Also, thinking that all businesses will lock one in using friction and timewasting is not a rational argument. There are a lot of honest businesses there forced to pay the Apple Mafia's tax.
But for every one of those, there are many who might want to transact with the business directly.
FWIW, I trust Spotify equally as Apple - so if I get a Spotify subscription, I'm more than happy to get a 30% discount and deal with Spotify directly. Heck, I can do that on my MacOS (another fine product the Cupertino company makes) but when it comes to iOS - OMG, virus, malware, user privacy!!
This way, I know if I'm dealing with something on my phone, I have a trusted channel for commerce. I am sophisticated enough that I can probably ascertain what alternative payment schemes are reasonable and which are scams, but Apple's imposed payment monoculture means unsophisticated users are protected as well.
A more permissive payment setup would necessarily mean more scammy apps, or maybe just vendors with gross, dark patterns designed to obfuscate cancellation without quite being fraud. No thanks.
People say this stuff, but recently I re-examined my subscription to a multi-platform VPN service through the App store and found that they priced it cheaper than getting the same package through their website or through their windows client.
No idea why.
I would presume an outlier as it seems to make poor business sense.
Edit: Not sure if up to date but for example: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/pdfs/App-Store-Pricing-Update...
They charge $19.39 for the same subscription if you buy it direct. By the logic of Apple taking a 30% cut thereby pushing up the price of doing business, you'd think they could charge $12.59 to direct customers and take the same profit out.
(This is month by month subscriptions to NordVPN)
If customers want to pay more for Apple to facilitate, there isn’t an incentive to not keep apps in the App Store too. If a company has other reasons not to be in Apple’s store, why should they be required to?
> That’s an unsupportable claim.
It's supported well enough in my view by a long history of sleaze that apparently people have forgotten.
Or Apple could do one of those virtual credit card things. Or do they already? So you could use an Apple virtual credit card with any processor.
But then the 30% extra fee would be visible to the user. Apple's whole schtick is making things way more expensive and hiding the competition pricing from the user. If "$10 with Stripe" was placed side by side with "$13 with Apple Pay", Apple would immediately lose all of their payment customers and about $2,000,000,000 in revenue, which is a lot. They can only prevent this by preventing "$10 with Stripe" from being there at all. (And if they did it with virtual credit cards, they'd have to tell users there's a 30% fee on each transaction)