Apple yesterday revealed the final details about Apple Arcade. The subscription gaming service will arrive on iPhone on 19 September, and then roll out to other Apple devices over the following four weeks. It will cost a fiver a month – and supports Family Sharing.

This has all sorts of ramifications for iOS gaming – and the potential to upend everything on the platform. First, the obvious positive is Apple is now taking gaming seriously. I’m hoping cross-device sync will work well, the games will be mostly worth playing, and that Apple won’t just get bored in a year and shutter the whole thing. (Anyone remember game Center?) But right now, the outlook is good.

Apple has priced this service sensibly. It’ll work on Mac, iPad, iPhone, iPod touch, and Apple TV. Also, you’ll be able to use MFi, PS4 and Xbox One controllers with many titles, rather than having to grapple with the Siri Remote, or play complex console-style fare using touchscreen controls.

The question is where this leaves pretty much all other gaming on Apple platforms – particularly iOS. At launch, Apple Arcade will have dozens of titles, and over 100 will arrive within “the coming weeks”; Apple is planning to add more titles every month. So for the price of a single premium iOS game each month, you’ll get access to hundreds. Quite how premium games are going to compete – even in the short term – I’ve no idea.

But Apple Arcade will impact on free and freemium titles as well. Apple has stated Apple Arcade titles can have no advertising, and no in-app purchases. Once a player’s immersed in that system, the vast majority of free App Store titles are from a user experience perspective going to range from irritating (ads being periodically thrown in your face) to downright skeevy. Clearly, developers will have to up their game in this regard – or hope that people would rather pay nothing and put up with a terrible UX than venture towards a subscription.

It’s an interesting time for Apple and games, then, and one that is filled with much promise. But it does feel ironic that the one time Apple finally gets interested in games, it may make the rest of the iOS gaming ecosystem even less viable. Here’s hoping it has the opposite effect – acting as a halo that draws more gamers to Apple devices, and finds them venturing from the Arcade tab to the Games one, and exploring the many goodies found within.

I’m all for developers of apps and games making money, whether by one-off payments or subscriptions. Although many now opt for the latter – and, frankly, in rather optimistic fashion, given the price-hikes that often occur – that’s fine if the user is at no point hoodwinked into signing up. Sadly, many apps are now using predatory tactics to game the system – and Apple needs to crush this horror.

The example I’m going to use here is Selfie Art, which is currently being advertised across a number of games. It’s a fairly run-of-the-mill app that I nonetheless imagine quite a few people might enjoy, transforming photographs into comic-style illustrations. The ad is sleek and inviting. As is, to some extent, the app itself when it first appears. However, on examining the initial screen, there are a number of red flags.

First, this is a doorslam. There is no way to escape the screen and use even a feature-limited version of the app. The FREE FOR NEW USERS button shimmers and animates, and the header states you can “access all features for free”. However, beneath the shimmering button is a comparatively dull one, outlining a staggering £24.49 fee – for a filter app. This is clearly designed to drive people to prod the free button; but take another look and you see some really faint grey text below, which notes that the trial is for just three days. After that point, you’ll be charged a monstrous £8.49 per week – more even than that monthly fee.

Sure enough, tap the button labelled FREE under the heading that says ‘For Free’, and you’re invited to join a piffling three-day free trial that then converts into an £8.49 per week charge. On older iPhones, this is horribly easy to trigger in error – automatic, if your thumb’s already on the Home button. Newer devices require a double-click of the Side button, but even then many users do this without thinking. Should you make that error and not notice (if you don’t track your App Store receipts), you’ll be down 300 quid a year – again, for a filters app.

Clearly, this is not OK. Apple really needs to have stricter policies in place to weed out such predatory charging, in order to protect its users. Two obvious options spring to mind:

1. Make it so charges are outlined in the same fonts, at broadly the same size, and in crystal-clear text. No more buttons marked FREE, unless that’s followed by FOR THREE DAYS, say.

2. Notify users when trials end, and have them confirm sign-up again.

I imagine lots of devs would be horrified by the prospect of users having to confirm a subscription a second time – on the basis a lot of people wouldn’t. If that’s you, perhaps petition Apple to strictly enforce IAP listing rules that are fair, obvious, and clear. And if your apps aren’t already all of those things regarding payment options, redesign them right now. Don’t be the bad guy, tricking people into signing up; be someone where people splash out on a subscription solely because they want ongoing access to a great app or game you’ve made.

As iOS 13 rampages towards us, half the Apple press has lost itself in a squee love-in, glowingly reporting that Apple Maps is now a Google Maps killer.

I’ve used the new Apple Maps quite a bit, and it is an improvement. Apple’s Street View rip-off, ‘Look Around’, not only sounds like a terrible 1970s BBC family TV show, but it’s smoother and more useful (what with inline POIs) than Google’s equivalent. Also, Apple now gives you shareable collections, and still actually knows what colour roads are supposed to be on maps in the UK. (Hint, Google: motorways are BLUE; A roads are GREEN.)

But the wheels come off unless you’re living in a big US city, and armed with as much data as your phone can eat – on a connection that never dies. Head beyond a handful of US cities and Look Around vanishes entirely. The lack of a map download option means Apple Maps is effectively useless unless you’re online.

I’ve no doubt future Apple Maps revisions will address these shortcomings. In fact, it doesn’t take a tech genius to recognise that in a few years, these apps will enable you to download offline mapping info for the entire world. But my assessment of software and services is based on what I see right now, and where I happen to live and work, rather than in a bubble – virtual or otherwise – that exists around Cupertino.

Android Police reports Google is looking into a Netflix-style app/games bundle priced at five bucks per month. This is probably good-ish for users, but a questionable draw for devs. When Amazon’s done similar things in the past, I’ve not heard positive things from app/game creators regarding income. Most have said such deals turned into a time-sink – little extra income, but a big increase in support requirements.

Naturally, there will be comparisons with Apple Arcade. I’m hopeful but cautious about Apple’s offering. After all, the company’s recent history with gaming has been poor. Game Center was left to rot, and then Apple killed it entirely. This left us without a centralised system for social gaming on the platform, and a massive increase in games asking people to sign into Facebook for high scores and the like. MFi and controller strategy has been repeatedly and unnecessarily botched. Even now, there’s no way to get a dynamically updated list on the App Store of games that support controllers. And then there’s the thorny issue of pricing, with many devs switching from c. 2012’s THE APP STORE IS AMAZING to leaving the platform entirely.

However, there are signs Apple is beginning to get gaming – at least to some degree. iOS 13 will support Xbox One and PS4 controllers out of the box. Apple Arcade isn’t just a case of Apple creating a gated gaming service – it’s throwing millions of dollars of funding at the thing as well. The App Store, too, now has its Games tab and games editorial in the Today tab, both of which help people discover great new and existing titles. Google doesn’t come close with most of this stuff – it is the BBC Micro to Apple’s ZX Spectrum.

That all said, success for these new subscription services will likely boil down to something a lot simpler – in fact, just two things:

1. Are people willing to pay?
2. Does enough high-quality fare exist on the platform?

For Google Play, answers to both of those are, sadly, mostly no. Android has a decent selection of games, but lacks many of iOS’s top-tier titles; and once you move past customisation and emulators, the app landscape on Android is dreadful. On iOS, I’ve of late found good new apps harder to find, but the ecosystem is still very strong. Games-wise, though, it’s frequently great – and that’s before Apple Arcade’s arrival.

That said, I remain unsure how many people will shell out ten bucks a month in the long term for games. (Frankly, you’d have to be a massive idiot to pass on the prospect of dozens of high-quality mobile titles on day one. But on month two…?) But it feels like Apple has a better shot at this than Google – unless Google puts some serious effort into ramping up the quality and discoverability of the content on its mobile store.

With my recent griping about Apple and reduce motion, I should note many other companies/designers fail this test. The web remains rife with such issues, as does the app and gaming ecosystem.

In part, I can understand why. Vestibular issues are weird. I never used to have one, and now I do. I’ve no idea where it came from. It also makes little logical sense to people. They think I’m lying that I get triggered by animations because I also write about videogames. But here’s the thing: I’m fine with racing games, just as I’m fine with roller-coasters. Whatever’s going on in my head manifests when 1) too much of my focus is taken over by a screen, and; 2) whatever’s happening on the screen is outside of my control.

So I can play Super Duper Racing Games VI, but an abrupt full-screen slide transition in an otherwise static puzzle game on the iPad might make me woozy for hours. This is why iOS 7’s transitions were a problem for many people – they couldn’t be ‘prepared’ for. That sounds weird, I know, and I recognise it’s tricky for designers to test against. You can have a crack at dealing with visual impairment by using your app or website with your eyes closed. Vestibular issues? Nope. So you need to fallback on testing and rules.

The first of those is pretty simple: find some people who have such issues, and ask them if your app/website causes problems, and for suggestions on how to fix it. On iOS, this might simply mean adding a preference to toggle some animations, such as parallax backgrounds. Regarding rules, ask yourself: do I really need this animation? Do I really need that full-window slide transition? In book and comic apps, can I offer an option to turn off transitions entirely? Have I checked transitions elsewhere within our apps?

The last of those is where Apple fails. The company’s accessibility people have been broadly impressive when it comes to being reactive to comments and requests I’ve made. But it seems there’s no systematic checking of triggers throughout the operating system. That might sound like I’m asking for too much, but if you have reduce motion baked in at system level, use it! It’s absurd to create something that can make millions of people’s lives better, and then pepper the OS and first-party apps with slide animations.

In a sense, I’m fortunate. After I figured out I have this issue (back in the Mac OS X Lion era, where I felt sick for days), I can usually recover from being blasted within minutes; if not, it takes a few hours. I’ve heard from people who can be knocked out for days.

So as web/app designers, ask yourself: what can I do to improve my work for people with vestibular disorders? And then think widely: what can I do to make my content accessible to everyone? That should be the goal of computing, not saying “well, just don’t use that”.