[bee_rider]

Interesting take. In my gut I hate subscriptions mostly because keeping track of them is annoying. But I’m semi-convinced. I mean, aligning the interests of the developer and the users is a nice benefit.

Something Apple could do is allow iOS to handle some of this stuff automatically. Establish a sort of “small app subscription” account. Keep track of which apps had been opened every month, only pay the subscriptions for the ones I’ve opened, and allow me to set monthly limits. It could also offer feedback to the app developers, “X% of your users didn’t use the app this month,” etc.

[RulerOf]

> Keep track of which apps had been opened every month, only pay the subscriptions for the ones I’ve opened, and allow me to set monthly limits.

That turns app icons into land-mines though.

Idk what the happy medium is, but there's gotta be something between "buy this kids game once" and "pay $13 a month until he gets sick of it," and I don't think we've quite found one that's equitable for all parties yet.

[bee_rider]

That’s true.

A difficulty is that making the billing time more granular could reduce the landmine factor, but also would incentivize developers to keep users in the app for longer than necessary. We’ve already seen in social media that that incentive is… quite bad.

I guess it remains to be figured out. I dunno, maybe my framing is wrong, maybe development bounties are a better ongoing revenue stream or something.

[dabluck]

Thanks for reading. Totally agree Apple can do more a lot here and it's disappointing they haven't tried.