[peoplewindow]

Or maybe you live in a situation where $74 USD is a meaningful barrier to accessing a market.

Like what situation? To build an app at all he requires at least one computer, which is guaranteed to cost more than $99. He didn't blink at paying $25 to access MacInCloud.

The $99 fee is hardly a big deal. It's quite clearly there to encourage people to report charges on stolen credit cards, i.e. to make credit cards usable as a form of ID verification.

You're excluding people and organizations who want to maintain a single codebase.

There are ways to do that which don't require the web.

[masklinn]

> Like what situation? To build an app at all he requires at least one computer, which is guaranteed to cost more than $99. He didn't blink at paying $25 to access MacInCloud.

You're from eastern europe, south america or SEA, and $99 is a serious chunk of money.

The latest Xcode requires sierra which runs on a late 2009 macbook (or even older using sierra patcher), and you can use that for other things than just publishing your application.

[_pfxa]

Like anybody was forced to write iOS apps... I'm an undergrad from Turkey and buying Apple hardware is impossible for me (and not really desirable ATM, but that's not the topic). But I don't feel I'm barred entry to the app-making business, I can start with a desktop app, a web business, or a even a Flutter app on Android and later port to iOS when it's financially feasible. iOS crowd is a bunch that wants quality software and is willing to pay for it, and that the entry to the market is not free is completely understandable. Otherwise it's like wanting to run a caf but not wanting to pay rent or resources. They don't owe you nothing.

[george_perez]

Latest Xcode needs High Sierra, not Sierra.

[saagarjha]

There are ways to make Xcode 9.3 run on macOS Sierra, but I wouldn't recommend using them if you can avoid it.

[kbenson]

> To build an app at all he requires at least one computer, which is guaranteed to cost more than $99.

Well, the question is who does it cost? The original purchaser, or the person that was gifted it or got it for free because it didn't work and put the time in to fix it?

Plenty of people get computing hardware for free or close to it.

[realusername]

> To build an app at all he requires at least one computer

It does not just require a computer, they require an Apple computer, big difference.