My point was pretty clear. Apple is a huge company, and allowing every single developer on earth to skip the $99/year fee is unlikely to make any difference to

My point was pretty clear. Apple is a huge company, and allowing every single developer on earth to skip the $99/year fee is unlikely to make any difference to their bottom-line. So why do they do it? There's some obvious reason that this article is missing, because it's focusing on this tiny monetary amount as though it's a huge onerous fee (which might be true in the author's country, to be fair). If you look at the bigger picture, there's more to it than Apple making $99 bucks off of devs.