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If it doesn’t make sense at $100/year, your apps just don’t make enough to matter to your budget at all anyhow.

Of course it doesn't make money - it's free. It doesn't have ads either.

I'd love to see that if your app was free with no ads, you didn't have to pay for a dev account.

Same, help my FOSS projects out!

Presumably this would result in a flood of "free" apps that are nothing more than facades for scams (e.g. a fun personality/quiz app -- look ma, no ads! -- that makes you reveal your secret questions and answers).

Maintaining the integrity of an app store is a very non-trivial task, and building an entry barrier in the form of developer fees is one way of doing it. Not saying this is the only solution or even a particularly good one, but every solution will have its share of unintended consequences and exploited armor chinks. Making dev accounts free for no-ads would be an interesting experiment, though. I'd support it for science!

Ha, that's a good point, though I think if Apple were to implement something like it, there would be a ton of rules. Perhaps banning network requests from the free app (no saas, no tracking) or limiting it in some way from being abused.

This discussion is about how the vast majority of apps don’t make any money. What needs to make sense for that completely arbitrary fee?

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