One of the better things Apple does with their position as a middleman is give customers more control over their relationship with app creators of all kinds. If the customer is unhappy about their experience, iOS gives them what amounts to a one-click "get off my phone and get out of my wallet" button. Compare this to the notorious New York Times cancellation rigamarole where cancelling a subscription required a phone call to a person whose job was to talk you out of cancelling. This level of autonomy is clearly valuable to customers: behold the widespread dissatisfaction about subscriptions vs. one-time purchases. People don't like the experience of being strongarmed into a business relationship any more than they like it with interpersonal relationships, and rightly so. However, because Apple exerted the degree of control that it did over what shape a customer relationship mediated by their app store could look like, it hasn't been clear exactly _how_ valuable that control is to consumers.
Once app creators have options for customer relationships other than Apple's app store, I expect that we'll find out exactly how valuable that autonomy is to customers, and I'm personally fascinated about what the answer might be.
I find this to be equally true for Apple's hide my email service and Apple Pay.
When I have to give my email out - to sign up for a service, or make a one time purchase online for the receipt etc, Apple provides the option to use a unique anonymized email alias that forwards to my iCloud account.
When I want to unsubscribe from any of these services, I control it directly and can just delete email alias for that service instead of going through unsubscribe flows which don't seem to work half the time.
I love using Apple Pay for a similar reason. It has that, it just works, quality, especially when ordering packages.
There's absolutely zero friction and never any fixing of incorrect auto filled forms. I get the same experience everywhere and its always seamless.
I always thought this should be the credit card company's responsibility. High-end credit cards like AMEX and Chase Sapphire already have so many cushy perks, what's so hard about also adding something like "We'll guarantee you can 1-click unsubscribe from anything <=$30 month and underwrite any risk of these going to collections"?
Once app creators have options for customer relationships other than Apple's app store, I expect that we'll find out exactly how valuable that autonomy is to customers, and I'm personally fascinated about what the answer might be.