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i’d guess it’s more to keep extremely low effort submissions out of the app store.

Which is not unreasonable for something listed in the App Store. It is unreasonable that you can’t sideload though.

I'm pretty sure the $99 fee is explicitly there to prevent "normal" users from side-loading.

It could be playing 2 roles, acting as a limiting gate for the App Store spam and preventing a simple 2 step tutorial to enable side loading.

yeah, this also makes sense