I want to cancel in one tap for any subscription. I do not want to go through shitty, abusive retention flows.
Two questions:
1. Are you fine (edit) as a consumer (/edit) paying 30% more for this, especially when you are just trading data collection from the App maker to Apple?
2. Wouldn't you rather that everyone had this protection, and not depend on the mercy of corporates for this?
I absolutely am not fine allowing Apple to charge 30% extra, especially when other payment processors only charge around 2 to 5%. And Apple forcing themselves as a middle man is more of a concern here as they have more potential to exploit me commercially, using my data, than some non-BigTech app maker. The 2nd question is more pertinent to all of us as consumers - thanks to Indian laws and regulation, I can easily unsubscribe to any service, and that protects me from exploitation both from Apple and any unscrupulous service. That is what we should all be working towards (more consumer rights). Any support for Apple on this is totally misguided - if they genuinely cared about your rights here, they wouldn't be gauging 30% of you in in-apps payment, without even telling you that money goes to Apple.
There is a difference between trusting a single company to run all your transactions through them and giving your card out to the 20+ places you subscribe to.
I trust Apple (and Google) on data security several orders of magnitude more than any generic publisher. While I may not like the privacy part, at least they tend to hold it better than any other generic app.
Several years ago there was a company similar to this called UltimateGameCard - they were a neutral third party not associated with any publisher that strictly handled paid-in-store prepaid value PINs that collected no personal information and were partnered with dozens to hundreds of game publishers, and supported hundreds of different major games (and several software publishers).
They were available in almost every store, and using them required no privacy violations. Explicitly, their largest customer base were minors (like me at the time), and not collecting PII or even name made it great and a first choice for them.
The low incidence of fraud and inability to chargeback the company (cash only in hand; and you could still dispute the game publisher via the prepaid company to get value added back) resulted in extremely low fees, to the point where games would give you bonus value if you chose this instead of a credit card or other. They had contracts with basically every major publisher - Club Penguin, Runescape, Everquest, etc, and your funds were good almost every game you'd play.
They generally respected both sides of the market: you, a 12 year old, could ask customer service if you were genuinely ripped off or accidentally claimed too much value at a specific publisher but didn't use it yet, and they would treat you like an adult. The game publisher could refund the value if you didn't spend it yet, and not be hit with any form of chargeback or dispute fee or any increase in fees at all. And since it was paid in cash, if you were lying about it or just upset you failed your loot box gamble, you got nothing back. It was also more or less publisher contract based so random IAP trash couldn't just sign up and take money - all the big names were on this.
I would love a system like this again.
Regarding #2, we didn't depend on the mercy of corporates in the PC world. I saw firsthand how annoying it is to debug my parent's computer repeatedly when random apps get installed or terms of service overstep. For less tech aware consumers this is almost certainly a win in terms of privacy and general experience.
It’s currently 6 taps to cancel a single subscription in Apple and 2 taps extra for each service you want to cancel right after. I love knowing that I don’t have to figure out what magical incantation I have to do to cancel any/every service I sign up for.
I do not want any kind of retention, I do not want to be messaged in any way, just stop renewal. I do not want to call in, live chat, give a reason, etc.
I think that would be great, except many companies care more about holding on to users than the user itself.
But i think it's a great idea, it could even be listed as a feature/badge when signing up.
[X] Easy one-click cancellation.
Also, those numbers aren't as great if you count typing a url in your tap count.