ProtonMail CEO calls Apple's forced in-app purchases 'Mafia extortion'

Re:ProtonMail CEO calls Apple's forced in-app purchases 'Maf... by forty on Friday October 09, 2020 @04:07PM (#24733885)

I feel it's the contrary. We are generally happy to refund customers that are not happy with our service, but the app store is the only payment system where we cannot refund them (I don't really know what the UX looks like on the customer side, but I think they have to contact Apple to ask for the refund and it's not always as easy as it should to get the refund)

Note that things might have changed since I worked on this stuff.

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Re:ProtonMail CEO calls Apple's forced in-app purchases 'Maf... by drtz on Friday October 09, 2020 @04:42PM (#24734234)

I can confirm it's not straightforward to get a refund from Apple for an App Store purchase, it was for me at least.

In the most recent case I tried to request a refund immediately after buying an app, only to get a vague and unhelpful error message. After a little Googling I learned that you have to wait a period of a few hours before requesting a refund. Of course I forgot to go back and request the refund later so I ended up paying for an app that didn't do what I expected it to.

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Re:ProtonMail CEO calls Apple's forced in-app purchases 'Maf... by fakedang on Friday October 09, 2020 @04:19PM (#24734001)

It's the same for Android too

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Re:ProtonMail CEO calls Apple's forced in-app purchases 'Maf... by forty on Friday October 09, 2020 @05:07PM (#24734453)

No, I believe we can refund ourselves payments on the play store (or at least I'm pretty sure we at least used to)

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Re:ProtonMail CEO calls Apple's forced in-app purchases 'Maf... by fakedang on Monday October 12, 2020 @07:04PM (#24760531)

I meant the calling up an Appstore rep and asking for the refund part. I know you definitely have to have a human to human interaction to get a Playstore refund.

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