January 29 2026
Hot on the heels of my previous blog post My collected App Store critiques, I have yet another critique. It’s undoubtedly old news to many people, my critique coming years too late, but in my defense, I almost never shop for apps in the App Store. Rather, I merely download apps in the App Store that I already discovered outside the App Store, the old-fashioned way: recommendations from trusted friends, associates, and experts. However, I was recently looking for a snore recorder app for my iPhone, and I couldn’t find any trustworthy reviews on the web. Perhaps this is because the existence of free App Store amateur, anonymous, crowdsourced user ratings and reviews has mostly demonetized professional software reviews that in the past were regularly produced by well-known tech news media publications. A search of the web returned a number of app review sites, but I had never heard of any of them, so I had no reason to trust them. The App Store user ratings and reviews are not trustworthy either, especially for apps that are free to download, because then anyone and everyone in the world can leave a rating and review; fake reviews are inexpensive to purchase in bulk, apps often push users to rate the app before they’ve even had a chance to use the app much, and in any case, amateurs are generally terrible at writing informative reviews. Thus, in selecting a snore recording app, I was left to my own devices, so to speak.
When I shop in physical retail stores, all of the products are upfront paid and have listed prices that I can compare. The same is mostly true of online retail stores too. The App Store… thinks different. Most of its apps are free to download and run. Apple admitted in the public statement Addressing Spotify’s claims that this state of affairs is intentional:
A full 84 percent of the apps in the App Store pay nothing to Apple when you download or use the app. That’s not discrimination, as Spotify claims; it’s by design
As an App Store developer myself, I’ve stubbornly resisted the trend, perhaps to my financial detriment, though I’m currently doing ok with upfront paid apps. One thing that drives me nuts about the In-App Purchase business model is that it creates massive customer confusion. How do you know in advance exactly how much the app costs, what exactly you’re getting for the price, and what functionality, if any, is free? And if you’re confused about any of these things, then how can you possibly comparison shop between various apps in the App Store?
To illustrate, here’s SnoreLab, which claims, with no apparent external citation, to be the “World’s #1 Snore App”:
I can’t make much sense of the list of In-App Purchases, which appears to include multiple conflicting prices for the same thing, and doesn’t explain what SnoreLab Premium gives you.
Sleep Cycle, in contrast, claims to be the “World’s No. 1 Sleep App.” Could the claims of both apps be true? Pedantically, perhaps, but is there any relevant difference between a snore app and a sleep app? And who exactly is ranking these apps?
Sleep Cycle’s In-App Purchases are equally baffling.
The In-App Purchases of Pillow are slightly less confusing, though one wonders why the Quarterly price of $59.99 is vastly and nonsensically higher than the Annual price(s) of $39.99.
The defense of this absurd App Store pricing opacity might be that all of these apps are free to download, so you can just download an app and discover more details about its In-App Purchase in the app. Easier said than done! Not that it’s particularly easy to download and run every app that you might be interested in, some of which are quite large in download size. Moreover, I presume that many of these apps phone home to the developer from your device when you open the app, so you can’t really comparison shop in private.
The worst part of the experience, though, is that you typically need to navigate through an obstacle course of “welcome” screens before you ever get to see information about the In-App Purchases. For example, below is what you see when you first launch Sleep Cycle. Note that there’s also an introductory video, which I did not record, that plays overly long before you to get my first screenshot.
At this point, it appears that you cannot use Sleep Cycle without signing up for an account. I wish I would have known that before downloading. And I still know nothing about the In-App Purchases!
To the trash with this app. Perhaps I’ll leave a bad rating and review, without ever having used the app, which I can do now, as mentioned earlier.
Let’s look at the first run experience of Pillow, if you have the patience. Warning: it may make you drowsy. Don’t read this while operating a motor vehicle.
Finally, after all that, we get to the In-App Purchase!
It appears that Pillow cannot be used at all without subscribing. The subscription does include the first week free, after which you are automatically charged $39.99, unless you cancel the subscription within that week.
There is a decent description of what exactly is included with the subscription, which is more than I can say for some other apps. On the other hand, it’s much easier for users to determine which features are included with the subscription when nothing works without the subscription.
Unfortunately, I didn’t think to take screenshots of the SnoreLab first run experience. It turns out that SnoreLab does have some functionality for free, with no subscription or signup, though that is not clear within the app. After the various welcome screens, SnoreLab presents an In-App Purchase screen that gives the impression of being mandatory, but the screen also has an “X” widget that when pressed dismisses the screen, and then you can go about using the app, at least to an extent. Some of the features and settings trigger the IAP screen again. Essentially, the only way for consumers to learn how much the app costs is via trial and error.
Many defenders of Apple claim that iPhone and iPad (unlike the Mac) are locked down to the App Store for the protection of Apple users. I’ve seen no evidence of this. How does the App Store protect users when for example it makes comparison shopping nearly impossible? In my opinion, the App Store has the opposite design: not to protect users but to perplex them, making the otherwise simple process of purchasing a product an unholy mess, reducing Apple users to helpless and hapless victims of greedy developers—including Apple, a financial beneficiary of all App Store IAP—who deliberately misdirect and mislead with cunning bait-and-switch schemes to pump the maximum amount of money out of consumers. The goal is to get you hooked first, invested in the app with your time and effort before you realize how much money you have to invest.