I'm a hobbyist developer who made three very small, ad-free apps. Apple charges $99 per year for anyone to make apps (in stark contrast to the $25 one-off fee that Google charges). Since I'm not actively working on my apps right now, I don't want to pay Apple another $99 this year. But my existing free apps will stay in the store for those who want to download them, right?<p>No. Apple's Developer Support claimed on the phone that keeping an existing app in the store if the developer isn't paying the annual $99 tribute would be a safety concern, "like an airport letting an unscanned bag through security". This really, really doesn't make sense: aside from the other disanalogies, if anything it's more like an airline kicking out a bag that they've already scanned and deemed safe because the owner refuses to pay them again in perpetuity.<p>The other justification Apple gave for the $99 per year fee was the storage and delivery costs of delivering my apps. For the record, my largest app is 40mb.<p>I have two suggestions for Apple. The first is a no-brainer: any authorised app should be allowed to stay in the store for as long as the platforms it works on are still supported, without the developer having to pay an annual tribute.<p>The second is a bigger step, but I think a reasonable one: Apple should have a free tier for small app developers. For example, it should not require an annual paid subscription to create and maintain free, ad-free apps.<p>Big tech companies are under a lot more scrutiny these days for abuse of market power, and this strikes me as the kind of reason why: I just don't believe that in a competitive market the equilibrium cost for a basic developer account would be anything close to $99 per year, or that Apple would kick existing apps out of its store unless the developer keeps paying every year.
I think in addition to hosting/distribution costs, a reason they charge an annual fee is to weed out spammers, which I think is a good idea. The fee is low enough (equivalent to about 2 cups of coffee per month) that any serious developer should have no problem paying it.
If you are a non-profit organization, you can apply for a free developer account : <a href="https://developer.apple.com/support/membership-fee-waiver/" rel="nofollow">https://developer.apple.com/support/membership-fee-waiver/</a><p>I am an iOS/macOS developer myself and have few apps in (Mac) App Store as well, I think the $99/ year serve as a motivation for me to keep on improving my app (to sell more to cover the cost), the $99/yr would probably weed out spammers as well. Try and compare how many spam apps in Play Store vs App Store.
What are the apps by the way?<p>In the pre-Apple days, mobile app makers on J2ME, BREW, Symbian etc had to give up to 70 percent to marketplaces and spend potentially up to 50 thousand dollars or more to code sign each app across multiple device types. $99 for code signing all the individual developers apps across all devices and publishing it was unheard of at the time and truly shocking compared to the old paradigm. Goolge then made it free and only later charged $25.
Would be cool if there was a single publisher on the app store who devs could dump their free apps with and would then aggregate/split the costs between all the devs involved.<p>$99 might be steep, but $10? Sure.