Apple needs to provide an API to allow developers to cancel a subscription on a user's behalf. Currently, the only way to do this is through the app store, and many customers find this very confusing, resulting in poor customer experience and a heavy support burden on developers.
Many customers forget where they even sourced their subscription to begin with, especially if you have a multi-/omni-channel presence.
You mean the process to get to the subscription management page isn't intuitive? I'd actually be shocked if more than 3 people out of the 1 billion that have bought iOS devices have ever figured this out without Googling or being shown. "Tap View Apple ID", seriously?
This has always seemed like a horrible user-hostile dark-pattern on Apple's part. When you subscribe, Apple says to go to Settings to unsubscribe or turn off auto-renew, but it's very opaque. It's also hidden behind a username/password prompt.
It would be much better if there were a Subscriptions option directly under 'iTunes & App Store' – even if there were still a password prompt behind this, at least people would know how to find it.
But Apple have long, long needed to modernise their entire iTunes Store experience, of which subscriptions are just one small problem. Does anyone know if it's still running on WebObjects? The whole experience has always felt slow and un-responsive, which felt normal when it first launched, but now feels very behind the times. It wouldn't surprise me if the subscriptions issue is a result of this too. Would be interested to hear if this is the case.
It's always felt like poor discoverability and lag were big reasons behind their social efforts (Ping/Connect) failing too. Not every social network needs a web presence, but presumably it'd help to be able to access/link to this content on the web at large, rather than it being buried deep inside existing apps.
Honestly, I'd like to know too. I have no first-hand knowledge here, which is why I was asking about it.
WebObjects has been discontinued, presumably for a reason, and while it was ahead of its time back in the day, it wouldn't be surprising to me if its age is starting to show when trying to deal with the huge amounts of traffic the iTunes Store must handle. But I really don't know. I only asked because I've seen it mentioned in this context before.
I've personally experienced a lot of flakiness with the Apple ID infrastructure though, especially with 2-factor auth enabled (their old 2-factor auth, not the new system which I haven't tried yet). Most recently when trying to purchase AppleCare after the fact, I just couldn't log in. I have no idea what's going on behind the scenes.
It's hidden behind a u/p prompt for a very good reason: that section of the site contains your personal info, payment information, shipping address, and so forth. It is absolutely necessary to require reauthentication to access that data.
That's a decision on their part which makes it a dark pattern. Subscriptions do not need to be in the same place. Although, I guess what you're subscribed to could be sensitive enough...
I think, given how Apple treat subscriptions (they email you multiple times warning you when a subscription is about to expire, renewable subscriptions are only for certain types of content), I would rather chalk this up to incompetence rather than maliciousness.
I think we're starting to seriously abuse the term "dark pattern". Placing subscription management (i.e. controlling what stuff hits your credit card) behind a reauthentication is not deceptive in any way.
Just to be clear, the dark pattern isn't the re-authentication itself, it's hiding the "Subscriptions" button behind a button that says "View Apple ID" where many people (myself included) may not think to look. The re-authentication just compounds the problem by hindering discoverability of where the "Subscriptions" button actually is, because you have to go through a password prompt to find it.
The Settings app built-in search doesn't work either. If you search for "Subscriptions" it doesn't appear, because it's behind hidden behind this password prompt (to be more generous, that entire screen is probably only generated once you've logged in, but it doesn't have to be that way).
Additionally, the "View Apple ID" button itself is also non-obvious: you have to click your email address first for it to come up as a pop-over. I recognise my email address in blue is a link to my account information, but a less experienced user might (reasonably) think otherwise. It would probably be better for your account name to have a right disclosure arrow next to it (taking you to a new view with your account options inside) to specifically indicate that touching it takes you to this new screen, because that's the way everything else in the Settings app works.
To solve all of this, you could just as easily put the "Subscriptions" button one level up in the "iTunes & App Store" screen, before the password prompt, and only prompt for a password after the user has clicked it. This would solve all of these problems.
If this sounds confusing, that's because it is. That's the real problem here.
There is intended to be a difference between poor UX and the godawful phrase "dark patterns." The amount of overintellectualization you can do about a given experience doesn't contribute to the darkness.
This, of course, is part of why it's such an awful phrase. It's too nerd-cool to avoid being overapplied by cool nerds.
I'm a relatively-infrequent Apple user who signed up for HBO Now when it first came out and you had to sign up exclusively via an iPhone App. As it turned out, you could use the credentials obtained from that signup to sign in with any web browser and stream content. You didn't need to use the app itself.
Apple was literally just handling payments and subscriptions for HBO Now, exclusively, for 3 months.
Imagine my frustration at trying to find out when my subscription was set to renew. Why am I supposed to know that iTunes and App Store settings is where I should look for anything to do with a subscription for something that isn't visibly tied to either iTunes or the App Store?
Taps #3 and #4 are truly banana-pants insane though.
Ah that's what it was. My dad complained about signing up for some HBO think and didn't know how to cancel. It was like $10 a month. He ended up just cancelling the credit card.
I keep watching in disbelief (from distance) how Apple more and more sucks at user experience. The next thing I know Microsoft will be releasing software that just works, lol.
The other day I tried to figure out how to change the 2nd city shown on the Apple Watch's default watchface. (There's a "world clock" feature that displays the time in another city in the corner of the watch screen.)
Turns out that the process to do this involves first configuring the city in an app within the iPhone, and then on the watch doing a series of UI actions: a force-touch, a swipe, a tap and turning the "digital crown" to find the right city within a UI element that is a list although it doesn't look like one. Several of these actions are entirely undiscoverable (the force-touch and digital crown in these contexts are just actions you have to stumble on by trying all the possible combinations, I guess).
I don't think there would have been any way to figure this out without googling it. And this is a feature that's prominently displayed in the default view of the Apple Watch screen, so it's perfectly reasonable to expect that users will want to change the city.
It's hard to believe that this device was designed by the company famous for the one-button mouse. I do find the physical design attractive though.
Actually, that's exactly the kind of shit you have to do when you only have one button. I was using my cousin's apple mouse one day and discovered context menus are found by touching or rubbing it on the front somehow (don't exactly remember a couple years later).
Simple is great, but not when you try to make simple do complex.
Apple historically got a lot of praise for having a great user experience that was intuitive.
Apple also historically had a small fraction as many users as Microsoft and had Steve Jobs, who didn't seem to care if existing users were bothered and instead wanted the experience to always be perfect.
Once you reach a certain number of users, any menu or UI change becomes increasingly painful for your current users, at the expense of new users and, sometimes, what feels like common sense.
There are "we can't please everyone" decisions, there are plain mistakes and there are UI decisions that benefit no one except possibly the company - i.e. dark patterns.
I personally don't see what benefit putting the subscription management behind an unrelated UI widget that doesn't even appear to be clickable could possibly bring to an end-user. Or how such a design got through usability testing in the first place. Hence the likelihood for a dark pattern seems pretty high to me here.
Yeah, of course. But it's something like using a Dvorak keyboard layout -- every time you use another computer or help someone else you hit friction. Customizing system level key binding is something I've intentionally avoided.
Windows 10 will upgrade your computer at any time of the day without your consent. A med school student friend of mine has to take tests on her computer. 15 minutes before the test, Windows 10 was updating and rebooting.
Found out, unless you have the pro version, you can't even tell Windows not to do that. You can only set a period of time where Windows will do it (like 2 am) so it doesn't do it at more inconvenient times.
OS X upgrades are worse, in my opinion. For any given version, Apple just nags me to install it. But if I go from major version to major version, suddenly selling my MBP gets complicated, because I can only install the version that it came with after I wipe it. It's up to the person who buys it from me to log in to Apple and update the OS to a more recent version.
Then there's iOS which nags you constantly to install updates that have been known to brick some devices...
I have home edition, it is set to reboot in the middle of the night. The laptop goes to sleep or hibernates when I go to bed, one or the other, the update is still pending when I start the laptop in the morning. Updates can be put off indefinitely, if this is the normal pattern.
>But if I go from major version to major version, suddenly selling my MBP gets complicated, because I can only install the version that it came with after I wipe it.
That isn't true. You can install a fresh copy of the most recent OS.
You can, but that requires you to log in with your Apple ID and password. Or to download (with your Apple ID and password) a copy and create an installation thumb drive.
El Capitan definitely doesn't require you to create an account OR enter a credit card number, I've done it on plenty of machines. Obviously you have to create an account if you want to use iCloud, but you can simply choose not to.
I believe you, but the OS told me to upgrade to El Capitan using the App Store and the App Store told me I had to log in to iCloud and iCloud told me I had to give it a credit card. I believe you that there is a way around it, but there is also a way around getting upgraded to Windows 10. If the OS doesn't tell the average user about it, it's not part of the UX.
depends on what will be on the person bank statement, if it's your company or apple. they will call you to cancel, not apple, if the statements say the charge is for your service
That would almost require Apple to allow developers to have an actual direct relationship with the customers. As far as I can see, they are Apple's customers that you are just renting.
To service the subscription, you must be given some token? You should be able to hand that token to Apple and tell them to cancel the associated subscription.
Apple definitely provides you with unique details about the transaction and your system can verify whether renewal occurred or not. Wish they would add an API for cancelling. It would significantly reduce the number of rude emails we get from people if we could offer a cancel button in the app.
However, it would not solve the issue of people that think that simply deleting the app will cancel the subscription, or dissuade people from insisting that we cancel the subscription for them.
That sounds right but the problem is how to associate the user with the token beyond something in your app. I just am not sure how I would go from a twitter support account to canceling the subscription.
I don't know the details of the current API, but wouldn't you already need some basic information about your subscribers before that? To, you know, actually do the thing that the user subscribed to...
I read the docs, but I get the feeling we need someone to detail exactly what the store gives you for personal information. It seems like tokens but I'm probably missing something.
As someone who's cancelled lots of subscriptions - I couldn't agree more, it's a right pain in the ass and the Apple website where you do unsubscribe is painfully slow (at least in Australia)
Many customers forget where they even sourced their subscription to begin with, especially if you have a multi-/omni-channel presence.