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Comment by gruez | Hacker News Reader

>Is this not what the credit card system (with chargebacks and liability shift) is supposed to counter more generally?

The credit card system is far less generous than App Store's policies. Apple offers no-questions asked refunds. Credit cards don't.

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They don’t always grant refunds for App Store purchases, I’ve heard from many customers whose refund requests were denied after we referred them to Apple. As a developer I would love to be able to refund them myself, but we can’t refund IAPs at all, it’s entirely up to Apple.

If the customer requests too many refunds (say 3-4 within a few months) their Apple ID is likely to be banned from making further purchases.

I feel that this is orthogonal to my point - it's not about how generous or not a given mechanism is, more to question why the App Store is any different from other transactions we need to protect. You either have to argue that App Store transactions need more consumer friendly refunds than other credit card transactions for some reason, or otherwise that credit cards should have no-questions asked refunds.

As another commenter said, in some cases Apple's power in the relationship is detrimental to the consumer - if a user issues a chargeback then Apple can disable their entire Apple account.

I don’t need no-questions refunds. I need fair transactions.

Apple is too powerful in this relationship to provide it. If I have a problem with a merchant I can go to my credit card company about it. If I have a problem with my credit card company I might lose out on that one transaction but I can get a different credit card.

If I have a problem with Apple (or Steam or Nintendo or…) I either have to take the abuse or lose past “purchases”.

And the merchant themselves can do no questions asked refunds anyway.

Then let's allow consumers choose if that service is worth 10x higher fees.

Apple knows it's a rip-off: Apple has explicitly forbidden app developers from ever informing users how much they're paying for Apple's services.

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