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Last week, the custom, automated subscription change people saw in Disney+ was surrounded by speculation. This week, weā€™ve had confirmation from Apple via Sarah Perez at TechCrunch:

An Apple spokesperson did not dispute the accuracy of the developersā€™ claims we presented and said this was part of a pilot test.

Thatā€™s excellent news.

A change like this deserves piloting. Even without this feature, thereā€™s enough predatory pricing behaviour on the App Store to last a lifetime. Rolling out auto opt-in for subscription price increases to all developers would be a disaster that would further damage customer opinions on subscription pricing.

That said, itā€™s also not practical to expect every app to stick to one subscription price forever or lose all of its subscribers if they choose to make a change. What should the rules around these changes be? Donā€™t ask me! But Iā€™m sure that determining those rules is a major goal of the pilot.

Where could Apple do better with changes like this? Communication. Iā€™ve written about this before, and my opinions havenā€™t changed much since then. It would be a significant change to open up about pilot programmes and other experiments, but Iā€™d welcome anything that helps stem the cycle of speculation and outrage.

Iā€™m not saying that every internal discussion of a new idea needs an accompanying news post, but itā€™s probably time to say something by the time a pilot programme is live on the store. Iā€™m also not saying this policy change would be easy. Apple is private-by-default and organisational change is hard.

Iā€™m not teaching anyone at Apple anything by saying any of this. They know how this all works, and it doesnā€™t take a genius to have the idea to ā€œcommunicate moreā€. I am saying that I believe it would be a net positive for third party developers, though.

Dave Verwer  

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