Why would they struggle to maintain Unreal Engine? The developer tools/SDKs are free to download and you don’t need a developer account for that. All they will lose is access to pre-release tools such as betas or the Apple Silicon transition kit. It just means they might not have a release ready on launch day, but should be fine after that as the tools are made public.

You can't even run a hello world app on iOS device without signing it with a developer account, and the restraining order that blocks apple from terminating epic international's developer account is just temporary. There is still chance that epic will lose developer account needed for developing unreal engine. You can run unsigned code on iOS simulator, but the simulator lacks many api and can't replace running on real devices (unlike Android emulator that can emulate almost everything a real device does).

> You can't even run a hello world app on iOS device without signing it with a developer account

What on Earth... Is this the same for Android? I come from the web, and this sounds like madness. You need to login to write code?

No, on Android you can sideload anything. (Do you not use smartphones at all? How do you not know this?)

This hasn't been true for iOS either for the last N years, AFAIK you can sign apps for free to load on your devices, but the signatures are valid only for a week, so you have to reload the apps at least every week.

> AFAIK you can sign apps for free to load on your devices, but the signatures are valid only for a week, so you have to reload the apps at least every week.

Guess where the key required for signing the binary comes from? That's right, it comes from your apple developer account, automatically downloaded and provisioned by xcode when you hit the build button. Without a developer account you won't have any valid key to sign the build, even for debug build. Afaik the only way to skip this is to jailbreak your device so it can run unsigned binary.

To run on the simulator or build towards a simulator target you don't need anything.

But this is with a free account you can register for anyone, with semi fake personal data even

It's not the login. They need to sign the binaries with that account, otherwise those won't run on an iOS device.

The theory was that apple might revoke their ability to use the developer tools/SDKs (Broadly, this is what was stated in the letter saying their developer account would be revoked, even though you don’t need a paid developer account to download some of that stuff).

Xcode, the SDKs, etc. are licensed, not open source, and probably contain clauses allowing apple to terminate the license.

Beta versions of iOS and macOS are largely behind a developer paywall as well.

They wouldn't be able to publish OSX binaries.