Hacker News Reader

Comment by Terretta | Hacker News Reader

> When people buy access to a service via a subscription in an iOS app, they are essentially Apple’s customers. For privacy reasons Apple does not provide much information about them to the apps or businesses that run the apps. That means it’s hard to do customer service, address issues, or solve any problems.

> “The user experience is much worse,” a marketing executive from one company told me. “When you buy with the developer, they have a relationship with you ... when you buy from Apple: sorry, you’re Apple’s customer, not ours, and if you have a problem with a subscription … we can’t really help them.”

Now interview a real user of subscriptions instead of a brand marketing executive and ask them if the user experience is worse.

PS. Even when not confronted with such a piece, remember that Forbes is no longer the business journalism folks may have grown up with. For the past decade, it’s a blogging platform for independent contributors:

> Each contributor flies solo with his own blog. He is responsible for conceiving and creating the content, ensuring its accuracy and building an engaged, loyal readership. Forbes provides the technology and compensates some of the contributors, but otherwise, like all entrepreneurs, contributors are left to sink or swim on their own.

https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2012/what-the-forb...

View on HN

Mobile app operator here - let me clarify some things:

1. Until June it was impossible for a developer to issue a refund to an angry customer - Apple simply did not allow developers to do that, despite the app store being around for 13 years. This has led to untold frustration among developers - angry customers email us, leave horrible reviews, leave screeds on social media about how we “won’t” refund them, when in actually Apple reserved that right only for Apple support agents. Literally - if you forgot to cancel your Calm or Headspace subscription, neither Calm nor Headspace could give you a refund. You had to call Apple. That’s insane and leads to horrible customer experiences. (I can send you actual emails we got blasting us for this, and us pleading with them to contact Apple because we literally can’t do anything to help them).

2. You may love the Apple subscription experience, but we shouldn’t be letting Apple decide what experiences we do and don’t have online (within reason). For instance: Apple doesn’t allow subscriptions priced at less than $0.99. Why not? What if I had a product that i wanted to sell for $0.50 a month? Why should Apple get to decide that that’s not high enough? There are many examples of things like this.

3. I think we should grapple with the ideas and arguments of the author, when in this case or others, and not focus on the pedigree of the publication they write for

> Apple doesn’t allow subscriptions priced at less than $0.99. Why not? What if I had a product that i wanted to sell for $0.50 a month?

I’d pay $0.50 more.

I just had the unpleasant experience of canceling a non-Apple controlled service. It sucked. Pages and pages of “are you sure you want to cancel” dark patterns.

You guys did this to yourselves with absolutely shitty customer experience. Could not care less if Apple makes things harder for you. Do not care if I pay more.

I’m all in favour, as a user, for Apple IAP subscriptions. But shouldn’t “the market” be able to send a signal that they prefer that?

Shouldn’t Apple’s IAP actually be able to compete on its merits (like the better experience that we both prefer!) rather than arbitrary platform lock-in?

If, faced with actual competition, users and/or developers do not chose Apple IAP, wouldn’t this signal to Apple that they need to do better and improve their service?

To some degree the competition exists...you leave the iOS ecosystem. Besides all the trendy parts of owning an iPhone (iMessage, camera, "fashionable") the simplicity of not getting burned by apps (or the veneer or not getting burned as often) is clearly valuable to consumers.

What would an acceptable solution to letting both styles compete? (would it be controlled by the phone's settings and the end user can change how they manage their subscriptions? Is it at the app level?)

MacOS is a great example - you can buy and download software from the Apple sanctioned App Store or you can get it from other sources on their websites. The fact that I can do that on an 11 inch MacBook Air but can’t on an iPad Pro (which with a keyboard looks like almost the same device) seems pretty silly to me.

I see no incentive for Apple to become motivated to do this on their own.

Google, Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft all wish their app stores could be as lucrative as Apple’s, and most of these are trying to do exactly what Apple is doing.

What other product exists that is able to take such a large revenue cut from 3rd party product enhancers? Is this possible outside of software? Don’t see why Apple would give that up unless they were forced to.

That's kind of the point, right? What forces or incentives are there for Apple to change its practices or lower its prices?

The end user is not the consumer segment that cares about this. As evidenced by many comments in this thread, most Apple users value the curated app store and its payment features. App developers just enabled Apple to get away with it.

The market segment that would have to resist would be the app developers themselves, but no individual app is attractive enough to do that. Even Microsoft attempted to keep Office products off iOS for quite some time. The cat is out of the bag at this point. Ironically, it seems as long as Google/Android still commands a significant market share, it's unlikely to be viewed by the courts as a monopoly. That just means Google will try harder to become like Apple, but they're going to have an even harder time back-tracking the path they've gone down.

The thing about Apple is not only have they prevented in-app payment processing, they have also prevented side-loading. This combination makes the App store so powerful. Probably some of the reason why they don't support PWAs well etc...

From the Epic decision it sounds like the courts may be inclined to allow 3rd party in-app payment processing as long as Apple still gets a cut. It's debatable which would be "worse" for end-users -- allowing them to side-load or allowing 3rd party in-app payment processing. It's probably less debatable about which one Apple prefers.

From the developer side of things, if 3rd party in-app payments are allowed and Apple still gets a cut what was gained? If Apple is forced to allow side-loading, you better believe they're going to make enabling that feature seem as scary and obscure as possible to the end-user.

Even further than that, users should be able to set their own police's for how much they want to pay for things and when.

Remove the centralization of apple driving the policy, then again to get rid of the centralization of developers choosing

Not OP, but market does send a signal when I prefer that. That's how I signed up for Netflix and Spotify. I saw that in-app prices were high when I tried to sign up, looked elsewhere and found out that website prices are lower and now apple doesn't get my cut. But for everything else, I am happy paying apple more because I only have trust for a few companies. If apple is charging app developers more than they should be, those apps can have their own billing page and manage the billing and let the user decide how they want to pay for it.

Yes, users know how to shop around. That's how they buy cars, groceries, gas, computers, cellphones, etc.

> If apple is charging app developers more than they should be, those apps can have their own billing page and manage the billing and let the user decide how they want to pay for it.

The problem is that on iOS apps are forbidden from telling their users that this is an option.

It's not much of a fair market if one of the items have been removed from the shelves and you have to specifically ask for it and the price.

Is it fair if Spotify and Netflix are charged a 30% tax on Apple's platforms when Apple's services arent?

> It's not much of a fair market if one of the items have been removed from the shelves and you have to specifically ask for it and the price.

To be fair, this isn't a very apt analogy.

A better one would be to liken Apple to a smart fridge...

- Is it ok for Apple to say "only products bought through our smart fridge's grocery app can be stored in this fridge" ? --> probably not

- Is it ok for Apple to take a cut when the consumer purchases through the smart fridge's app directly? --> IMO clearly yes

- Should Apple be required to warn you that it'd be cheaper to buy the same brand of milk from a grocery store 10min walk away? --> IMO clearly no

Should Apple be required to warn you that it'd be cheaper? Definitely not. But when you've taken the milk home the milk should be able to say "Hey, If you buy directly from us it's 30% cheaper!".

Right now Apple prohibits developers from being transparent about what the users choices are. I think it is wrong that developers are not allowed to explain the rules to its own users.

Apple should compete on the product itself, not technicalities and obfuscation. There should be pressures on Apple to lower prices for what it charges.

> But shouldn’t “the market” be able to send a signal that they prefer that?

Ah yes. "The market".

People forget that before Appstore mobile apps were distributed through stores controlled by mobile operators. With "store tax" at 70% or higher.

Then Apple came along and decided to take only 30%. It turns out that this (and superior phones) is exactly what users prefer.

But wait, now it's somehow not the proper "market", there's some other "proper market" that must make it right.

Right, or there's me, with no dark patterns, easy cancellation (one email, we answer our phone) on a $1000/mo subscription app. And the hoops to get into apple, and they wanted a cut, even when users create an account and engage from our plain web-app ages before trying for iOS app. It took almost a year to get approved with Mostly our terms, apple forced a bunch of changes - which frustrated our users (who just went back to the web-app). For us, Apple was a zero-value time-suck, degraded user experience, and since we're not assholes, the IAP benefits were moot for our clients.

App store is classic rent-seeking; it's also an economic force. So, we've pulled our app, but I'm long $AAPL

Yes, I'm sorry the millions of developers with their $3.99/mo apps ruined the experience for your unicorn $1,000/mo app. I'm sure your users, with such a high need that they would pay so much, are perfectly able to find a workaround.

Thanks! Yea, they were, as I commented, it's all just web-app, which works in Safari

There’s already a solution to dark patterns: chargebacks. Apple probably makes it worse by taking this avenue away because if you try to chargeback apple they probably just suspend your account.

Chargebacks are no panacea for dark patterns; issue too many and you’ll start getting your card blacklisted from payment processors. I did this a couple times with an online retail store that was especially egregious on the dark patterns (sneaking things into your cart on checkout, etc) and my card would get rejected at certain gas pumps and online stores for the next 6 months. It wasn’t all of them, but a good 25% simply wouldn’t take that card.

I have never heard of a universal blacklist for chargebacks (spanning multiple unrelated businesses), and I don't think it exists. I've charged back transactions for legitimate reasons (such as fraud and false advertising) on quite a few occasions, and I've never received any kind of penalty. Even if there were such a blacklist, you could simply ask your card issuer to change your card number to get around it. In fact, when you perform a chargeback for a fradulent transaction, most card issuers immediately cancel your card and issue you a new one with a new number.

Now if you file a chargeback against Apple or Google, your account with that company will almost certainly be permanently disabled, based on what I've heard from users who have done it. This is a significant setback for consumer protections, and makes it less advisable to concentrate your digital identity into either of these companies' services. However, as inconvenient as it may be to get banned from having an account with Apple/Google, it shouldn't blacklist you from using your card at any gas stations or online stores, assuming that you aren't using Apple/Google payment processing.

Companies, especially retailers, pass around lists of problem customers.

While it’s possible Stripe implement this implicitly via their “fraud detection” machine learning model I’ve never heard of any blacklists currently being used and I operate an online retailer.

That being said you’d have to be purchasing from shady merchants quite a lot and using lots of chargebacks (and presumably losing them) to be blanketed.

It was a few instances where a store crammed something in my cart, then ignored all contact when I requested to return them. So I ended up with both the money and the merch, which I suspect means they flagged me for “fraud”.

Needless to say I don’t shop at that store anymore.

I'd argue there is no reason why Apple cant force a much better, simpler or even standardise canceling experience without taking away all the relationship between your client.

There are minimum per transaction fees for most processors, so if you go at this alone, and you'd find that charging very small increments may not be feasible.

That's up to the developer though isn't it?

Yes. I was just explaining one likely reason for this limit.

And I'm sure Apple, being a small fish that they are, would be able to negotiate custom fee schedule to accommodate very small transactions. They just don't want to.

It’s insane that Apple publishes tabled of all the “allowed” prices in a PDF file.

If you haven’t seen it, it’s because you’ve never read the App Store agreement. They have a table in the PDF that lists out every single price you can charge. $0.99, $1.99, $2.99, … , $999.99. Per country too. Want to charge $1.49? Sorry, it’s not on the table of prices. It’s just absurd.

I just thought one thing no one seems to have point out yet. Apple framed this as a standard practice in business.

Yes, in a Supermarket, they will advertise your product on your behave. But customer dont run to Kraft Heinz, Johnson & Johnson, Procter & Gamble or Coca Cola for refund. They go straight to the store they bought it with. Or a better analogy would be tools ( multi usage ) rather than consumables. Consumer buying a tool will still return their tools to Home Depot rather than making complain about the tools maker not doing refund. But with Software that is not the case. Nearly all software are treated as "services" by consumer whether they are charged with subscription or not. And customer will act the same if they bought a services from Walmart. Let say Disney+ or Netflix. They will go to Disney and Netflix to complain or refund, not Walmart.

I think this distinction is quite profound ( to me at least ). Because we often use the product analogy with Software and Subscription. We even have a term SaaS ( Software as Services ) when in fact nearly all software are in some way treated as services by consumers. And of course Software developer have long thought of it as services due to its constantly updating nature.

So this mismatch, between how App Store operate, how Apps are priced and how consumer behaves with software seems to be fundamentally wrong.

On the contrary, the CDPR release debacle shows consumers expect the refund from the app store aka the console store front, whether Microsoft or Sony. They’re mad at CDPR, they want their money back from Microsoft or Sony. And given that noise level, Sony yanked Cyberpunk2077, just as Apple might. Or Walmart with a bad batch of ketchup.

Similarly, people buying from the app store BnL don’t go back to the app store to find the developer web site and go there to look up a support phone number to ask a human if they can please cancel by physically mailing a certified letter somewhere (how you cancel most first party subscriptions). They go to the subscriptions settings and cancel.

I’d argue that is indeed exactly like Heinz vs. Walmart or whatever.

As an iOS user, I do not want the publisher knowing anything about me. I'm happy to pay for the app, but I do not want to tell the publisher a single thing other than the fact that it is paid. Nothing else. I do not want to share my email, I do not want to share any form of cardholder data.

I want to cancel in one tap for any subscription. I do not want to go through shitty, abusive retention flows.

Until last year it took 11 taps to cancel through iOS. Bet it’s a whole lot less if you try to cancel HBO from their website.

It’s an infinite number of taps to cancel nytimes though. I guess Apple subscription is an equalizer, they all become somewhat horrible.

This is a very odd comparison. You’re comparing a past workflow for one service against an existing workflow for an entirely separate service, but only speculating on whether it is actually less.

It’s currently 6 taps to cancel a single subscription in Apple and 2 taps extra for each service you want to cancel right after. I love knowing that I don’t have to figure out what magical incantation I have to do to cancel any/every service I sign up for.

When I say cancel in one tap, what I mean is I have a list of every subscription I am holding, and I pick that one and it goes.

I do not want any kind of retention, I do not want to be messaged in any way, just stop renewal. I do not want to call in, live chat, give a reason, etc.

So sort of a one-click buy experience, only for cancelling a subscription.

I think that would be great, except many companies care more about holding on to users than the user itself.

But i think it's a great idea, it could even be listed as a feature/badge when signing up.

[X] Easy one-click cancellation.

The App Store provides just that

I value the thought I have to put into figuring out what to click more than I do the actual effort of clicking.

Also, those numbers aren't as great if you count typing a url in your tap count.

Last I checked, it's also incredibly difficult to cancel an Apple subscription if you've switched away from the ecosystem and all you have on hand is Linux and Android.

It is quite sad that most Americans see Apple's exploitation of a lacunae in their law (not allowing easy cancellation of subscriptions) as some benevolent act from it.

Two questions:

1. Are you fine (edit) as a consumer (/edit) paying 30% more for this, especially when you are just trading data collection from the App maker to Apple?

2. Wouldn't you rather that everyone had this protection, and not depend on the mercy of corporates for this?

I absolutely am not fine allowing Apple to charge 30% extra, especially when other payment processors only charge around 2 to 5%. And Apple forcing themselves as a middle man is more of a concern here as they have more potential to exploit me commercially, using my data, than some non-BigTech app maker. The 2nd question is more pertinent to all of us as consumers - thanks to Indian laws and regulation, I can easily unsubscribe to any service, and that protects me from exploitation both from Apple and any unscrupulous service. That is what we should all be working towards (more consumer rights). Any support for Apple on this is totally misguided - if they genuinely cared about your rights here, they wouldn't be gauging 30% of you in in-apps payment, without even telling you that money goes to Apple.

I'm fine paying another relatively neutral party provided they do not pass ANYTHING on to the final publisher. No name, email, country, anything. Too many bad experiences. If the alternative was to subscribe with Stripe or Braintree, I would just not subscribe. Sure, I might trust Stripe, but I do not trust the end-company to be reasonable or safe stewards of the data that can be exported. Time and time again, repeatedly, this has been proven.

There is a difference between trusting a single company to run all your transactions through them and giving your card out to the 20+ places you subscribe to.

I trust Apple (and Google) on data security several orders of magnitude more than any generic publisher. While I may not like the privacy part, at least they tend to hold it better than any other generic app.

As an additional note: I would love to see such a privacy-respecting third party exist. Ideally, they would collect nothing at all and exist via prepaid value.

Several years ago there was a company similar to this called UltimateGameCard - they were a neutral third party not associated with any publisher that strictly handled paid-in-store prepaid value PINs that collected no personal information and were partnered with dozens to hundreds of game publishers, and supported hundreds of different major games (and several software publishers).

They were available in almost every store, and using them required no privacy violations. Explicitly, their largest customer base were minors (like me at the time), and not collecting PII or even name made it great and a first choice for them.

The low incidence of fraud and inability to chargeback the company (cash only in hand; and you could still dispute the game publisher via the prepaid company to get value added back) resulted in extremely low fees, to the point where games would give you bonus value if you chose this instead of a credit card or other. They had contracts with basically every major publisher - Club Penguin, Runescape, Everquest, etc, and your funds were good almost every game you'd play.

They generally respected both sides of the market: you, a 12 year old, could ask customer service if you were genuinely ripped off or accidentally claimed too much value at a specific publisher but didn't use it yet, and they would treat you like an adult. The game publisher could refund the value if you didn't spend it yet, and not be hit with any form of chargeback or dispute fee or any increase in fees at all. And since it was paid in cash, if you were lying about it or just upset you failed your loot box gamble, you got nothing back. It was also more or less publisher contract based so random IAP trash couldn't just sign up and take money - all the big names were on this.

I would love a system like this again.

Regarding #1, no one is stopping any app developer from charging 30% more than what they currently do and seeing if consumers will stay with them. Apple already has my data... they have time and time again proven to be reasonable stewards of that data. I do not want to play a guessing game with 40 other developers to see if they all follow that. I've been burned too many times.

Regarding #2, we didn't depend on the mercy of corporates in the PC world. I saw firsthand how annoying it is to debug my parent's computer repeatedly when random apps get installed or terms of service overstep. For less tech aware consumers this is almost certainly a win in terms of privacy and general experience.

It’s also why I don’t pay for or use apps that use their own data sync instead of iCloud (looking at you sleep cycle).

There are pros and cons. As one example my son purchased $500 of skins in Fortnite on Nintendo (I had the card saved, my fault since corrected). Trying to get that refunded was a huge drama because I had to go via Nintendo rather than Epic. In this specific scenario I would have preferred a first party resolution.

Interesting. I’ve had Apple proactively email me about parental controls along with an offer to refund what they seem to have considered excessive in-game currency IAPs.

I’d be amazed if the game publisher would have cared at all. No amount of future loyalty to the one game would have offset the cost of the refund. Same is not true for Apple or Nintendo.

IMO businesses selling apps have dug their own grave in the customer relationship department. In the last 20 years I've only had 2 or 3 tech support experiences where someone helped me solve a problem I'd consider non-trivial.

Businesses have cost cut and devalued support so much that it's not worth having a relationship with them. They only want a sales relationship and you're on your own when it comes to support.

What does having a relationship with them get me as a customer?

> The user experience is much worse

Spoken like someone who has never tried to cancel anything where they had a direct relationship with the publisher

Or rather - spoken like an American? Outside the US, it is quite easy to cancel such subscriptions as the consumer laws are in your favour. Apple's exploitation of this lacunae in US laws is sadly being interpreted as some benevolent act from them. If the US has similar stronger consumer laws, both Apple and other companies wouldn't be able to exploit Americans.

California has their shit together on this (if you can sign up for something online, you must be able to cancel the same way), but the rest of the country hasn’t caught up yet

It depends.

As an individual, I would rather buy a newspaper subscription from Apple instead of paying for a 13 week subscription from the paper directly, billed monthly.

As an enterprise, I don’t want to be stuck dealing with a mercurial and pain the ass middleman like Apple for anything significant to my business. I have the market power to get terms from a company like Adobe or whatever, but with Apple, we get a very polite “Fuck you, we’re Apple, you are not Apple. Be thankful we are selling our beautiful things to you.”

The reasons why I can’t stand Apple for B2B are why they are delightful to Spooky23, the individual consumer.

>Now interview a real user of subscriptions instead of a brand marketing executive and ask them if the user experience is worse.

Their experience is better when they signed up, mostly due to Apple's integrated API and enforcing standards.

Their experience is much worse when they have dispute. Because no user think of themselves as Apple's customers. They are using your App or Services. Telling them to go to Apple doesn't solve their problem.

If the experience is truly better, and if Apple owns every single transaction and relationship. Why is it the developers gets the blame every time when there is a problem while Apple sitting their enjoying their 15% to 30% commission?

Apple is muddling rent-seeking, developer tooling, support, discovery, distribution and services all into that 15-30%. And they happily dance around that one of these stance every time they are questioned.

imagine have issues with 10 apps you bought on your iphone. having to go through 10 developer's refund process is a nightmare. I would rather just go through apple.

>You can no longer help the customer who’s buying your product with the following requests: Refunds, credit card changes, discounts, trial extensions, hardship exceptions, comps, partial payments, non-profit discounts, educational discounts, downtime credits, tax exceptions, etc. You can’t control any of this when you charge your customers through Apple’s platform. So now you’re forced to sell a product - with your name and reputation on it - to your customers, yet you are helpless and unable to help them if they need a hand with any of the above.

From https://www.hey.com/apple/iap/

Unfortunately, from a user perspective, in aggregate, the reputation of Apple beats the median reputation of devs at doing all those things in a customer’s favor.

So odds are subscribe through apple has better experience.

You, as a dev, may offer better, for sure. But the user cannot count on that.

> Now interview a real user of subscriptions instead of a brand marketing executive and ask them if the user experience is worse.

I'd say the same thing. Much prefer dealing with individual app developers. I go out of my way to purchase through them over Apple. It's far more secure for me as a consumer to go through individual app developers than through Apple.

Can someone here confirm what info the app gets when you get a subscription?

What if a person would sign up to a dating site under two separate names - would the App Store out them somehow?

Basically a transaction receipt is all the app gets. It’s up to the app developer to associate this purchase transaction with any app related user identity information.

RevenueCat had a decent explanation for this considering this is their main product:

https://www.revenuecat.com/blog/managing-cross-platform-subs...

Disclaimer: not at all associated with revenuecat, just in the process of evaluating their product myself.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com