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i recently tried on spotify and disney plus as well, works like a charm. The worst offenders in recent history were bloomberg (where i had to open a support ca

i recently tried on spotify and disney plus as well, works like a charm. The worst offenders in recent history were bloomberg (where i had to open a support case to cancel) and some other news publication. FT was the best experience in news publications. More and more services seem to be getting better in this.

Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
Cancelling direct spotify subscription is actually full of dark patterns: You click unsubscribe and are taken to new screen that presents you pricing plans and is worded in such way that you think you already unsubscribed. I actually thought so and almost thought that I'm done. But no, decided to check and saw that I'm still subscribed. Turned out, there are THREE consecutive screens where you need to successfully pick the correct option to really unsubscribe.
- bodge5000 5y ago
  its by no means perfect, but compared to others where you have to dig deep in an faq for a support number, call up (during business hours), go through 3 people who will try to sell you something else (once whilst trying to cancel a mobile contract because of a poor signal, I've even had accusations of not doing enough on my end to improve things), to then get to someone who will probably cancel your contract, its a step in the right direction at least
dimmke 5y ago
The problem is that it's completely a company's decision to make it easy to cancel and the vast majority of them make it as hard as they can. Just a few examples: Xbox Live, you can sign up online but to cancel you have to call them and justify to them why you don't want to use their service anymore. Also had to do that to cancel a credit card recently. I've heard its even worse with companies like Adobe or like you mentioned, news publications. As a customer, because of our bad consumer protection laws it makes me very hesitant to start a subscription with a new company and I vastly prefer doing it through Apple if I can. With Apple, it's easy to see when you have a subscription active and to stop it from auto renewing. If cancel flows are getting easier it's probably due to pressure from this existing.
- dimmke 5y ago
  I also wanted to add, I think a lot of the value that Apple adds should actually be things that are regulated by our government. For example, you should be able to cancel a service the same way you signed up. And a lot of the privacy stuff Apple does should be enshrined into law. It's pleasant as a consumer that at least one company operates this way, but it's terrible that most people don't even consider that our government should be the one doing this, not private companies.
- y4mi 5y ago
  Uh, are you sure that Xbox sub issue is still there? I've recently unsubbed from it just through their web UI. While it was kinda annoying to get through their menus, it wasn't particularly bad either.

Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago

Cancelling direct spotify subscription is actually full of dark patterns: You click unsubscribe and are taken to new screen that presents you pricing plans and is worded in such way that you think you already unsubscribed. I actually thought so and almost thought that I'm done. But no, decided to check and saw that I'm still subscribed. Turned out, there are THREE consecutive screens where you need to successfully pick the correct option to really unsubscribe.

bodge5000 5y ago
its by no means perfect, but compared to others where you have to dig deep in an faq for a support number, call up (during business hours), go through 3 people who will try to sell you something else (once whilst trying to cancel a mobile contract because of a poor signal, I've even had accusations of not doing enough on my end to improve things), to then get to someone who will probably cancel your contract, its a step in the right direction at least

dimmke 5y ago

The problem is that it's completely a company's decision to make it easy to cancel and the vast majority of them make it as hard as they can. Just a few examples: Xbox Live, you can sign up online but to cancel you have to call them and justify to them why you don't want to use their service anymore. Also had to do that to cancel a credit card recently. I've heard its even worse with companies like Adobe or like you mentioned, news publications. As a customer, because of our bad consumer protection laws it makes me very hesitant to start a subscription with a new company and I vastly prefer doing it through Apple if I can. With Apple, it's easy to see when you have a subscription active and to stop it from auto renewing. If cancel flows are getting easier it's probably due to pressure from this existing.

dimmke 5y ago
I also wanted to add, I think a lot of the value that Apple adds should actually be things that are regulated by our government. For example, you should be able to cancel a service the same way you signed up. And a lot of the privacy stuff Apple does should be enshrined into law. It's pleasant as a consumer that at least one company operates this way, but it's terrible that most people don't even consider that our government should be the one doing this, not private companies.
y4mi 5y ago
Uh, are you sure that Xbox sub issue is still there? I've recently unsubbed from it just through their web UI. While it was kinda annoying to get through their menus, it wasn't particularly bad either.