Apple invited a group of app developers to a secret April 2017 meeting in New York’s Tribeca district, asking them to move from selling apps at low prices to renting app access through subscriptions.

This move was intended to keep users paying for apps “on a regular basis, putting money into developer coffers on a regular schedule”, the report claims. Since Apple gets a huge chunk of developer money from App store sales, Jobs' Mob would have made even more money from the increased margins.

If the report is true, it means that Apple was acting against the interests of its customers to line its own pockets. It is a similar situation which happened when Steve Jobs colluded with publishers to jack up the prices of eBooks. That cartel was rumbled, and Apple was made to pay a fine, even if it denied doing anything wrong.

The Tame Apple press insists that this is all part of a super cool plan by Apple to encourage developers to convert one-time app purchases into recurring draws on customers’ accounts. Apple wants developers to “create sustainable business models, instead of selling high-quality software for a few dollars or monetising through advertising”. However, that is not really in the customers' interest. Some app customers purchase are tools that they use only intermittently, so they are unwilling either to pay high prices or maintenance fees that might keep the tools updated.

In short, the only winner from increased charges for software in Apple.

Another challenge is that paid apps were said as of last year to represent 15 percent of total app-related sales, a number that’s in decline, compared with growing revenues from in-app purchases.

At the meeting, Apple gave developers suggestions to turn their existing “free” users into “high-value customers”, offering multiple subscription options differentiated by price, and suggested that they could increase their prices without losing most customers.

Apple reportedly shared research indicating that the rate of subscription customer retention was 41 percent after a price hike, versus 61 percent without a price hike, and warned developers that their businesses would stop growing without subscriptions.

However, consumers generally don’t like the idea of software as a subscription service. Independent research suggests that video services such as Netflix, Hulu, and HBO are generating a large part of Apple’s subscription revenue, alongside top-earning freemium games.