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Comment by wayne | Hacker News Reader

I similarly have an iPhone app I built and have been enjoyably using on my iPhone for years and slowly iterating on. I'd happy give it away for free and pay the associated increase in web service costs just so others can enjoy it. But the thought of paying $100/year (and having to deal with App Store review) is a bit much for a hobby app...

I'm surprised Apple put this barrier up since it certainly would have scared me away from iOS development as a poorer/newer developer. I guess Apple's happy with amateurs building but doesn't want to deal with their apps in the store. Maybe a compromise would be letting people self-distribute free apps without paying the $100?

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Google's webstore for extensions charges a one-time fee of $5 to mitigate the abuse problem. I think it's a reasonable compromise. Apple's $100 per year is also keeping my hobby extensions off Safari as well.

I was more than happy to pay $5, but I don't think it helps with abuse at Chrome's scale. The abuse got so bad that Google is forcing Manifest v3 [1] on developers to seriously limit what extensions can do. Beyond the abuse, most of the extensions in all the stores, Chrome, Firefox, Edge and especially Opera, are not designed and maintained well.

[1] https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/mv3/intro/

Is the abuse because $5 is too little or because the initial permissions and policies too lax?

Not sure what you mean about poor design or maintenance. The lower barrier to entry means there are many more options and often unmaintained extensions get forked. (If their license is permissive, which is more often the case when the creator doesn't have to pay $100 per year.)

Nothing stops you putting the code on GH and let people self deploy it.

However I’d also wondered if there’s a scenario where several independent devs might band together and use a single organisational dev account to ship their own apps. Obviously trust (between devs who are otherwise strangers to each other) is an issue here but I’m sure you’re not the only one in that scenario.

I'm into the shared account / shared cost idea for small side projects. But the reality is that managing an app store account for a popular app can be its own full time job. I spent weeks tinkering with account settings, exchanging dozens of app store support emails, and managing the release process. A lot of unexpected things. A lot went wrong. And it's not just Apple. The Chrome Web Store has plenty of quirks too. I trust my fellow devs but I don't trust myself to not screw up a shared account.

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