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> When people buy access to a service via a subscription in an iOS app, they are essentially Apple’s customers. For privacy reasons Apple does not provide much

> When people buy access to a service via a subscription in an iOS app, they are essentially Apple’s customers. For privacy reasons Apple does not provide much information about them to the apps or businesses that run the apps. That means it’s hard to do customer service, address issues, or solve any problems. > “The user experience is much worse,” a marketing executive from one company told me. “When you buy with the developer, they have a relationship with you ... when you buy from Apple: sorry, you’re Apple’s customer, not ours, and if you have a problem with a subscription … we can’t really help them.” Now interview a real user of subscriptions instead of a brand marketing executive and ask them if the user experience is worse. PS. Even when not confronted with such a piece, remember that Forbes is no longer the business journalism folks may have grown up with. For the past decade, it’s a blogging platform for independent contributors: > Each contributor flies solo with his own blog. He is responsible for conceiving and creating the content, ensuring its accuracy and building an engaged, loyal readership. Forbes provides the technology and compensates some of the contributors, but otherwise, like all entrepreneurs, contributors are left to sink or swim on their own. https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2012/what-the-forbes-model-of-contributed-content-means-for-journalism/ https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2012/what-the-forb...

jsmeaton 5y ago
There are pros and cons. As one example my son purchased $500 of skins in Fortnite on Nintendo (I had the card saved, my fault since corrected). Trying to get that refunded was a huge drama because I had to go via Nintendo rather than Epic. In this specific scenario I would have preferred a first party resolution.
- Terretta 5y ago
  Interesting. I’ve had Apple proactively email me about parental controls along with an offer to refund what they seem to have considered excessive in-game currency IAPs. I’d be amazed if the game publisher would have cared at all. No amount of future loyalty to the one game would have offset the cost of the refund. Same is not true for Apple or Nintendo.
ev1 5y ago
As an iOS user, I do not want the publisher knowing anything about me. I'm happy to pay for the app, but I do not want to tell the publisher a single thing other than the fact that it is paid. Nothing else. I do not want to share my email, I do not want to share any form of cardholder data. I want to cancel in one tap for any subscription. I do not want to go through shitty, abusive retention flows.
- offtotheraces 5y ago
  Until last year it took 11 taps to cancel through iOS. Bet it’s a whole lot less if you try to cancel HBO from their website.
  - kmonsen 5y ago
    It’s an infinite number of taps to cancel nytimes though. I guess Apple subscription is an equalizer, they all become somewhat horrible.
  - scrose 5y ago
    This is a very odd comparison. You’re comparing a past workflow for one service against an existing workflow for an entirely separate service, but only speculating on whether it is actually less. 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.
  - ev1 5y ago
    When I say cancel in one tap, what I mean is I have a list of every subscription I am holding, and I pick that one and it goes. 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.
    - sharken 5y ago
      So sort of a one-click buy experience, only for cancelling a subscription. 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.
wlesieutre 5y ago
> The user experience is much worse Spoken like someone who has never tried to cancel anything where they had a direct relationship with the publisher
- webmobdev 5y ago
  Or rather - spoken like an American? Outside the US, it is quite easy to cancel such subscriptions as the consumer laws are in your favour. Apple's exploitation of this lacunae in US laws is sadly being interpreted as some benevolent act from them. If the US has similar stronger consumer laws, both Apple and other companies wouldn't be able to exploit Americans.
  - wlesieutre 5y ago
    California has their shit together on this (if you can sign up for something online, you must be able to cancel the same way), but the rest of the country hasn’t caught up yet
Spooky23 5y ago
It depends. As an individual, I would rather buy a newspaper subscription from Apple instead of paying for a 13 week subscription from the paper directly, billed monthly. As an enterprise, I don’t want to be stuck dealing with a mercurial and pain the ass middleman like Apple for anything significant to my business. I have the market power to get terms from a company like Adobe or whatever, but with Apple, we get a very polite “Fuck you, we’re Apple, you are not Apple. Be thankful we are selling our beautiful things to you.” The reasons why I can’t stand Apple for B2B are why they are delightful to Spooky23, the individual consumer.
offtotheraces 5y ago
Mobile app operator here - let me clarify some things: 1. Until June it was impossible for a developer to issue a refund to an angry customer - Apple simply did not allow developers to do that, despite the app store being around for 13 years. This has led to untold frustration among developers - angry customers email us, leave horrible reviews, leave screeds on social media about how we “won’t” refund them, when in actually Apple reserved that right only for Apple support agents. Literally - if you forgot to cancel your Calm or Headspace subscription, neither Calm nor Headspace could give you a refund. You had to call Apple. That’s insane and leads to horrible customer experiences. (I can send you actual emails we got blasting us for this, and us pleading with them to contact Apple because we literally can’t do anything to help them). 2. You may love the Apple subscription experience, but we shouldn’t be letting Apple decide what experiences we do and don’t have online (within reason). For instance: Apple doesn’t allow subscriptions priced at less than $0.99. Why not? What if I had a product that i wanted to sell for $0.50 a month? Why should Apple get to decide that that’s not high enough? There are many examples of things like this. 3. I think we should grapple with the ideas and arguments of the author, when in this case or others, and not focus on the pedigree of the publication they write for
- asimilator 5y ago
  > Apple doesn’t allow subscriptions priced at less than $0.99. Why not? What if I had a product that i wanted to sell for $0.50 a month? I’d pay $0.50 more. I just had the unpleasant experience of canceling a non-Apple controlled service. It sucked. Pages and pages of “are you sure you want to cancel” dark patterns. You guys did this to yourselves with absolutely shitty customer experience. Could not care less if Apple makes things harder for you. Do not care if I pay more.
  - madeofpalk 5y ago
    I’m all in favour, as a user, for Apple IAP subscriptions. But shouldn’t “the market” be able to send a signal that they prefer that? Shouldn’t Apple’s IAP actually be able to compete on its merits (like the better experience that we both prefer!) rather than arbitrary platform lock-in? If, faced with actual competition, users and/or developers do not chose Apple IAP, wouldn’t this signal to Apple that they need to do better and improve their service?
cachehit 5y ago
>You can no longer help the customer who’s buying your product with the following requests: Refunds, credit card changes, discounts, trial extensions, hardship exceptions, comps, partial payments, non-profit discounts, educational discounts, downtime credits, tax exceptions, etc. You can’t control any of this when you charge your customers through Apple’s platform. So now you’re forced to sell a product - with your name and reputation on it - to your customers, yet you are helpless and unable to help them if they need a hand with any of the above. From https://www.hey.com/apple/iap/ https://www.hey.com/apple/iap/
- Terretta 5y ago
  Unfortunately, from a user perspective, in aggregate, the reputation of Apple beats the median reputation of devs at doing all those things in a customer’s favor. So odds are subscribe through apple has better experience. You, as a dev, may offer better, for sure. But the user cannot count on that.
EGreg 5y ago
Can someone here confirm what info the app gets when you get a subscription? What if a person would sign up to a dating site under two separate names - would the App Store out them somehow?
- Mertax 5y ago
  Basically a transaction receipt is all the app gets. It’s up to the app developer to associate this purchase transaction with any app related user identity information. RevenueCat had a decent explanation for this considering this is their main product: https://www.revenuecat.com/blog/managing-cross-platform-subscriptions https://www.revenuecat.com/blog/managing-cross-platform-subs... Disclaimer: not at all associated with revenuecat, just in the process of evaluating their product myself.
donmcronald 5y ago
IMO businesses selling apps have dug their own grave in the customer relationship department. In the last 20 years I've only had 2 or 3 tech support experiences where someone helped me solve a problem I'd consider non-trivial. Businesses have cost cut and devalued support so much that it's not worth having a relationship with them. They only want a sales relationship and you're on your own when it comes to support. What does having a relationship with them get me as a customer?
celloductor 5y ago
imagine have issues with 10 apps you bought on your iphone. having to go through 10 developer's refund process is a nightmare. I would rather just go through apple.
jasonlotito 5y ago
> Now interview a real user of subscriptions instead of a brand marketing executive and ask them if the user experience is worse. I'd say the same thing. Much prefer dealing with individual app developers. I go out of my way to purchase through them over Apple. It's far more secure for me as a consumer to go through individual app developers than through Apple.
ksec 5y ago
>Now interview a real user of subscriptions instead of a brand marketing executive and ask them if the user experience is worse. Their experience is better when they signed up, mostly due to Apple's integrated API and enforcing standards. Their experience is much worse when they have dispute. Because no user think of themselves as Apple's customers. They are using your App or Services. Telling them to go to Apple doesn't solve their problem. If the experience is truly better, and if Apple owns every single transaction and relationship. Why is it the developers gets the blame every time when there is a problem while Apple sitting their enjoying their 15% to 30% commission? Apple is muddling rent-seeking, developer tooling, support, discovery, distribution and services all into that 15-30%. And they happily dance around that one of these stance every time they are questioned.

jsmeaton 5y ago

There are pros and cons. As one example my son purchased $500 of skins in Fortnite on Nintendo (I had the card saved, my fault since corrected). Trying to get that refunded was a huge drama because I had to go via Nintendo rather than Epic. In this specific scenario I would have preferred a first party resolution.

Terretta 5y ago
Interesting. I’ve had Apple proactively email me about parental controls along with an offer to refund what they seem to have considered excessive in-game currency IAPs. I’d be amazed if the game publisher would have cared at all. No amount of future loyalty to the one game would have offset the cost of the refund. Same is not true for Apple or Nintendo.

ev1 5y ago

As an iOS user, I do not want the publisher knowing anything about me. I'm happy to pay for the app, but I do not want to tell the publisher a single thing other than the fact that it is paid. Nothing else. I do not want to share my email, I do not want to share any form of cardholder data. I want to cancel in one tap for any subscription. I do not want to go through shitty, abusive retention flows.

offtotheraces 5y ago
Until last year it took 11 taps to cancel through iOS. Bet it’s a whole lot less if you try to cancel HBO from their website.
- kmonsen 5y ago
  It’s an infinite number of taps to cancel nytimes though. I guess Apple subscription is an equalizer, they all become somewhat horrible.
- scrose 5y ago
  This is a very odd comparison. You’re comparing a past workflow for one service against an existing workflow for an entirely separate service, but only speculating on whether it is actually less. 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.
- ev1 5y ago
  When I say cancel in one tap, what I mean is I have a list of every subscription I am holding, and I pick that one and it goes. 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.
  - sharken 5y ago
    So sort of a one-click buy experience, only for cancelling a subscription. 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.

wlesieutre 5y ago

> The user experience is much worse Spoken like someone who has never tried to cancel anything where they had a direct relationship with the publisher

webmobdev 5y ago
Or rather - spoken like an American? Outside the US, it is quite easy to cancel such subscriptions as the consumer laws are in your favour. Apple's exploitation of this lacunae in US laws is sadly being interpreted as some benevolent act from them. If the US has similar stronger consumer laws, both Apple and other companies wouldn't be able to exploit Americans.
- wlesieutre 5y ago
  California has their shit together on this (if you can sign up for something online, you must be able to cancel the same way), but the rest of the country hasn’t caught up yet

Spooky23 5y ago

It depends. As an individual, I would rather buy a newspaper subscription from Apple instead of paying for a 13 week subscription from the paper directly, billed monthly. As an enterprise, I don’t want to be stuck dealing with a mercurial and pain the ass middleman like Apple for anything significant to my business. I have the market power to get terms from a company like Adobe or whatever, but with Apple, we get a very polite “Fuck you, we’re Apple, you are not Apple. Be thankful we are selling our beautiful things to you.” The reasons why I can’t stand Apple for B2B are why they are delightful to Spooky23, the individual consumer.

offtotheraces 5y ago

Mobile app operator here - let me clarify some things: 1. Until June it was impossible for a developer to issue a refund to an angry customer - Apple simply did not allow developers to do that, despite the app store being around for 13 years. This has led to untold frustration among developers - angry customers email us, leave horrible reviews, leave screeds on social media about how we “won’t” refund them, when in actually Apple reserved that right only for Apple support agents. Literally - if you forgot to cancel your Calm or Headspace subscription, neither Calm nor Headspace could give you a refund. You had to call Apple. That’s insane and leads to horrible customer experiences. (I can send you actual emails we got blasting us for this, and us pleading with them to contact Apple because we literally can’t do anything to help them). 2. You may love the Apple subscription experience, but we shouldn’t be letting Apple decide what experiences we do and don’t have online (within reason). For instance: Apple doesn’t allow subscriptions priced at less than $0.99. Why not? What if I had a product that i wanted to sell for $0.50 a month? Why should Apple get to decide that that’s not high enough? There are many examples of things like this. 3. I think we should grapple with the ideas and arguments of the author, when in this case or others, and not focus on the pedigree of the publication they write for

asimilator 5y ago
> Apple doesn’t allow subscriptions priced at less than $0.99. Why not? What if I had a product that i wanted to sell for $0.50 a month? I’d pay $0.50 more. I just had the unpleasant experience of canceling a non-Apple controlled service. It sucked. Pages and pages of “are you sure you want to cancel” dark patterns. You guys did this to yourselves with absolutely shitty customer experience. Could not care less if Apple makes things harder for you. Do not care if I pay more.
- madeofpalk 5y ago
  I’m all in favour, as a user, for Apple IAP subscriptions. But shouldn’t “the market” be able to send a signal that they prefer that? Shouldn’t Apple’s IAP actually be able to compete on its merits (like the better experience that we both prefer!) rather than arbitrary platform lock-in? If, faced with actual competition, users and/or developers do not chose Apple IAP, wouldn’t this signal to Apple that they need to do better and improve their service?

cachehit 5y ago

>You can no longer help the customer who’s buying your product with the following requests: Refunds, credit card changes, discounts, trial extensions, hardship exceptions, comps, partial payments, non-profit discounts, educational discounts, downtime credits, tax exceptions, etc. You can’t control any of this when you charge your customers through Apple’s platform. So now you’re forced to sell a product - with your name and reputation on it - to your customers, yet you are helpless and unable to help them if they need a hand with any of the above. From https://www.hey.com/apple/iap/ https://www.hey.com/apple/iap/

Terretta 5y ago
Unfortunately, from a user perspective, in aggregate, the reputation of Apple beats the median reputation of devs at doing all those things in a customer’s favor. So odds are subscribe through apple has better experience. You, as a dev, may offer better, for sure. But the user cannot count on that.

EGreg 5y ago

Can someone here confirm what info the app gets when you get a subscription? What if a person would sign up to a dating site under two separate names - would the App Store out them somehow?

Mertax 5y ago
Basically a transaction receipt is all the app gets. It’s up to the app developer to associate this purchase transaction with any app related user identity information. RevenueCat had a decent explanation for this considering this is their main product: https://www.revenuecat.com/blog/managing-cross-platform-subscriptions https://www.revenuecat.com/blog/managing-cross-platform-subs... Disclaimer: not at all associated with revenuecat, just in the process of evaluating their product myself.

donmcronald 5y ago

IMO businesses selling apps have dug their own grave in the customer relationship department. In the last 20 years I've only had 2 or 3 tech support experiences where someone helped me solve a problem I'd consider non-trivial. Businesses have cost cut and devalued support so much that it's not worth having a relationship with them. They only want a sales relationship and you're on your own when it comes to support. What does having a relationship with them get me as a customer?

celloductor 5y ago

imagine have issues with 10 apps you bought on your iphone. having to go through 10 developer's refund process is a nightmare. I would rather just go through apple.

jasonlotito 5y ago

> Now interview a real user of subscriptions instead of a brand marketing executive and ask them if the user experience is worse. I'd say the same thing. Much prefer dealing with individual app developers. I go out of my way to purchase through them over Apple. It's far more secure for me as a consumer to go through individual app developers than through Apple.

ksec 5y ago

>Now interview a real user of subscriptions instead of a brand marketing executive and ask them if the user experience is worse. Their experience is better when they signed up, mostly due to Apple's integrated API and enforcing standards. Their experience is much worse when they have dispute. Because no user think of themselves as Apple's customers. They are using your App or Services. Telling them to go to Apple doesn't solve their problem. If the experience is truly better, and if Apple owns every single transaction and relationship. Why is it the developers gets the blame every time when there is a problem while Apple sitting their enjoying their 15% to 30% commission? Apple is muddling rent-seeking, developer tooling, support, discovery, distribution and services all into that 15-30%. And they happily dance around that one of these stance every time they are questioned.