$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.