I, for one, couldn't care less if they go away. I think the patent is bad, the troll is deplorable and Apple will be setting a terrible precedent that will have non-trivial fallout in their dev community.
But on this topic, I just don't care how it shakes out. 90% of the in-app purchasing I see is predatory (smurfberries, virtual poker chips) or tantamount to it.
A lot of developers rely on using IAP to make money off their existing (and often small) customer base, and if IAP went away so would a lot of indie game developers.
I agree that good apps and good uses exists, that's just the minority in what I've personally seen. The only app I have personally used that had reasonable IAP was Camera+.
And to be fair, I hand-waved 90% not considering subscriptions. [1] If we roll those in, I agree there's a much lower rate of 'smurfberry' use.
> "Apple has taken steps to mitigate the issue"
Sorry if I've missed that. But last I checked they had just changed the top-revenue rankings to include IAP, and smurfberry-bearing titles shot to the top. To change that algorithm the way they did looks more like celebrating that nonsense. [2]
[1] I've been thinking of subscriptions as their own beast for a while and just didn't think of them. But I do agree, they're IAP.
[2] Surely Apple tested the proposed ranking change and rolled it out knowing full well what titles would dominate under that scheme.
I just looked at the top free game list, and most of the top 25 don't appear to be smurfberry titles. About 7 or 8 of them appear to be like that. Most of the ones with IAP are for removing advertising, upgrades to the full version, or additional content, all of which are pretty legitimate uses for it.