Yet another example of apple's ongoing control freakery. I wonder how many incidents will be required before those who rush to defend them every time get it?

Apple tolerate app store developers as a necessary evil. If they could develop all of their own apps they would.

As with suppliers, as with stores, as with everything they would gladly prefer to do it all themselves and give zero access or share the slightest collaboration with anybody.

They are utterly ruthless in this regard and will continue to be for as long as they exist. This includes doing bad and nasty things as well as those the apologists can more readily rationalise.

I am a little surprised anybody takes risks in this arena. Of course for $$$ apps that trivially fulfil apple's arbitrary rules (for now) the potential payout justifies it but for free/open source apps why risk the pain?

For a company that happily generates colossal margins by using the effectively slave labour of a totalitarian state which puts people in concentration camps and disappears political opponents them being unethical/inconsistent in the app store seems very unsurprising. Even in western countries they happily bankrupt suppliers after poaching all their staff. Yet there appears to be shock when they do things considerably less evil... Strange to me.