We repeatably see people racking up incredible charges on in-app purchases on iOS, sometimes even into the thousands of dollars. (Not that other systems are immune, they are simply too unattractive now)
Many of these titles use mechanisms that are explicitly designed to exploit gaming addiction, and as with every other title they have been approved by Apple, sometimes even promoted by Apple. As such Apple is actively colluding in the exploitation of gaming addiction for their own benefit, the well known 30% cut from the App Store.
The consumable model for freemium games is actually a reasonable approximation of a software rent model, but to make this work, it must be controlled better to ensure that it is close to impossible to rack up insane charges:
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Consumables should be either directly time related (the classic subscription), or there must be a hard limit to how much in game currency you can buy per day.
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In app purchases must be separated between permanent buys, and consumables. Ideally every single in game currency purchase should need to be confirmed with the account password.
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Apple should set a 50$ per month limit on in game currency purchases. Raising the limit needs to incur a cool off period of a day, after which you need to reconfirm your raise before it starts. We can also stipulate that such a raise can no more than double the limit, and include the do not raise answer (accepted with no waiting period), which would force you to trigger a new request with a fresh wait should you change your mind. As a further bonus, the limit could start to lower itself automatically again, for example when less than 25% of the limit was used in a month, it would halve for the next month.
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Apple should add support for upgrade pricing as well as trial periods to decrease the incentive for freemium.
With these changes implemented it should become nearly impossible to go broke accidentally, it would even include a pretty powerful break for people becoming addicted, and intentionally racking up the bills. Until these are implemented, there are ways to help immediately:
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Every single in app purchase must be confirmed with the account password.
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Apple should implement a wait period before an in-app purchase can be repeated. This should depend on the sum spent, say a day for up to 10$, a week for up to 50$ and a month for anything even larger, with in game currency purchases limited to at most 50$. Since all purchases go through Apple, this should be possible server side. But if technically impossible, Apple needs to force publishers to implement those, and remove any offending titles from the store after a grace period of a month.
I do not understand why there are no fraud prevention measures kicking in when such large purchases are being made. Spending more than a hundred bucks a month on games is such a rare occurrence that the extra annoyance of verifying them with the purchaser would be more than compensated for by the removal of bad surprises for other people.
Also I do believe that it is in Apple’s long term interest to start removing the worst in-app offenders from the store. The brand Apple is based on the presumption that they filter out the bad stuff to keep things simple. And not acting will undermine our trust in their curation, giving us reason to leave.