The developer toolkit which is used to build and test the apps (Android Studio or XCode) are free. The Microsoft comparison would be the $20 to publish in the Microsoft Store and Visual Studio Community which is free to build and test apps.
"MSDN" is a bundle of additional developer tools that you would use for a business (licensed Visual Studio, Azure DevOps, training, and support).
Yes Xcode and APIs like ARKit are free to develop (for obvious reasons), but Apple captures some of the costs at publish time (as it should be).
Here's a full list of stuff that the fee go towards supporting and developing: https://developer.apple.com/programs/whats-included/
This forces you to pay 100$ a year when you just wish to use your own hand made app on your own phone if you wish it to work longer then 1 week offline. While using app of someone else doesn't require that.
100$ per year x 4 years = 400$ to use your own app. What makes you think that this is how it should be?
If the whole idea that one should pay for ability to program his own device seems logical to you then perhaps some monthly fee for using your fingers to control the phone would seem logical too? After all finger touches use many features of the phone that "are tremendously powerful and useful" too.
Free developer accounts must re-sign every 7 days
Paid developer accounts must re-sign every 1 year
This page is an excuse. There is no reason except greed and corporate accounting.
Yes. That page align with Apple Accounting. Since 2017 Apple has been putting iOS cost and development, SDK as part of their Services Strategy expenses.
In a sense Apple is now think you are buying iPhone just as Hardware ( with huge margins ), and you are paying for all the development of iOS, macOS through their Services Revenue coming from App Store and Google Search.
In Steve Jobs days Apple used to lump all those together as one product. But now you are basically renting the usage of iOS and Apple experience Hence from Apple's POV the user aren't even paying enough for the usage of iOS.
But there is another POV. One that includes rights of a person to be a human being rather then income source for some company. One of those rights should be ability to install whatever software you choose on your own computer without any artificial restrictions.
and building a competing ecosystem that is is Not Allowed!
iOS is the minority OS in every single market it operates in.
Try building a game for Nintendo Switch that doesn’t go through the Nintendo store and see how far that gets you.
I’m also a dev and have been doing mobile development for years btw. I’m no stranger to the needs of developers.
iOS is the majority in US and Japan, nearly half in many other countries. Not Minority in most Developed market.
In Japan it’s below 50% but close enough (45ish) and there’s a historical reason for that. Japanese adoption of iPhone is especially unique.
Everywhere else it’s well below 50%. In the EU it’s about 30% or so.
If you want the equivalent of app development on Windows (meaning little to no access to kernel sources and such, just a native UI), you can use the free version of Visual Studio without the MSDN license [1]. The license allows commercial development even with the free community version.
You still need to pay +/- $20 to MS to publish apps to the MS Store, but because Windows isn't a walled garden and barely any Windows users are using the store anyway, you probably don't need to bother. If you do pay, it's not a subscription either; the costs are only made during registration. Just like with Google, this keeps down (but does not prevent) the creation of spam accounts.
For most app developers, the infrastructure you get in return isn't worth the $100 / year, because most apps don't get that many downloads at all. Hosting APK or IPA files can be done for one or two dollars per month for the first few hundred or even thousand users, and by extending the store ecosystem, you're also adding value to the platform itself.
For iOS you can argue that the manual testing of the application needs to be paid somehow, but the manual testing Apple performs don't benefit you as a developer in any way; they serve benefit the end user that downloads your apps, so those costs should be recouped from the user (as part of the iPhone sales price and the mandatory 15-30% cut Apple and Google will take).
If there was a way to build and publish applications without the subscriptions, the fee might be reasonable if Apple can defend the $99 / year. With the walled garden they've set up, there's no competitors, and therefore there will never be an alternative developer toolkit like those you can see for the Android ecosystem.
[1]: https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/downloads/
Let's take a look at what MSDN costs for a pro-level subscription (not even enterprise): "At the Professional subscription level, you pay a not-insignificant sum: $539 per year for an annual cloud subscription or $1,199 for the first year of a perpetual license subscription, with renewals costing $799 per year."