Epic has a toolchain and SDK for their own app store. So does Valve, and many other competitors, and Apple won't let them install their toolchain on iOS.

Dystopian story plot:

Apple completely opens up the iOS platform. Do whatever you like.

Also, an XCode license is now $20,000/year. Don’t like it? Build your own.

> Also, an XCode license is now $20,000/year. Don’t like it? Build your own.

And people will. That's how competition works. If someone thinks they can make a profit by offering a) better product b) same product at a cheaper price, you'll see investment.

VCs will be pouring money to capture that market.

> And people will.

And it will likely be much better too.

That would be the best outcome!

We would be back to the real days of computing.

Why stop at xcode?

Add a licensing fee for UIKit, Core Data, Core Text, Core Audio, Core Graphics, Metal, Network, SwiftUI, Quartz and all the other libraries apps use constantly.

Heck, why not for the OS itself? If you don't want to pay, they could conceivably dump you into an isolated VM and force you to write your own OS and userspace device drivers.

> Heck, why not for the OS itself?

We used to pay for OSes and OS upgrades. Heck, you still have to pay for Windows.

If I'm remembering correctly, the community jailbroke the iPhone OS and produced a toolchain and app installer before the App Store's original release.

Say no one builds their own, and iPhones now only have first party apps. How many people are going to buy them now? How well did the Windows phone sell with no app support? How's the app support on the Apple Vision Pro?

The idea that devs owe Apple for use of their SDKs and API development is absurd. Apple already profits from it as people by their phones due to the amount of third party app support. See how Apple's profits go when WhatsApp, Instagram, Spotify, Netflix Uber, banking apps, are all no longer available on their devices.

Vision Pro is an excellent example

What Apple really needs to do is mimic their old policy of no fees except for games. Let everyone develop for it, and then rug pull by making the fees apply to everything

But they can’t do it twice. So the Vision Pro ends up with no ecosystem

> Also, an XCode license is now $20,000/year. Don’t like it? Build your own.

That's what people literally did, multiple times, for multiple systems, and did a much better job than encumbents

Have you heard of gcc? The entire open source ecosystem exists because people were able to build their own.

It's entirely possible to build apps to run on OSX without touching Apple tools .. except for notarization, which they force you to use.