That EM likes to burn bridges does not change the nature of your transaction with Twitterific. You did not pay for access to Twitter: you paid for an app that you received. Asking for a refund is ... questionnable.

No, you're paying a continuing subscription for an app that lets you interact with Twitter. If that app stops letting you interact with Twitter, then you absolutely are entitled to a refund of the remaining portion of the subscription.

If Twitterific was a one-time purchase and not a subscription service, I would absolutely agree that refunds are probably not warranted. (Though someone who bought the app yesterday might feel differently.)

It's flat-out gross that the Twitterific developer isn't pro-actively giving pro-rated refunds to their customers, and is instead asking for charity.

> It's flat-out gross that the Twitterific developer isn't pro-actively giving pro-rated refunds to their customers, and is instead asking for charity.

Please explain the mechanism by which an App Store app developer can provide pro-rated refunds. You seem so confident about your claim that the company could be and should be doing this, that I’m sure this is something you’ve already checked and verified.

But: you did receive it. You received it immediately when you paid for it. And you've used it in the meantime and presumably derived value from it otherwise you would have asked for a refund immediately upon delivery.

Precisely.

I wouldn't judge anyone who bought it a month ago for asking for a refund, but if you've been using the app since 2019 or something, you got what you paid for, for years.

Does Apple give refunds for four-year old app downloads?

Good question. Anything over 90 days I would see as unreasonable.

So anyone getting a refund is probably a recent purchaser.

I don't know because I don't know the App store rules for these refunds. But if they do allow longer refunds it should have massive repercussions for any App store developers that want to stay in business in the longer term if they are basing their App on someone else's API, even with permission.

It's a $9.99 annual subscription. The fact they are not automatically refunding the part of the year that wasn't provided is offensive.

They can’t. The App Store head never had any mechanism for developers to initiate refunds in any way, let alone partial refunds.

You’re raging against these guys for not doing something that they have no ability to do. Hardly fair.

I think people are talking about refunds of (pro-rated unused portions of) ongoing subscriptions, not refunds for paying a one-time app store fee.

That functionality would have to be created for this particular situation, which I highly doubt Apple can even do at this point (and google likely can't either).

For an industry that makes as much money as it does some people appear to be extremely petty about this, if you could afford the app to begin with you can afford to be gracious about it. If you have any beef it is with Elon Musk, not with Twitterific.

> That functionality would have to be created for this particular situation, which I highly doubt Apple can even do at this point (and google likely can't either).

Wow, really? "Refund remainder of 1-year subscription that started on X date and ended prematurely on Y date" seems like a pretty basic feature of a payments system. The inability to do that says more about Apple (or Google) than it does anyone else.

> If you have any beef it is with Elon Musk, not with Twitterific.

I don't have a beef with either, as I don't use my Twitter account, and didn't purchase Twitterific.

People who bought Twitterific and pay for a subscription don't have an ongoing business relationship with Twitter/Musk, they have one with Twitterific. When the company you pay for a subscription service stops providing that service -- for whatever reason, even reasons outside their control -- the right thing to do is for the company to refund the rest of the subscription.

> Because I paid them for something and I'm not receiving it?

But that's not a response to my comment. I'm asking why the developer, who has expenses of his own, should cover for the actions of Twitter. In the absence of an explicit promise related to this, the customer was taking a risk that Twitter would do something like this. There is no good argument that either party should have to cover for Twitter's actions.

Erm, that isn't how the real world works. I'm not entering into an agreement with Twitter when I pay for a Twitterific subscription, I'm entering into an agreement with Twitterific. They are responsible for fulfilling the subscription for which I am paying, not Twitter. If they are unable to then it doesn't matter why, they have still broken the agreement. This is simple business.

The developer should cover for the actions of Twitter because they decided to build their business on top of Twitter, fully reliant on Twitter's goodwill around API access. They are the one who took on that risk, and it's irresponsible and unethical to push the consequences of that risk onto their own customers.

Their average customer doesn't know or care about API platforms. They just want to access Twitter via a nice, premium app they paid for. If they can no longer do that, they deserve a refund of the remaining unused value of their subscription.

The developer gets the upside of building a successful business and takes the downside of making business decisions that turn out to be misguided, no?

To put it another way - if the shareholders had had a nine-figure exit, would they have planned on sharing that with their customers?