You’ll notice I made no argument in defense of Apple. You can definitely develop for their desktop OS without paying that $100 fee. If you don’t want to use all

You’ll notice I made no argument in defense of Apple. You can definitely develop for their desktop OS without paying that $100 fee. If you don’t want to use all the free languages out there that will run on many platforms (macOS included), and you’d rather use Apple’s tools to build natively, well now you have to spend money on Apple hardware. If you need an argument in defense of paying $100/yr for a signing certificate: it’s definitely a barrier to entry. It makes high volume scams based on obtaining signing keys too expensive. If it were free for all, it would be a free-for-all for scammers … until the world asked Apple to “do something about it” and that something would be charging for access to those certs.