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Comment by javajosh | Hacker News Reader

You are in luck! Another way to manage subscriptions client side is to use PayPal. In the same way you have control over all your subscriptions in one place, and can cancel without the interference of the counterparty - a great benefit indeed. And paypal can work with anything, any entity that has a PayPal account. PP is, of course, not without its own horror stories, however a lot of that is around p2p selling-gone-wrong. I have not experienced or even heard of problems around subscriptions, so I think this is a sweet spot.

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How I read this:

You're in luck! Another way to [solve problem] is to [introduce another problem]. XD

xkcd standards!

This doesn’t actually help, because ending payment for a subscription doesn’t absolve you of legal responsibility, and you might at some point end up getting sent to collections over something stupid. Importantly, Apple can force companies as part of their terms of service to recognize an App Store subscription cancellation as an actual cancellation of obligation to pay.

I suppose that's possible, but it would at least put the onus on them to begin legal proceedings. I would also argue that they'd be putting their PP relationship at risk by taking such an anti-consumer attitude. Certainly this is something I want to look out for, but so far (knock on wood) it hasn't bitten me.

Paypay is great when everything has gone right but everything about their support and dispute resolution system is shockingly incompetent. Going from everything going well to something has gone wrong is like driving through Mayberry and crossing a bridge to find yourself in Kafkaesque post apocalyptic landscape devoid of sanity and reason.

You'd be smarter to trust your money to drug dealers or your put it in a sack and have your 5 year old cousin watch it real close.

Your assuming everyone will use PayPal for subscriptions.

When with this there are no rules forcing them to do anything since they can just ship outside the store.

This doesn't address my issue (also I don't want another one I want to keep everything in a single place in settings on my phone). Considering I have never used PayPal for any of my subscriptions on the web I don't see this catching on for mobile either.

If a company wants to put me through hoops to make unsubscribing hard, there is zero chance they will opt to use something that makes it easy if they have the choice.

I'm letting you know of an alternative that has worked well for me. If you want to respond to that assistance with silly assertions and general whingeing, well, that's your choice. But you are not coming off as very...impressive, shall I say.

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