You would really pay a 30% premium on all your digital purchases just to be warned about a subscription expiring next year? You might be an edge case.
If the US mandated that you need to provide equivalent means of subscription and unsubscription with equal ease of use that would be one thing, but we do not live in that world.
Even if a developer makes subscriptions easy to manage today, without tie-in to Apple's infrastructure, they could change that process on a whim.
Instead I suggest playing back a pre-recorded sales pitch for a relevant trade union: The workers won’t suffer from bleeding ears and the bosses might actually care.
https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/companies-mu...
This makes the practice even more egregious as you know the website has the ability to allow cancellations they just choose not to enable it for people living in other states.
But, that is only the NYTimes. My guess is that the original hypothesis holds true for others; I doubt JFax has improved.
In my opinion, it should be as easy to unsubscribe as it is to subscribe. I interpret anything else as consumer-hostile. It's very strange coming from NY Times ... I know they find it hard to finance journalism nowadays, but dark patterns are never the answer.
Perhaps look at it this way: I'm pretty OK with paying 30% to not pay 200% and, kinda more importantly, not to feel upset and angry later for forgetting a dark-patterned subscription dinging me again. If that's an edge case, y'all are wrong.
Maybe Apple can straitjacket them properly. "You must use XYZ API in iOS/MacOS and you must support one-click cancellation via a standard process." But I think the dark-pattern farmers who are angry about this would be angry about that, too.
I don't want to pay an extra 30%, and have that 30% taken away from the devs who actually deserve the money, because _some_ might make it hard to cancel.
Most would likely just have a Paypal button same as 90% of websites if that makes you feel better.
And it doesn't make me feel better, because that's exactly the hellworld we have outside of iOS, but thanks!
If that's all they'd done from the beginning this ruling would not have happened.
Apple wants to control the access to a very significant portion of the user base?
Fine, but then they'll act like a lawmaker-light and in many (western) societies that means you get some burdens and responsibilities piled upon you by the original lawmakers.
Im not sure Apple want's to do that. By not restricting the 3rd party payments there is more of a case for using Apple's payment processor so you can cancel easier.
Does Apple not support paying in arbitrary websites like Google Pay?
Apple Pay is one of those payment options, but if you have to trust a bunch of third parties to properly manage your information the specific form of payment doesn't matter much.
The mobile app payment market hasn't been competitive for a decade, so Apple has never had to compete with companies that are more efficient than they are, and can offer the same or better service for less than a 30% cut.
However Apple does vet apps and focus on security somewhat (altho Google's project 0 seems to do a better job at finding bugs for Apple), however 30% is far too much even for what Apple are offering their customers.
In an ideal world, Apple customers need to be told: "you will be charged extra buying through Apple to help pay for the protections/quality that our platform offers you".
However, Apple explicitly disallows both telling users that they're being charged more and why, and that they could get it cheaper elsewhere.
Regardless of whether Apple are still allowed to charge x%, the first step it to get Apple to allow developers to tell the customer about other payment options and for Apple to explain to their customers why it costs more, then customers can make the decision for themselves.
Apple is free to not make developer tools anymore, that's their choice. Nobody is forcing them to. They do it b/c apps make the iPhone better. In fact an iPhone without apps is pretty useless.