argument Epic's tried to make, and it isn't particularly convincing.

It's not an argument, it's a question. Some people have clearly answered it as yes, yes they would. This shows some distinct value provided to them by Apple. Value that's worth something, though perhaps not 30%.

Apple's next step is to provide a compelling enough offering that developers and consumers alike pick it over the soon-to-be competing offerings. Wouldn't that be awesome if they pull it off?

27% more? Are you kidding - it will be 12% more, if Apple doesn't reduce their rates at all for most developers (most don't make $1m revenue).

What portion of payments go to people not making $1m revenue? Hard to believe it is a large portion.

> Are you willing to spend 27% more for everything

This makes what is, IMO, an unjustified assumption: that competition in the payment scene will drive prices down for the same item based on payment method.

Instead, I think we'll see the same thing we see with the cash/credit card split: The same price regardless of your payment method, with price differences lining the publisher's pockets.

True that cheaper payment methods may not drive down the price of an app or in-app transactions. But as a user, you would be more satisfied knowing that that the $10 you are paying for an app (or for some transaction within it) is going to the creator of the app, rather than some arbitrary percentage (decided by Apple) of your money. As a user, you would even feel worse knowing that Apple simply pockets the remaining amount.

Yes, if it saves me from having to call to cancel my subscription or going through a bunch of weird "are you sure", "how about 2% off", "how about 5% off", "how about we bill you $5 less", "why do you not like us? Fill out this 75 question survey to cancel". Yes it does.

>Are you willing to spend 27% more for everything to use Apple payment gateway? Do you love it that much?

Most in-App purchases are in the range of 1-5$. If I pay a couple of cents more to have a unified experience, yeah sure.

It'd be interesting to see how much users spend on in-App purchases. For me it's almost nothing, maybe 1 purchase a year? The big money is probably in the free2play market where players spend a lot to buy booster packs or "gold".

You are correct. See:

> Judge seems alarmed at the extent to which impulse spending by "exorbitantly high spending gamers" drives App Store revenue.

> Says it's outside the scope of antitrust but says issue is "worthy of attention"

[1] https://twitter.com/stephentotilo/status/1436365652164493317

> "in most economic ways...the App Store is primarily a game store and secondarily an 'every other' app store"

[2] https://twitter.com/stephentotilo/status/1436365985800507394

There this weird misconception floating around the topic that if Apple where to reduce their cut, things would be cheaper for people, conveniently forgetting this is a fight between providers and distributor for margins and not between consumers and sellers for pricing.