> Off topic. Using F-Droid, you don't need to touch Google's ecosystem.
Absolutely. I still don't get why I can't compile and deploy my own apps on my own devices without paying Apple $99 a year.
I thought it was really cool that you can deploy apps you compile yourself on your device out of the app store without paying the $99 yearly fee but apparently that's not the case.
> There are three levels: $300/yr for "enterprise" allows you to deploy your app on a large number of devices within your organization (and the terms of service are very explicit that the devices must be under your control: not even for testing by a customer at an off-site location unless you are overseeing), $100/yr for an individual or company normal developer license that lets you install your app for testing purposes on up to 100 of your devices for one year (after which point the apps expire and you have to reinstall them), or $0 for truly "free" provisioning (no yearly fee) which lets you install up to three apps (total; not per account: across all free accounts any device can have only three such apps) on a device using a slightly limited set of APIs (for example: no VPN support) which expire every seven days.
> Clearly the free tier is pretty worthless in the grand scheme of things, and being able to write software for you but not being able to legitimately give it to anyone else not also paying the $100/yr "please let me own the piece of hardware you sold me instead of renting it" tax is not really acceptable for people trying to learn to write software as a big part of software is being able to give it to other people. In practice, though, a lot of people are seriously only learning to develop so that one day they can pay the full Apple developer tax and deploy their apps to the App Store under the Apple software approval process, and so it works out: like, to them, software development is all about writing software for Apple hardware under Apple's rules, and that's what Apple wants anyway. The entire scenario makes me feel a little sick: this shouldn't even be legal as far as I'm concerned.
> I thought it was really cool that you can deploy apps you compile yourself on your device out of the app store without paying the $99 yearly fee but apparently that's not the case.
It's the case as long as you manually recompile them once a week when the code signing cert expires. It is deliberately impractical to actually distribute apps this way.
Off topic. Using F-Droid, you don't need to touch Google's ecosystem.