FTC announces "click-to-cancel" rule making it easier to cancel subscriptions

Past canceling, there are so many problems with subscription programs. Too many products are unusable without a subscription that offer no additional value. Or disabling the subscription cripples product features that have no dependency on the remote service. Or they can 'alter the deal' at any point where what you get for what you pay can change despite the fact the product hasn't.

Ideally 'the market' would punish such companies but it seems to do the opposite in that once a dark pattern becomes mainstream, everyone quickly adopts it, and consumers don't really get any real choices.

I think that App stores are a big part of this.

When people buy an app on the app store they kind of expect it to work in perpetuity. This would be fine, but the environment changes and people still expect it to keep working. It is reasonable to expect an app I bought on my iPhone 4 using iOs 4 (or whatever it was) to work in perpetuity on that phone and that OS. It is less reasonable to expect it to run on my iPhone 16 on iOs 18, but that is what people expect.

The other thing that app stores did was dramatically lower the price point of software. In 2000, you could go to the store and expect to pay $50+ for an "app". Now, $9.99 is considered a higher price point, and we expect it to be maintained in perpetuity.

Given those constraints, a subscription model is actually pretty reasonable.

Add in that the investors in many companies are hyper focused on MRR, and subscriptions are the only viable way for a startup to work.