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Comment by franciscop | Hacker News Reader

I have never used an iPhone, but IIRC Neflix is the example people usually put as the "perfect" subcription & unsubscription workflows, as in they will make your life easy to unsubscribe and that has earned them a bunch of customers over the years. So it's a bit unfair to put "the best in class" as the alternative and saying it's not as good, when virtually every other subscription system is worse than Netflix.

Apple payments don't even need to be the best, they just need to be good enough since they are already the default and integrated with your phone.

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Netflix makes it too easy to re-subscribe, though.

I cancelled it after one of the price hikes and a round of it suggesting nothing I wanted to watch, only to have it seemingly re-subscribe on it's own.

After a couple of rounds of that, I discovered that any TV still logged in could browse, pick a show, and would get a prompt to "continue membership" or something like that.

It was designed in such a way that the family was instinctively clicking through the message, not knowing what it was.

Anyway, forcing all sessions to sign out before the next cancellation did the trick.

i recently tried on spotify and disney plus as well, works like a charm.

The worst offenders in recent history were bloomberg (where i had to open a support case to cancel) and some other news publication. FT was the best experience in news publications. More and more services seem to be getting better in this.

Cancelling direct spotify subscription is actually full of dark patterns:

You click unsubscribe and are taken to new screen that presents you pricing plans and is worded in such way that you think you already unsubscribed. I actually thought so and almost thought that I'm done. But no, decided to check and saw that I'm still subscribed.

Turned out, there are THREE consecutive screens where you need to successfully pick the correct option to really unsubscribe.

its by no means perfect, but compared to others where you have to dig deep in an faq for a support number, call up (during business hours), go through 3 people who will try to sell you something else (once whilst trying to cancel a mobile contract because of a poor signal, I've even had accusations of not doing enough on my end to improve things), to then get to someone who will probably cancel your contract, its a step in the right direction at least

The problem is that it's completely a company's decision to make it easy to cancel and the vast majority of them make it as hard as they can.

Just a few examples: Xbox Live, you can sign up online but to cancel you have to call them and justify to them why you don't want to use their service anymore. Also had to do that to cancel a credit card recently. I've heard its even worse with companies like Adobe or like you mentioned, news publications.

As a customer, because of our bad consumer protection laws it makes me very hesitant to start a subscription with a new company and I vastly prefer doing it through Apple if I can.

With Apple, it's easy to see when you have a subscription active and to stop it from auto renewing. If cancel flows are getting easier it's probably due to pressure from this existing.

I also wanted to add, I think a lot of the value that Apple adds should actually be things that are regulated by our government. For example, you should be able to cancel a service the same way you signed up. And a lot of the privacy stuff Apple does should be enshrined into law.

It's pleasant as a consumer that at least one company operates this way, but it's terrible that most people don't even consider that our government should be the one doing this, not private companies.

Uh, are you sure that Xbox sub issue is still there? I've recently unsubbed from it just through their web UI. While it was kinda annoying to get through their menus, it wasn't particularly bad either.

Out of curiosity, how would a good unsubscription flow earn Netflix a bunch of customers? It doesn't seem like people would recommend Netflix to others because it was easy for them to unsubscribe frequently enough for that to have any substantial effect or come back just because it was so easy to unsubscribe.

1. Because people who unsubscribe might come back again. If it's a hassle to unsubscribe, I'm never going to subscribe again. There are a few of companies that I had poor experience with, and I am never going to buy anything from again. While I currently don't have time for Netflix anymore doesn't mean I'm not going to subscribe again in a year or two.

2. I subscribed to Netflix because they had a reputation of being easy to subscribe / unsubscribe. I'm not going to subscribe to the New York Times because I've heard how hard they are to cancel. I have a subscription to a local newspaper, they even had ads mentioning how easy it is to start / stop their subscription.

I put my Netflix on hold all the time. If it was hard, I’d cancel forever.

Not sure what the OP is talking about with the Apple system. There is a Subscriptions section in your Apple ID.

But I like going through Apple because it’s all in one place and the content provider has no chance to try and dark patterns on me. Even if the Apple subscriptions is a slightly worse experience, if I can get all my subscriptions in one place and have the ability to cancel at will I’m going to chose that.

I can’t imagine what kind of minor benefit I’d get from using multiple cards and different subscriptions that would make it worth more than easy management.

> I can’t imagine what kind of minor benefit I’d get from using multiple cards and different subscriptions that would make it worth more than easy management.

I have a personal bank account, a business bank account for all business expenses, and a bank account shared with my significant other for household expenses.

I want to pay our shared Netflix and Spotify accounts from the family account, apps that I buy for business use on my business account, and things I buy for myself on my personal account.

I can't be the only person who has multiple bank accounts?

Family Sharing

That puts everyones purchases on a single card and is even worse.

Think you'll be surprised how far the ideology of "the customer comes first" can take a company.

If it was easy for me to unsubscribe, I'm not going to worry much about re-subscribing later. If you put me through an hour of faffing about in the hopes I give up then why would I ever come back.

I stay away from services I liked when it was hard to unsubscribe and won't come back even if I have the money now.

I absolutely remember the manipulative Amazon Prime workflow and it gives me pause every time I am offered a free trial because I know it's going to be a confusing pain to make sure I unsubscribe properly.

Just signed up for a month of some service because it was non-recurring. There are services I haven't signed up for specifically because even though I'm ok to pay every month, the (hypothetical, but likely according to my priors) trouble to unsubscribe puts me off.

Beyond that, if someone's choosing between one of e.g. Netflix, Amazon Prime Video or Disney+, I imagine that it could make a difference.

If you make me jump through hoops (and have interactive human contact) to unsubscribe, I'm never subscribing again.

On the other hand if I can just go "click" on website and the site goes "ok, your subscription ends at the end of this month". I'll most likely come back if there is some content I want to get to.

I know it’s anecdotal but I refuse to subscribe to services that I think are going to be difficult to cancel. The Economist is an immediate example.

If it's a pain to unsubscribe you'd think about it before subscribing again.

There is also people that might be put off if the process is notorious for being unfriendly or cumbersome

How much this affects subscriber numbers is a different story altogether.

I don't subscribe to the NYT primarily because of the details I've heard of their unsubscribe flow (they've even built a better one to comply with california regulations, but geoblocked it outside of california)

I was fortunate to take a subscript with a throw away credit card. When it was empty my subscription ended.

Considering Apple are one of the most dominant, largest, successful companies in the world ... it's not unreasonable to pit them against "the best".

The question is, if Netflix is "best in class" and makes users happy, why isn't Apple on that level. There really isn't any excuse.

What are you talking about?

Apple unsubscribe is pretty darn solid. Phone > Subscriptions > toggle to off.

Dear auto renewal app, get stuffed.

I use this feature often, and it’s excellent.

> I don't subscribe to a lot of services, but I find that eg. subscribing and unsubscribing from Netflix is a much nicer experience than subscribing from something that uses Apple's service.

Wtf. How easy does it have to be?

Come on, let’s be specific here instead of vague hand waving.

What exactly is this great unsubscribe service from Netflix that is better than a three step toggle?

Settings > subscriptions > Name > alter or cancel.

I was replying to OP's assertions, so you might want to direct your post there. But you're welcome to kma also if you're so exercised.

>>> if Netflix is "best in class" and makes users happy, why isn't Apple on that level

>> Come on, let’s be specific here instead of vague hand waving.

> But you're welcome to kma

Well, that about sums up the thoughtful discussion of people saying how bad Apple pay is right there.

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