Apples Developer Account (99$/year) is much more expensive than Googles (25$/one time)... Therefor it might be difficult and expensive to create your own iOS developer account just to publish a few free apps.
My idea is to include a way to publish free apps on a Thunkable developer account. For some customers in social media design I used a service that automatically creates apps from facebook pages (Chayns by Tobit Software) and they also publish your iOS apps on their account. And they checked everything to be fine with Apple.
Maybe you could also charge some one time setup/check fee like 3$/app if Apple is okay with that but I think if you charge for approving the app and not monthly it should not be a problem
Still this would be a great way to make people able to publish apps that are likely not going to be profitable / not meant to monetize. Also I think this would be important because other than on Android, you cannot share any iOS app bypassing the App Storeā¦
Iām completly agree. The only issue I see is the work needed to validate the App by Thunkable Team while it has responsability for what is published in their account. Maybe, a $3/app fee may worth the effort.
yeah - even if it is 5$/app or whatever, I think a lot of users would still rather pay a small one time fee to publish some free apps than pay 99$/year if they do not plan to monetize the app except maybe some advertising
Also a big difference between Apples App Store and Google Play Store is that Apple really checks every single app before publishing it. Thatās why publishing an App to the App Store takes quite long sometimes. But Thunkable might not even need to pre-check the apps because if there is inappropriate content, the app would just be rejected by Apple.
This is very different from Google Play, where apps are only checked automatically and will only be removed if they are reported / checked later.
Ah hah ok, But what if Thinkable called the apps that we submit their own? As in they lie to Apple and say āYup we soooo developed that appā obviously the app would have to not include branding or have text like āLOLZ I MADE THIS APPā or not have ads (when they become available) etc etc etc
I reckon Thinkable would have to put in like a $5 fee for submitting an app to the service, instead of the $99 yearly app store fee, which is very inconvenient for youngsters and others alike (I donāt know where Iām going with that)
that wouldnāt work and also be very unprofessional maybe they will find another, legal way to do it. I wonder how Chayns is doing after the changes because they always worked close together with Apple maybe Iāll check that when I find time.
Great idea @Chris, but I think Apple and Google have different approaches here.
Appleās App Store costs 99$ per year and developing an iOS app requires an iPhone as far as I know. Thus you pay 99$ fee + 699$ phone = 800$
Googleās Play Store costs a 25$ one time fee. An Android phone is not required (you can use an emulator), but if you want one you can get them for under 100$
In my opinion, Apple wants to keep bad quality developers away with its policy. But this prevents young developers from trying to make an app in my eyes.
yeah on the one hand they keep their App Store clean from really bad and useless apps (which you can find tons of in Google Play) but on the other hand they make it hard for beginners / non profit projects to share their creations because iOS does not allow apps installment from outside the App Storeā¦
You do not need an iPhone but you do need a Mac if you want to code or test without a physical iPhone. Then you can use XCode which is quite similar to Android Studio and also contains iOS emulators.
But by now at least you can code an app and install it for testing purposes on your own device. Not too long ago you couldnāt even do that without having the 99$ developer account
maybe they will find another, legal way to do it. I wonder how Chayns is doing after the changes because they always worked close together with Apple 
maybe Iāll check that when I find time.
