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Comment by sangnoir | Hacker News Reader

> Yet those developers somehow can buy a computer for $1000+ and spend an additional $500-$800 on the tablet/phone? :)[1]

In a word - Yes.

I am a developer from a 3rd world country, and I bought a Mac Mini for $500 (not '$1000+') for the purposes of entering the Apple ecosystem. I'm not going to spend another $500 on an iPhone[2], especially since I'm not sure if it will work out financially. The emulator will have to do (my apoligies to anyone who'll potentially run my apps and encounter bugs I miss because of this).

1. I'm not sure if the smiley is an indicator of sarcasm or not

2. If push comes to shove,I can afford it, but I've already bought the phone I'll use for the next 2-3 years (OnePlus), and I'd rather spend the money on other things - like family.

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If you're serious about making an App, then yes, you should spend the $100. You will get it back in the first couple of days if you make a good app.

The $100 is to keep out the shovel ware and crap-- look at all the junk in the store as it is now. Imagine what it would be like if there wasn't that $100 barrier to entry?

> You will get it back in the first couple of days if you make a good app.

Well, there's the rub. Unfortunately, the vast majority of developers just don't make money on the app stores. I'm not going to beat myself up if it doesn't work out - I'm taking this as a long-term learning opportunity.

If one of my apps takes off on Android (as proof that other people find it good - or I'm confident it is good enough), then I'll pay the $100.

> you should spend the $100. You will get it back in the first couple of days if you make a good app.

40% of mobile developers do not even reach $100 in a month [1]. Having a "good app" is not a guarantee that someone will get $100 in two days.

[1] https://www.developereconomics.com/reports/developer-economi...

40% of mobile developers don't have good apps. Heck, more like 90% of them don't (Sturgeon's law).

When I recently worked on making our installer work on Mac OS X again (it broke a few years ago, and we don't have a lot of demand for Mac OS X, since we build server software), I did so in a VM on my Linux system. It was slow, it was ornery to get it working, but it was free (if we assume a pirated Mac OS X, though I have a purchased box of a slightly older version than the one I was able to install from a prior Hackintosh experiment that I gave up on, since I found I hate Mac OS X through and through).

I would never build for Mac or iOS if I had to buy a Mac. Since I was able to do so effectively for free, Mac support in our software (which is pretty popular with about 3+ million downloads a year) got a lot better. I didn't enjoy it, and I won't be using that VM for anything other than testing Mac OS X support, but it's silly to act like everyone ought to be willing to shell out money to support a platform (especially in our case, where the vast majority of our paying users are running Linux).

"look at all the junk in the store as it is now. Imagine what it would be like if there wasn't that $100 barrier to entry?"

Whatever happened to the argument that the Apple approval process was to protect users from poor quality software?

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