Hacker News Reader

Comment by meepmorp | Hacker News Reader

I see you missing the point here. As a consumer, I don't want to be your customer.

When I buy stuff at the grocery store, I'm not the customer of the companies that produce food. Similarly, I just want to get your app, not become a marketing target for dozens of software vendors with varying privacy and data retention policies. I don't want you to upsell me on anything, it's literally the opposite of friendly to me as a consumer.

View on HN

That is what I said. It is not about upselling stuff for those who do not want it. It is about making it easier to connect with people who do. This makes sense for some situations but not for others. The grocery shop example you mentioned is great, I agree with you there. People who don't want to be contacted, should not be contacted.

I'm not saying that the way Paddle implemented it is the correct way forward. Personally, I'd rather there was an opt-in option to share data on the payment form. This way, if you want to be in contact with the seller, you can flag it and the default option is not sharing. This is simple and would allow you to remain "not a customer" while letting those who want to be in touch to have an easy path forward. This is not possible inside the App Store.

The App Store model —and Amazon and others as well— make it really hard for you to find who the customer is. That is not because they're thinking of you. They're doing that as yet another vendor lock-in mechanism to prevent the seller from leaving or doing any kind of business with that customer away from them.

As ~NhanH said in another comment in this thread, you can put a form on an app. Yes, you can jump through a lot of hops, and maybe Apple will allow it through. It is death by a thousand paper cuts. From their PoV it is their customer, not yours. From their PoV, the seller is a customer as well.

I feel like responsible people (such as yourself) have a hard time seeing that the problem is that the vast majority of people are not responsible and will happily abuse my information.

I don't think Apple is necessarily altruistic here. But I am able to essentially use them to protect me against people who will abuse my information.

And I also think that developers miss the fact that, at least for a lot of us, this model makes it MORE likely that we will purchase your product. I'm much more likely to try a new app out knowing that it's not going to generate a ton of emails or that my credit card information will leak.

Maybe I'm in the minority, but I don't want to hear a single peep out of a company that manufactures a product I bought. I don't want to be "connected". I don't want to know when their next great thing is available. I don't care what the manufacturer thinks is a really useful, totally non-spam message for me. I don't want that relationship at all.

Maybe others are less dogmatic about it, but I truly appreciate having Apple as a "connection shield" between me and hundreds of thirsty app developers wanting to reach out and tell me all the great things they want to tell me.

I thought this way until I realized I personally value portability over simplicity of signup. Most apps I use often I use on my phone and laptop. When I had an iPhone, I ran most subscriptions through IAP. As soon as I wanted to try Android, moving everything over was nearly impossible.

For most services I now sign up directly through a developer. I also find for services I subscribe to developers provide WAY better customer support than Apple.

There are more than one grocery stores, but there's only one app store. The point is valid, but I'm not sure if it's the whole story.

Then why buy something from them at all? I don’t want spam as much as the next person, but the people I pay money are least likely to spam me.

Through the Apple App Store they are not able to spam me.

I don’t get any spam from Apple either.

I want to buy things and not be bothered by follow up emails and whatnot.

That's not true at all. Psychologically speaking, you're more likely to spend money with a company that you've already spent money with in the past. It's exactly that sentiment that marketers try to take advantage of.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com