[cyrus_]

An Apple developer account costs $99/year.

The ethical problem on macOS is that Apple is imposing artificial technical barriers to push people to pay Apple what amounts to "protection" money.

On iOS, there is no reasonable way to bypass the app store for the vast majority of users.

[eridius]

The fact that you apparently don't understand the security implications here and the reasons why Apple is pushing for codesigning does not mean that Apple is putting up artificial barriers out of greed. That's a pretty ludicrous claim - do you really think the $99/year Apple gets from developers (who aren't already paying for iOS) even registers as a blip on their balance sheets?

The next time you see something you don't understand, your automatic reaction shouldn't be "those greedy bastards", it should be to actually educate yourself as to why it's being done. You may find that in a lot of cases there are actually really good reasons for it. And even if you decide that you don't agree with the reasons, that doesn't make it appropriate to accuse someone of being greedy or doing "evil" things (e.g. artificial technology barriers to extract money), and it's rather offensive for you to do that.

[imtringued]

$99 every year is enough to be a barrier to entry for individuals but low enough to for malicious actors to obtain the ability to sign code.

It doesn't matter how much it costs. Even if it only costs $0.01 a year it would offer the same level of protection.

The only thing the fee does is limit the number of developer certificates to one per bank account.

[cyrus_]

I suspect it is you that doesn't understand the security implications -- if all it takes is $99/year to gain the ability to sign arbitrary code, then there is no security benefit whatsoever. Pure security theater.

Obviously, the $99/year isn't making Apple a lot of money. But what it is doing is creating a culture of acceptance around Apple-as-gatekeeper. The iOS app store is most certainly making Apple a non-trivial amount of money (yes I know its a small percentage of their total at the moment.)