And if you sell your software or services on the App Store, that doesn’t mean you can’t give it away for free to your buddies or sell it somewhere else.
How else do you give it away free? The CTF applies to anyone with business revenue who meets the install requirements, even if you're not charging for that specific app. Development apps are time limited by Apple's terms.
Furthermore, all of the limits exist solely at Apple's discretion. Apple is essentially being benevolent, not saying they have no claim to the transactions.
Same way anyone gives software away for free, put the source code up and give instructions for compiling / installing. That Apple imposes time limits on self installed applications is the user's problem, not the developer's. The user chose the platform, the consequences of that are theirs to bear. If they wanted to install arbitrary applications that weren't beholden to Apple's rules the options for that were always there. Apple's restrictions are well known and are as restrictive as they have ever been, there was no bait and switch here.
I'm sure we both understand why "put it on GitHub" is not free in any meaningful sense on a platform that charges people $99/yr to use the compiler. The point here is that Apple is insisting they own every part of the system and neither the user nor the developer can touch any of it without their permission.
I would understand that if that were true, but Apple does not "[charge] people $99/yr to use the compiler." I'd also once again point out that even were that the case, that's still the user's problem, not the developer's. At a certain point a user is responsible for the choices they have made, which includes choosing the second most popular cell phone OS, with well known heavy restrictions on applications as their platform of choice. If I chose to do all of my computing using a nintendo switch, the fact that I need to buy a dev kit to even begin to have a chance of installing something like firefox is my problem as a user, not Mozilla's, nor does it make firefox any less meaningfully free.
I'm apparently a bit out of date. The last time I did any iOS dev was before iOS 9 when free provisioning (running the compiler) became a thing. Guess that's something at least.
