Apple said there are 20 million registered developers in 2018.

Now there must be more but $99 * 20 million is not nothing in annual revenue which is mostly profit.

When their annual revenue is $368 billion and their net income is $95 billion (in 2021), a couple hundred million dollars doesn’t really move the needle.

off by an order of magnitude. 20 million by $99 is 2 billion, which is >4% of the net income.

Which is still not accurate, most “registered developers” aren’t “paying developers”.

If you have a company with 100 iOS developers, you only need to pay for one account that has permission to submit an app.

If you are exclusively a Mac developer, you don’t have to pay anything unless you are submitting to the Mac App Store.

App review, XCode, each app gets a certain amount of iCloud storage outside of what the user pays, bandwidth, etc.

A “registered developer” is not necessarily a “paying developer”, you can register as a developer to get documentation etc.

If you are working for a company creating an app, not all developers need to pay to publish an app. Also Mac developers don’t pay to distribute an app.

> nothingburger

What the heck is a nothingburger?