A place for Lemmy builders to chat about building apps, clients, tools and bots for the Lemmy platform.
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Does that apply to free apps as well? I planned on publishing one but if need to pay USD 100 out of picket every year then clearly i won't. Let me check that.
Edit: It does. The developer account is independent of what you publish. Well, then PWA without app store presence it is I guess.
Is that for an app store account or what? Either it's your job and like buying tools for a job is not rare, or it's your hobby and also not rare to spend that. I do like when there's a free tier for experimenting, though.
To build an IOS app you need an Apple Developer Account, which is a subscription service for 100 bucks a year.
It's similar but not the same for Android. With Android you don't need an Account to build the App, just one to publish it on the Play Store - which also only costs 25$ one-time purchase.
Also, I can understand the financing on for-profit Apps like Sync. Shit costs so much money the dude breaks profit with just one person paying premium.
For hobbiest it's on the expensive side. I mean it's probably the most expensive part of the pipeline for most hobby Devs for a way overpriced service. But I get it if you really want to publish your Lemmy App on the IOS store and have the money to do it, just wondering if these people have any plans of breaking at least even via donations or such.
Just to clarify, you do not need to pay the subscription when building an iOS app. Apple does have free tier developer accounts with limitations. Such as you can only install 3 development apps on an actual device at a time, you need to resign (reinstall) the apps every 7 days, certain capabilities are not available such as Push Notifications, etc.
Now, for releasing to the AppStore or TestFlight, you will need to pay the subscription fee. You also need to continue paying the subscription in order to keep the apps on the AppStore.
Feels like a control thing, a "your app is not going to be on an iphone without our approval for verry long"
Prevents consumers from (self signing and) sideloading apps for personal use by using the app development system (pipeline)
If even a completely sandboxed system like DosBox or theoretically a linux emulator is banned, why do they care this much?