Apple makes it incredibly easy to manage and cancel subscriptions. Would that all companies matched them!
One reason I don't begrudge them their 30% is that I could easily lose that much or more trying to get some vendors to cancel subscriptions if I didn't have the easy options Apple provides. Epic is clearly one of them.
There's no system to compare against the supposed "easy" system Apple provides because it's impossible to manage your subscriptions outside of that.
If there was some other system out there that was easier to manage subscriptions in and only takes 10% it wouldn't matter because Apple wouldn't allow you to use it.
Anyone can launch a system to manage subscriptions on any platform other than Apple's, and yet somehow all of the systems people have launched on every platform other than Apple's are worse than Apple's. In Epic's case, illegally so.
I responded to a comment from someone who apparently didn't realize that Apple's subscription system makes it exceptionally easy to cancel subscriptions.
They said:
> while Epic uses predatory tactics to trap people into subscriptions Apple and Google do the same
Which is as far from my experience as it is possible to get.
The comments from people stating that Apple exercises platform lock-in seem roughly as relevant as the current price of tea at a Foxconn factory in China.
Eh? I'm not a customer but TrueBill/Rocket Money seems to deliver a lot more value than Apple for far less of a cost while also being opt-in rather than a platform requirement.
I'm sorry, I didn't realize that when I said "all" I should clarify that I meant "all platforms that provide a similar level of services, including subscriptions on behalf of third parties for which payment is made centrally."
RockeyMoney is great, but not only is it irrelevant in the extreme to the original comment at the root of this thread, it's very much an apples-to-guavas comparison with the Google/Apple/Epic/Valve/etc model of operation.
I can certainly see where you're coming from - but I don't think that subscription management necessarily needs to be in the ___domain of payment processors and products that allow third party subscription management are pretty appealing to me. At the moment they obviously can't manage subscriptions made through the iStore simply because there is a walled garden keeping them out - but I'd prefer a universe where those subscriptions could be managed by third parties (so that I could manage all my subscriptions through a single client) to one where each walled garden delivered a slick by completely separate and incompatible (by design) tool to manage subscriptions within their system.
Apple has one of the best subscription management tools as a seller platform (though I do personally think Steam's is better - but that's just preference)... but a better subscription management system would be providing an interoperable system that third parties could interact with and help control.
We're only really talking Apples-to-Guavas because these systems are configured to defend themselves from any cooperation.
One reason I don't begrudge them their 30% is that I could easily lose that much or more trying to get some vendors to cancel subscriptions if I didn't have the easy options Apple provides. Epic is clearly one of them.