I have some sideproject apps that I built with Flutter that I use on my Android phone, and I would make them available on iOS if I didn't have to pay any money to do so.

You still need to pay the $100/yr to get the app out to anyone else's iPhone using TestFlight or an enterprise app store. You can build and test on your own iPhone (or an emulator) for free but that's the limit.

But that's exactly the type of thing why iOS apps tend to be of higher quality than Android apps. The whole "I do the bare minimum to support your platform" thing isn't going well with iOS users.

So the question is why would I as a consumer want to buy a least common denominator app using a cross platform framework that wasn’t actually tested on real hardware?

You can always uninstall it if it's crap right? It would be available to you as a choice, and now it's simply not available.

If the App Store becomes full of “checkbox ports” it’s going to be even more difficult to navigate than it already is.

Part of that is on Apple for not investing more in discovery, but copious numbers of low effort ports isn’t a good thing to have anyway. In the game world, bad ports of console games to PC and bad ports of games from any other platform to the Switch are one of the most consistent gripes — quite often the sentiment surrounding them is that they’d be better off not existing.

The app store has been full of "checkbox ports" since about 6 months after it launched

You're showing your cards as an android person ;-)

I agree with you, but nearly everyone on apple products will not. I get a (too me very perplexing) very similar respose when I ask things like, "why would it hurt people who want an Apple curated app store experience to allow a buried setting in the settings menu that allows sideloading for the few people who want that?"

For myself, it’s mostly web stuff with Safari and Safari on iOS that I’d really like to be able to test from time to time.

There's a ton of companies out there who have real iPhones, iPads etc you can rent by the minute through a web browser to test your code or web sites.

i.e.

https://www.browserstack.com/test-on-iphone

I'm just trying to find the one I use to test my emoji stuff, since Safari is the only one that displays emoji domains correctly.

Browser stack did not had the betas or the just released Safari versions, we had to depend on someone in our team risking upgrading to latest OSX to be able to debug with just released Safari that broke WebGL on desktop too. We do not target mobile users, we are fixing any bugs reported for Safari that are our code , but we only daily test with Firefox and Chrome because the developers and testers are using Windows or Linux(the team is in Europe)

Then macOS + Xcode + simulator would probably be the most cost-effective solution.

*(Small glance at QEMU)*

Yeah, because I can’t use macOS without violating its EULA or forking out even more hundreds of dollars for a Mac Mini. :-(