What is the opportunity here? For consumers is it that you can pick who you pay? That doesn't sound like much of an opportunity to me.
What is the opportunity for developers?
An opportunity to make unsubscribing a more engaging activity
Contrary to your suggestion, I would argue that most businesses do not want to predatorily extract money from unwilling customers. It's typically the old, calcified businesses that do not innovate (gyms, cable companies, etc.) that engage in this behavior.
I want more margin so I can hire more engineers and change the world faster.
Google probably sees regulatory pressure writing on the wall, and by doing this they're building evidence that they haven't built a mobile computing monopoly or are backing away from it (insofar as running executions on your customer's devices used to be free in the desktop computing world where two corporations didn't tax all of innovation).
Also, it's a shot against Apple, who is definitely the more egregious of the two.
This is all around good. There might be a company or two that abuse the system, but that's easily dealt with. In an open app ecosystem, you still have measures in place to correct the bad actors.
They'd all rather receive the money from happy customers enthusiastically paying because they love the service so much, but if the third option is no money they all know what their second choice would be.
I'd agree that I don't think it's a majority that are bad actors, but I'd say it's far more then one or two, and atleast enough to impact the decisions users are making. I'd prefer this kind of subscription management functionality was handled via bank accounts, but until that's possible I'll probably keep using the app stores
I find it difficult to agree with this – and I'm not just being scattergun cynical. I quite literally think that the vast majority of consumer-facing businesses work as hard as they can to juice more money out of their customers through obfuscation.
It's easy to argue that this is a benefit for developers, or open ecosystems, or just plain principles or whatever, because that's all almost certainly true. But it's also probably virtually certainly no better for users.
Doesn't matter. There are enough of them to cause headaches for many people on a regular basis.
This is still a loss for devs, I was hoping we can just rip of Google garbage payment system and use something like Stripe, or whatever new companies that would've emerged to fill our needs.
Obviously they'll give a sweet deal to massive companies but not the small devs.
What issues do you have with the Google payments system? With the stripe bring that Google does not already have? (Outside the fee issue most people raise)
After a year or two there will be a PR announcement:
Congratulations to us! Today we're announcing going forward all plans will be priced exactly the same. This means whether you pay via Google or Spotify, you no longer need to worry about confusing pricing options because all plans will have one single price.
As an additional benefit users who pay via Spotify will get a limited edition Snoop Dogg / Jaden Smith / Billy Ray Cyrus NFT usable in Fortnite while logged into Spotify Pro Max