It's the opportunity to take more of your revenue as margin, plain and simple.
Contrary to your suggestion, I would argue that most businesses do not want to predatorily extract money from unwilling customers. It's typically the old, calcified businesses that do not innovate (gyms, cable companies, etc.) that engage in this behavior.
I want more margin so I can hire more engineers and change the world faster.
Google probably sees regulatory pressure writing on the wall, and by doing this they're building evidence that they haven't built a mobile computing monopoly or are backing away from it (insofar as running executions on your customer's devices used to be free in the desktop computing world where two corporations didn't tax all of innovation).
Also, it's a shot against Apple, who is definitely the more egregious of the two.
This is all around good. There might be a company or two that abuse the system, but that's easily dealt with. In an open app ecosystem, you still have measures in place to correct the bad actors.
> I would argue that most businesses do not want to predatorily extract money from unwilling customers
They'd all rather receive the money from happy customers enthusiastically paying because they love the service so much, but if the third option is no money they all know what their second choice would be.
I don't think many businesses think of their dark patterns/retention schemes as predatory is part of the problem. Outside of the app stores, my experience with subscription services is that a significant number of them engage in what I would consider poor behaviour (making it difficult to cancel/change the level you are subscribed at/trying to get your CC details for trials, etc.). Which resulted in me mostly avoiding subscription services, with the app store and having the ability to control subscriptions from a central location I'm much more willing to sign up and as a result am paying for more of them now then at any point in the past
I'd agree that I don't think it's a majority that are bad actors, but I'd say it's far more then one or two, and atleast enough to impact the decisions users are making. I'd prefer this kind of subscription management functionality was handled via bank accounts, but until that's possible I'll probably keep using the app stores
I would argue that most businesses do not want to predatorily extract money from unwilling customers
I find it difficult to agree with this – and I'm not just being scattergun cynical. I quite literally think that the vast majority of consumer-facing businesses work as hard as they can to juice more money out of their customers through obfuscation.
It's easy to argue that this is a benefit for developers, or open ecosystems, or just plain principles or whatever, because that's all almost certainly true. But it's also probably virtually certainly no better for users.
Contrary to your suggestion, I would argue that most businesses do not want to predatorily extract money from unwilling customers. It's typically the old, calcified businesses that do not innovate (gyms, cable companies, etc.) that engage in this behavior.
I want more margin so I can hire more engineers and change the world faster.
Google probably sees regulatory pressure writing on the wall, and by doing this they're building evidence that they haven't built a mobile computing monopoly or are backing away from it (insofar as running executions on your customer's devices used to be free in the desktop computing world where two corporations didn't tax all of innovation).
Also, it's a shot against Apple, who is definitely the more egregious of the two.
This is all around good. There might be a company or two that abuse the system, but that's easily dealt with. In an open app ecosystem, you still have measures in place to correct the bad actors.