TL;DR
- App developers can now ask you to downgrade your subscription when you try to cancel it via the Play Store.
- Users can still quickly cancel their app subscriptions from the resulting menu, though.
- This feature joins other recent additions like app recommendations in Gemini and expanded Ask Play capabilities.
The Google Play Store gives you a dedicated page to manage your subscriptions, making it pretty easy to cancel them. However, Google will let app developers persuade you to think twice before canceling.
Google announced at its I/O event that app developers can soon prompt users to downgrade subscriptions instead of canceling them. Tapping the cancel subscription button in the Play Store app will still show a menu with Keep subscription and Cancel subscription buttons, but you’ll also see options to switch to a cheaper plan.
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“Coming soon, our in-app Subscription Management API will let users easily change plans directly within your apps,” said Googler Diego Dayan. “But more importantly, we’re bringing this functionality into the cancellation flow itself. If a user hits cancel, you can offer them a downgrade instead.”
The downgrade offer doesn’t seem to make the cancellation process significantly harder on paper. You might have to scroll a little further to confirm your subscription cancellation via the relevant button, but it’s still pretty much the same process. An accompanying screenshot also suggests that app developers can offer discounted subscriptions to convince users to stay.
In any event, this could be a convenient feature for developers in their bid to reduce cancellations. It also seems like this isn’t coming at great expense to the user experience. So our fingers are crossed that Google doesn’t add more friction to the cancellation process.
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