> Besides did everyone forget they can call their credit card issuer and suspend payment?

This does not get you out of your contractual obligation to pay, if you have one. You could end up getting an annoying surprise from a debt collection agency a few years down the road. An important thing that Apple was able to provide that a credit card processor suspending payment can’t is to force the vendor to let you actually cancel the subscription, not just the payment.

Apple can't remove contractual obligations either. Any subscription which requires serious amount of money (enough to make a lawsuit worthwhile) should be very carefully managed.

Otherwise calling collections is a very bad deal for the vendor who will be penalized by the credit company and by the courts and by bad PR.

> Apple can't remove contractual obligations either.

They can’t remove them, but they can prevent them from existing in the first place. It’s their platform, and they can and do make it a requirement that the app vendor’s subscription contract conform to a standard where ending the subscription from within Apple’s subscription management UI actually terminates all future obligations for the customer. This is why many subscriptions that are otherwise quite hard to end and involve deliberate inconveniences like requiring calling in during business hours can just be cancelled from the subscription page if they were started via the app.

> Otherwise calling collections is a very bad deal for the vendor who will be penalized by the credit company and by the courts and by bad PR.

This is just not correct. Vendors do this all the time, credit companies don’t care and have no policies against it, since it’s the customer’s responsibility to have a legal justification to tell the credit company to refuse charges, and the PR blowback is demonstrably nonexistent.