(EDIT: I guess I should have clarified better: I'm not defending the crapware, social share-driven apps mentioned by the OP. There's good IAPs, and bad IAPs, and the latter should indeed be banned. I'm just against the widespread sentiment that all IAP is bad. I have no problem with Candy Crush making millions of dollars thru IAP, provided they deliver value to users)
"Consumer win" is giving them choice.
Users spend millions of dollars on IAPs, because it was relevant to them. This created an entire industry of game developers, artists, story writers, that rely on IAPs to keep their apps free.
Without IAP, they would have to charge upfront for the app. While it is certainly an option, I'd prefer to let developers and customers figure out the model they want, rather than having Apple or Google enforcing it.
Anyway, IAP is one of the most important pillars of Apple's mobile strategy, so it obviously isn't going away anytime soon.
There's a difference between short- and long-term interest. People are bad at the latter. Yes, there's demand for a free game - duh, of course people want free games. And when they have to pay a euro to get the game to really progress. Sure, why not? And then they need to pay a bit more. And they are still fine with it. But they are less and less satisfied. They try the next game - and the same thing happens. For me the end result is: I stopped looking at games for my iPhone because I have a deep mistrust for apps. Most things that look high quality turn out to be terribly designed (from a game design POV) and are just employing one dark pattern after the other to get people to make more IAPs.
So, yes, short-term there's demand. There's a market signal that says "this is totally what people want". But mid- and long-term it's bad for the platform because it leads to shitty customer/user experience. It will still make companies money for a while - but the consumers are burning away. And it's really hard to recover from that.
Apple has been more than willing to sacrifice direct profits for user experience - they'd no doubt make more money with the App Store as a free-for-all like the Play Store, but instead they don't do that, and often reject applications which would be quite lucrative for them because they don't meet the guidelines.
IAP isn't going away, but seeing Apple burn a little bit of potential profit to keep the store relatively high quality shouldn't be that surprising.
"Consumer win" is giving them choice.
Users spend millions of dollars on IAPs, because it was relevant to them. This created an entire industry of game developers, artists, story writers, that rely on IAPs to keep their apps free.
Without IAP, they would have to charge upfront for the app. While it is certainly an option, I'd prefer to let developers and customers figure out the model they want, rather than having Apple or Google enforcing it.
Anyway, IAP is one of the most important pillars of Apple's mobile strategy, so it obviously isn't going away anytime soon.