Ah the joys of being subjected to a dictator's whim. Apple can do as it wants when it wants for any reason it wants to regarding that app you may have poured a year of your life into.
Our profitable SaaS web app has 1000s of paying users and those apps also run very well on mobile safari.
We made a decision a long time ago as a company never to invest in iOS because of Apple's dictator like policies. We may develop a simple tool on iOS but we will never put our flagship apps there.
Apple has made it clear from the beginning that they will not be fair in their dealings with devs and in fact the opposite, they are actively hostile against app devs in many cases such as this one without being accountable to them. It's Apple's way or the highway.
Not only do we have the privilege of paying Apple to develop on their platform (that devs make more valuable to consumers) but we also have the privilege of paying Apple a 30% cut on virtual goods.
I still don't understand why so many devs have given into this. But it probably has something to do with Apple's monopolistic power.
MacOS dev is also going down the hill considering all the uncertainity about developing for the platform (deprecations, transitions to new SDKs and language, etc).
For example it would seem ObjC and Cocoa will be abandoned one day. When? In 2 years? 5 years? When will OpenGL not be distributed with macOS?
It would seem the safe bet is switching to SwiftUI for macOS but as of today you lose support for most macOS users. Plus SwiftUI is not ready for prime time yet from all the complaints I've read.
I was planning on working on a macOS exclusive product but for many reasons (including some of the points you have mentioned) this doesn't seem a wise decision at all.
> Not only do we have the privilege of paying Apple to develop on their platform (that devs make more valuable to consumers) but we also have the privilege of paying Apple a 30% cut on virtual goods.
You'll always pay other companies a "cut" of your business, unless you've figured out a way to host your profitable Saas web app for free.
Our profitable SaaS web app has 1000s of paying users and those apps also run very well on mobile safari.
We made a decision a long time ago as a company never to invest in iOS because of Apple's dictator like policies. We may develop a simple tool on iOS but we will never put our flagship apps there.
Apple has made it clear from the beginning that they will not be fair in their dealings with devs and in fact the opposite, they are actively hostile against app devs in many cases such as this one without being accountable to them. It's Apple's way or the highway.
Not only do we have the privilege of paying Apple to develop on their platform (that devs make more valuable to consumers) but we also have the privilege of paying Apple a 30% cut on virtual goods.
I still don't understand why so many devs have given into this. But it probably has something to do with Apple's monopolistic power.