Thank you.
> I’m trying to understand how this is Apple’s fault
Apple: "it’s by design"
> neither the seller nor Apple are committing fraud here.
As the article points out, many App Store developers are in fact committing fraud, but Apple does little or nothing about that.
> The terms of the transaction are clearly spelled out before you commit to it.
Are they? From the article: "What is Apple's App Store refund policy? An as App Store developer and consumer, I honestly don't know!"
Retail stores typically have some kind of publicly posted refund policy, unlike the App Store.
Trustworthy businesses don't pull that kind of crap. And as the title of the article indicates, the raison d'être of Apple's App Store lockdown is allegedly to protect consumers. But it doesn't protect consumers.
They don't have to be forced. Scammers love this pricing model.
Notice the word buy here, not try. There's a world of difference between buying and trying. When you walk out of the retail store, you've already intentionally paid your money. With a trial, you don't necessarily have an intention to buy.
As I said in the article: "People often compare App Store to a retail store, but what physical retail store in the world allows you to walk out the door with 84% of its products without paying anything?"
Buy now, bill me later is a pretty common thing in retail. Technically I suppose you're still "buying", but you haven't paid for anything yet any more than you have when you subscribe for something with a free trial first.
Likewise, Amazon (and some other online clothing retailers) offer "try it on at home first, pay after you decide to keep it" models.
And then there's sit down restaurants which allow you to order as much as you want and pay after you've eaten. And if you go really up scale, they may not even have prices on the menu and you get surprised by the costs at the end.
I haven't seen this.
> Likewise, Amazon (and some other online clothing retailers) offer "try it on at home first, pay after you decide to keep it" models.
This is actually news to me. Anyway, it's certainly not the traditional physical store model that we've had for decades/centuries/millennia. And Amazon is problematic in its own way, but I don't want to get into that whole thing here.
> And then there's sit down restaurants which allow you to order as much as you want and pay after you've eaten.
This is not a good analogy. You don't get to walk out of the restaurant without paying. The food doesn't have a trial period. If you ordered it, you pay for it on the bill. Restaurants let you pay at the end of the meal because they want you to keep ordering as many drinks as possible.
You called it OP.
I’m trying to understand how this is Apple’s fault or how they owe the Reddit poster a refund. Are opt-out free trials a bit of a scummy thing to do? Yes and I would never utilize one as a seller, but neither the seller nor Apple are committing fraud here. The terms of the transaction are clearly spelled out before you commit to it.
Perhaps Apple could provide a short grace period with automated refunds as long as the user cancels within 3 days of payment or so? That might be a good compromise here.