Since F-Droid is an Android store, it most likely doesn't even exist for iOS.

But that's kinda the price you pay there.

No, and they won't because it's against Apple's terms of service to license your app as GPL.

Even if this were true, it's irrelevant since Maps.me isn't GPL software to begin with.

It is true, take it from the FSF themselves [0]. Or the VLC devs [1]. However, you're right that Maps.me is not GPL; I misread the question as asking about F-Droid itself which is GPL.

[0]: https://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/more-about-the-app-store...

[1]: https://www.zdnet.com/article/no-gpl-apps-for-apples-app-sto...

The way that this comment implies a carelessness about the way I operate is more than a little annoying, especially in light of the clear-cut carelessness of your original comment.

> take it from the FSF themselves

Is that supposed to be a trump card? I've read that FSF document. I read it when it was published in 2010, and because I'm not careless I read it again this morning before and after I posted my comment. I've also looked at it more than once in the intervening years.

> Or the VLC devs

VLC is on the App Store right now.

The FSF post was true in 2010, but unlike GPLv2, v3, etc, the Apple terms are not static documents. They've been revised multiple times in the last 10 years, and the FSF post hasn't been updated. The last time I spent an afternoon doing an analysis, I found that the terms at the time didn't conflict with GPL. At this point, if a person is going to claim that there's a conflict, the onus is on them to show that it's true—just like the FSF did at the time they published that blog post. It doesn't suffice to show that it was true in 2010. But again none of this matters here, because Maps.me isn't GPL software, so this entire diversion has been a waste of time.

Given the cost & overhead of distributing via Apple, I can't imagine there'd be much incentive for this.

Could you expand on this please? What costs apart from the $100 or so dev license?

$100 is not insignificant.

On top of that there's the cost of Apple hardware; you can get away with not having an iPhone and using xcode's emulation for many cases but with custom graphics heavy things like omim had, this approach would be limiting. And you still need a Mac either way.

And all this is to create an app that's competing directly with an almost identical app on the same store with only marginal benefits (the Android one in contrast has the benefit of being available outside the Google ecosystem, as well as having some exclusivity within F-Droid itself).

It would be a not insurmountable but still significant extra amount of maintenance effort. Given the maintenance effort was already seemingly unmanageable supporting Android alone it's understandable.

As far as I know, you actually need a Mac or other Apple computer to push something to the Appstore and even then it's not a fun process.

This knowledge is second hand from a friend of mine, whom I had the pleasure of listening to when he was ranting about the process a few years ago.

Maybe things have changed since then..?

I did not experience any inconvenience with putting apps into the iOS AppStore. Rather, I found the process quite easy and my apps got approved faster than expected (within one day).

Did you already have a Mac? Because that seems like a significant part of the process if it is stil necessary.