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Comment by krferriter | Hacker News Reader

I subscribed to Google One through the Google Photos iOS app because I wanted photos I took on my iPhone to be backed up to Google. When I switched to Android and went into Google One to increase my storage capacity in my Google account, I found that it was literally impossible, because the subscription was tied to my iCloud account. I even got on a line with Google Support about it and they told me yeah it's not even possible on their side to disconnect my Google One subscription from Apple. I had to wait for the iCloud subscription to Google One to end, and then I was able to go into Google One and increase my storage capacity.

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The root problem here lies with Apple. It's so frustrating how they take a 30% cut for the privilege of being unable to actually have a relationship with your customers. Want to do a partial refund (or a refund at all)? Want to give one month free to an existing subscriber? Tough luck. Your users are Apple's customers, not yours.

I implemented Google One integration in an iOS app. This comment chain is accurate. Users want to pay with Apple (like other app subscriptions) but then your “account” is inside their payments world. Which is super confusing since users (rightly) think they are dealing with their Google account.

Sounds like the analysts and product owners didn't really want to solve this problem. Instead they ticked the boxes, got the bonuses, and the devs never questioned it and just implemented it for fear of being PIPed.

I'm sure there is technically nothing that stopped you from treating this "Pay with Apple" thing as just another payment method inside the google account, except maybe additional complexity and red-tape.

Seen this many times when PMs, POs, and Devs code by features instead of trying to actually solve something. I don't even want to know what mess of a database schema is behind this monstrosity.

Same as a shopping centre, clothing retailer, or any other non-bazaar marketplace with its own brand and transaction processing.

Apple is selling you a huge lucrative market.

Customers buy Apple’s curated marketplace.

Apple takes a cut for being in the middle and enabling all of this.

Believe me, I would never pay for most of the apps that I did pay for via Apple if it wasn’t via their marketplace and their consumer protections.

There is no counterfactual scenario where you and millions(!) of other ISVs get 100% of the same money without Apple.

What’s difficult to understand about these business relationships?

> Apple takes a cut for being in the middle and enabling all of this.

Enabling this like Ticketmaster enables selling tickets.

In ticketmaster's case I believe they give kickbacks and lucrative exclusive contracts with large venues, to squeeze smaller ones, maybe making whole tours use it but only kicking back to the biggest or select venues on the tour I think.

Apple sometimes does special deals and special rules with important providers, among many other tactics behind their moat. All single signons must also offer apple single sign-on, for instance, and they have even disabled access to customer accounts using their single sign-on for unrelated business disputes, though they walked it back in the big public example I'm aware of, the threat is there if you go against them in any way.

Amazon or Wallmart are much better analogies.

Ticketmaster is in no way comparable, because they gouge customers and provide no protections.

Someone in the music industry explained that both bands and venues like Ticketmaster because then Ticketmaster is the "bad guy" and the band can just shrug their shoulders and pretend to be the victim while profiting enormously from Ticketmaster's evil practices.

Lmao no.

Okay, all the app developers pull out of iOS because they're not actually useful, in fact they should be paying Apple!

How many people do you think would still buy iPhones if there are 0 apps on the app store? Lmaooo, it's almost like it's a co-operative relationship and Apple don't deserve a huge cut because it's the apps that sell their phones.

The problem is that other payment processors could emerge with the same trust profiles as Apple to facilitate this transaction.

I could see Stripe doing something like this. They protect the consumer and come down hard on the merchants.

Imagine them, and maybe a few other processors, competing for this business. The fee would probably drop below 30%. To a large degree, this is the sort of arrangement credit card processors already have between their merchants and consumers and that rate is single digit percentages. Not hard to imagine Visa or MasterCard running a SaaS transaction service for a 5-10% cut.

5% would be kinda high

I love Apple subscriptions.

No way for you to scam me or make it hard ro cancel. I can view them all in the apple account subscription view.

No tricks, no unexpected behaviour.

Same with Stripe, minus the 30% fee. Even better, if you accidentally let the renewal happen they will instantly refund in one-click.

This is exactly the kind of innovation Apple apologists don't realize they're missing out on in the walled garden. You could still have easy, centralized billing with all-in-one management and one-click cancellation, while paying 30% less for everything. Give the free market a chance.

This IS the free market ya dingus.

It's not a free market without meaningful choice.

You can't say a slave is free because their master is free to enslave them, and they're free to escape if they can. Sometimes you need rules to create real freedom.

That is the free market. That is why libertarians love the free market.

Idk if you just have a bone to pick with libertarians, but monopolized markets by definition are not free markets, regardless of how they arise

But the only way to have it centralized is to have it integrated in iOS.

Stripe already is a second place, non centralized, off platform.

I don't want to hunt down my predatory subscriptions in multiple places.

Why do you think that's the only way? Payment processors have long been able to differentiate recurring transactions from one-offs. Capital One has subscription management.

How the platform and the vendor split that money is irrelevant to me, and I’m not convinced this would become cheaper - evidently consumers are willing to pay the current price, so why wouldn’t the vendor just increase their profit?

In the same vein: Games don’t cost less on the epic store despite their lower (compared to Steam) either, so as an end user it makes no difference where I buy games.

https://expertbeacon.com/why-epic-games-is-cheaper-than-stea...

Maybe you like paying an extra 20%. That's your business. But fees like that affect the viability of lots of business ideas, including games. Having lower fees increases the pool of indie games.

Managing subscriptions in the apple account view, on stripe, on paypal and on whatever other platform wants their cut? No thanks.

Yeah, technically. But just everyone _normal_ just pays using Stripe often without even knowing about it. On the _walled garden_ all is so clear that my 70 years aunt is able to do it. And there is no exceptions to the rule: every subscription made through the App Store is there and it's cancellable...

30% is a robbery, and the confusion on the customer "ownership" is true, but it's not useful for the discussion to negate the advantage the _garden_ offers to the basic consumer

As Long As You Never Leave Us You Wouldn't Want To Leave Us Would You Why Would You Betray Us?

> or make it hard ro [sic] cancel

Unless you're trying to cancel the Apple ecosystem as a whole...

> Your users are Apple's customers, not yours.

At least on my side, thats fine / intended. As long as their is no useable regulations around unsub dark patterns, that type of firewall is what I want as a customer.

I bought my Google Photos subscription through the iOS app because it was cheaper than through Google directly. I have no idea why, but it was when I compared prices.

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