Yes. I don’t think Apple is a saint. I think it understands that forcing consumer friendly practices for its customers makes sense especially if they get paid to do so.
I go to Settings, I go to my Apple account, I go to subscriptions, and I press 1 button to cancel the subscription and 1 button to confirm that's what I want to do and the end date. Unless I know I want the subscription effectively forever, I subscribe through apple so I can do this.
Have you tried cancelling your audible subscription? Compare that with the experience cancelling a subscription with Apple and you quickly realize the experience is more consumer friendly. You look at it from a price perspective while others look at it from a value perspective.
That's also something that's the fault of US lawmakers. In the EU cancelling a service must be as easy and through the same channels as signing up. Hence it's illegal to require that customers mail a hand-posted registered letter only on the second Tuesday of the month. Unless that's also the only way to sign up.
Transferring you to a "customer loyalty specialist" when cancelling is also illegal if you refuse.
Don't worship Apple because they're a bit more "consumer friendly" (while cashing in 30% for the privilege!!) when you could have everything be customer friendly for free just by electing honest politicians.
Fair point, and I don’t worship them. Reality is US governance philosophy is that the market will mostly self-regulate. Apple’s behavior is best aligned with my interest.
If i were an app developer, maker of Skinner box games, or selling virtual products, i would feel differently. But I’m not, and allowing Amazon to extract more margin in exchange for cheapening my experience does nothing to benefit me.
No they're bad because of the 30%. But almost all American companies are bad, really. It's just a inevitability in unrestricted capitalism. That's why we need the EU to put legal constraints on them. Apple isn't the bad Apple in the bunch but they're not great either.
They may have changed but it used to be quite confusing how to cancel Prime. Once you cancel and try to buy something on Amazon they present a variety of dark patterns to get you to sign up again.