3 ms·

Multiple payment engines to me is a miss and not a hit. Creating an account and giving credit card info to get one more online merchant is a total pain. With

Multiple payment engines to me is a miss and not a hit. Creating an account and giving credit card info to get one more online merchant is a total pain. With iTunes payments I am way up on my spend. I used to spend about $40/mo. With the apple handling magazine apps and all kinds of other payments for games like smurf village I spend easily $180 a month. Maybe the other way is good for developers but it blows for the consumer. Make it easy for me to give you money and I will.

msbarnett 15y ago
Yeah, I had the same reaction. I'm sure the Magazine publishers would love a system where they can use their own payment processor to harvest a ton of details from you and that requires you to phone a call-center that mysteriously drops your call 3/4s of the time in order to cancel, but it's a big step backward for me as a consumer.
potatolicious 15y ago
Actually I think this is a great idea - MSFT isn't saying they won't run their own payment engine, they're giving devs the choice on whether or not to use their payment engine. This is far superior to Apple's current policy right now. There are some pretty extreme advantages to tying yourself into the first-party payment engine. As you've brought up, it's way easier to separate me from my money if all I have to do is type in an ID that's already pre-registered to the device. There is in fact a large incentive for devs to go first-party. But that's not true for all cases, and the edge cases really make iOS a painful platform to use at times. Amazon can't integrate their book store into the Kindle app because Apple wants their cut. As a consumer, I don't mind giving my CC info to Amazon and signing up for their account, and Apple's policy makes my experience as a user noticeably worse. The incentives for most developers to go with the first-party payment solution is IMO enough - Apple's enforcement here just seems heavy-handed and unnecessary.

msbarnett 15y ago

Yeah, I had the same reaction. I'm sure the Magazine publishers would love a system where they can use their own payment processor to harvest a ton of details from you and that requires you to phone a call-center that mysteriously drops your call 3/4s of the time in order to cancel, but it's a big step backward for me as a consumer.

potatolicious 15y ago

Actually I think this is a great idea - MSFT isn't saying they won't run their own payment engine, they're giving devs the choice on whether or not to use their payment engine. This is far superior to Apple's current policy right now. There are some pretty extreme advantages to tying yourself into the first-party payment engine. As you've brought up, it's way easier to separate me from my money if all I have to do is type in an ID that's already pre-registered to the device. There is in fact a large incentive for devs to go first-party. But that's not true for all cases, and the edge cases really make iOS a painful platform to use at times. Amazon can't integrate their book store into the Kindle app because Apple wants their cut. As a consumer, I don't mind giving my CC info to Amazon and signing up for their account, and Apple's policy makes my experience as a user noticeably worse. The incentives for most developers to go with the first-party payment solution is IMO enough - Apple's enforcement here just seems heavy-handed and unnecessary.