They sold their company and shut down their service for which they charged monthly/yearly subscriptions. They had a decent relationship with Apple, so they emailed their contact and notified them that they'd like to issue refunds to all their users. Apple said that users had to do it themselves. That wouldn't be so bad, but there's (as I understand it) some restrictions on Apple offering refunds for subscriptions, for example if you're 25 days into a 30 day subscription period, Apple won't allow users to request a refund.
This caused users to get angry at my friend and their company.
If they had been using any other payment service other than the App Store, they could have just automatically issued refunds to all their users.
Apple balances on the assumption of the stability of their developers offering subscriptions and an easier experience for a user requesting a refund.
The difficulty that the developer is having in this case is that Apple isn't exposing the payment information to the developer. If they can say "this user gets a refund" that is leaking some information about the users to developers.
(...)
Additionally, it appears that there were some new methods added to the in-app library for developers to be able to create a refund request on behalf of a user.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/storekit/transacti...
> Call this function from account settings or a help menu to enable customers to request a refund for an in-app purchase within your app. When you call this function, the system displays a refund sheet with the customer’s purchase details and list of reason codes for the customer to choose from.
Regardless, to address your (off-topic) addition: do you actually request refunds from Apple often enough to be willing to pay 10% more for the privilege? You'd have to be asking for refunds for 1 out of every 10 products you buy for that to make sense...
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/storekit/transacti...
I would counter that its really easy compared to most other systems.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204084
I had an occasion where my phone was loaned to my (young at that time) nephew on a car trip and since it was my phone (and only my phone) I had rather permissive purchase checks on it. He bought a bunch of in app purchase stuff for Talking Tom (owned by a Chinese company). I filled out the form, and got a refund. I believe that it was much easier than trying to get a refund from the developer.