Hulu and Disney Plus No Longer Support App Store Payments ⇥ macrumors.com
Juli Clover, MacRumors:
Disney is no longer allowing its customers to sign up for and purchase subscriptions to Hulu or Disney+ through Apple’s App Store, cutting out any subscription fees that Disney would have needed to pay to Apple for using in-app purchase.
As of writing a day after Disney made this change, Disney Plus is still listed as a member on Apple’s Video Partner Program page. I wrote about that program four years ago in the context of Apple seemingly retconning it into being a longstanding and “established” option available to developers of media applications.
More importantly, Disney is increasingly concerned with flexible tiers and bundles so that they can charge more. Especially when Disney launches their ESPN service later, which is almost guaranteed to be incredibly expensive. Disney will try to offset that with bundles. I’m sure Disney might even want to toy around with locking people into yearly subscriptions paid on a monthly basis, à la cable TV.
Despite Apple being Disney’s BFF, Disney needs to have infrastructure to handle all these bundles and tiers, which will be very expensive, so why involve Apple acting as a glorified payment processor?
It is hard to feel anything at all, really, about the business decisions of one massive conglomerate compared to another. But Apple’s subscription management is — in a vacuum and distinct from anything else — one of the nicest around, and it ultimately hurts users that it is so unattractive to some developers when given other options.
On a related note, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission just announced a final set of rules to make cancelling a subscription as easy as starting it. Michael Tsai:
While it was good that in some cases customers could get easier cancellation by paying for an additional layer such as the App Store, I think it makes sense to just make these bad practices illegal.
I am in full agreement. The FTC’s policies are a good idea and should be copied by every national or supranational consumer protection body.