The 100$ yearly publishing fee just straight up is a wall that prevents the OSS iOS ecosystem from thriving. It's just high enough that it's hard to justify putting an App out there unless you want to make a profit from it.
[0]: https://patreon.com/ajayyy
[1]: Or rather, most have been shamed into doing it and only pay the bigger projects. Anything smaller just falls to the wayside.
Oh really? I've never heard of it prior to this thread.
They had to dual license the iOS version of VLC to get it on the App Store:
> VLC for iOS is bi-licensed under the Mozilla Public License Version 2 as well as the GNU General Public License Version 2 or later. You can modify or redistribute its sources under the conditions of these licenses. Note that additional terms apply for trademarks owned by the VideoLAN association.
VLC is in the app store (with telemetry, sadly) so I'm not sure where the whole "GPL isn't compatible with the app store" claim comes from.