As a user I love the ability to easily turn a subscription on and off, without having to call someone/chat with someone. Also, did you know that a requirement of the app store is you can delete your data from within the app? It's a great way to reduce your digital fingerprint.
As a developer, we rolled out in app subscriptions and our revenue essentially tripled. They handle refunds. That saves me a LOT of time.
Perfect? No, but I do as most pragmatists do: compromise and make the best of it.
Don't think anyone actually noticed this fly past yesterday [0] but as I commented here [1] Apple have set out their position clearly as patrician and protective (under the dishonest guise of "security").
This is right for some people.
There is a place for the digitally bewildered, like a kind of care home for those who've basically given up on trying to make sense of their place in the digital world, given up all agency, and essentially conceded control of their lives. Ironically the polar opposite of Apple's 1984 Superbowl advert [2].
But we really ought to tell them they're being put out to pasture.
[0] https://developer.apple.com/security/complying-with-the-dma....
All apps being required to use a single payment system is a great example: it sucks for the app developers but only for the app developers. From the consumer perspective, Apple's app store is the only place in the internet economy where they're not subject to pervasive dark patterns trying to get them to not cancel a subscription, not back out of a free trial, or otherwise separate them from their money. People pay good money for Apple phones in part because Apple successfully protects them from predatory anti-consumer behavior.
Contrast that with 90s Microsoft, where people bought Windows because that's mostly all that was available (because Microsoft made sure of that). Today there are more non-Apple phone choices than Apple choices, and yet a substantial number of people consistently choose Apple.