A license is $99. If you can afford a Mac to develop on your can certainly afford a $99 license.
They reason the have the fee is to keep out people who aren't serious about development. If they didn't have it for example the forums would be overrun with people who just signed up to get the latest OS beta complaining about bugs (this is already a problem at $99).
People can still develop and distribute apps without ever signing up with Apple. This restriction is a good protection step for users imo.
You shouldn't have to prove that you're "serious about development" by paying money to write and distribute software. How many developers started as hobbyists?
Charging $100 just to be capricious is not a good move and is certainly not a good omen for OS 10.9 "Tabby" wherein you can be almost certain they will remove the option to run unsigned software (for your own protection, of course! You don't want to pay Apple $100? What are you, poor? The computer cost $1000! $generic_strawman_argument!)
You don't need to pay ANY money to write software for the Mac. Xcode is free. You don't need to pay any money to distribute software for the Mac. Distribute it through your own website. You need to pay to sell through the Mac App Store. I also presume you need to pay if you want it signed. Well that's a privilege. It helps you prove to potential customers your app is safe. You benefit from it so you should have to pay for it.
If you develop an app with the purpose of selling it on the Mac App Store for profit $100 should not be a problem for you.
If you want to distribute it yourself, go ahead. Apple is not charging you.
Yes, but Apple doesn't want to allow people to pay to get into a Beta. They want only devs taking part. A fee to enter the dev program seems like the best solution to me. Honestly they should increase it to $199 to help weed out the app spammers.
There's enough money in app spamming that it would have to be a lot higher than that to put them off.
As a rule the people who act like arseholes have at least as much money as those who don't, I don't think it's going to put them off.
I agree a nominal fee is reasonable as it puts another barrier in their way (you can check for duplicate memberships off the same card for instance so they have to get multiple cards) but the actual financial amount isn't a major barrier I don't think.
That's a good point. It would help get the beta testers out of the forums though :) Every time a new iOS version starts testing the forums are overrun with people who have x bug and don't understand what beta means. I wish there was a way for Apple to prevent a lot of the App Store spam. I wouldn't be against them becoming more curated (i.e. only apps they deem useful and quality get it). Or have a special section in the store labeled 'crap'.
I'm not sure that charging more is the solution, there's no shortage of people with more money than sense!
I don't see why Apple don't invite the developers of high-ranking iOS apps to an early-access program in order to keep their best apps up to date, and not invite anybody else to the beta.
I don't see why Apple don't invite the developers of high-ranking iOS apps to an early-access program in order to keep their best apps up to date, and not invite anybody else to the beta.
Because every publisher, not just the "blessed" ones, has software in the store that could be negatively impacted by a new iOS release's changed APIs. And every publisher has potential use cases for new features Apple adds in a new iOS revision.
Apple ships major iOS releases at the same time as shipping the newest iOS device. They want a customer to unwrap their new device and have free roam of the store to download/buy as much as they can. They want the software to use the new features in iOS and they don't want their customers downloading crap that is broken.
And as a developer who isn't even close to "high-ranking" (My one paid iOS app maybe pulls in $50 on a good month) it's still not fair to me for someone to one-star my app and say "doesn't work on iOS 6" even when I've had no chance to test it before general release.
They reason the have the fee is to keep out people who aren't serious about development. If they didn't have it for example the forums would be overrun with people who just signed up to get the latest OS beta complaining about bugs (this is already a problem at $99).
People can still develop and distribute apps without ever signing up with Apple. This restriction is a good protection step for users imo.