Not to mention that you have to purchase expensive apple hardware to develop for iOS.

I saw the new Mac Mini on sale at Costco for $600 yesterday, I don’t see how Apple hardware can be called “expensive” anymore.

The new M1 Mac Mini might literally be the first 'affordable' Apple machine that isn't underpowered. Will need to cough up some $ for display adaptors if you want more than one monitor for development though.

$600 is a lot for a small dev who already has a computer. What if they’re a windows gamer and they’re happy with their old desktop? $600 is a lot to many people if it’s not strictly necessary.

I don't know why you're getting downvoted, you're right. Besides, the cheapest Mac Mini M1 is $1000 in my country. Not everyone can afford that.

Apple is not obligated to make tools for every platform...

Apple does more than just not make tools for other platforms though. They make it impossible for anyone else to make tools on other platforms that can deploy to the App store. And after a certain scale, it isn't even the development machines that are the problem, it's your CI/CD pipeline.

Don't you still need to buy a monitor and all peripherals?

I mean you also need to buy a monitor and peripherals for a PC. Since they’re not built in you could find a 1080p monitor on Facebook marketplace locally for almost nothing. If you’re just doing iOS development the Mac mini should be fine.

Doing iOS development includes a whole other bundle of costs associated with it. $1000/yr if you want to even try to sell on the app store?

Those don’t need to be apple products - the mini has standard ports.

Billions in revenue on $99/year? Is 1% of the planet a paid up iOS developer?

Math much? 20 million (that's 3-year old numbers [1]) apple developers. Probably a lot of them on the $299 enterprise plan, but let's assume they're all using the $99 one. 20mil * $100 = $2 billions. QED

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/04/app-store-hits-20m-registe...

To be fair, the 1% isn't off either.

The figure available was "billions". For ease of calculation, say it was 7b. That means if each developer pays $100 and total revenue was 7b, 1% of the world must be a developer. (1% of 7b * $100 = $7b)

Also, by your own figure, 20 million is already ~0.25% of the world population.

Who cares how much they make? If you’re unhappy, go to Google or petition Microsoft or Amazon to get back in the game. I’d also like a provider that allows other app stores and has high quality like Apple — one of those companies should do it. But it’s ridiculous to force apple to do it when you could go elsewhere.

So they are making billions -while- creating an effective incentive against spam on their platform? That must the most obvious case of profits well deserved in the history of modern LTDs, good for Apple and their shareholders!

Apple's App Store has plenty of scummy apps. A yearly 100 fee isn't going to stop that from happening.

https://9to5mac.com/2021/02/11/app-store-scam-apps-how-to-sp...