If that's the intent, they could just as easily (and more sensibly) charge the fee when you submit your first app into the store. As is, they seem to want you

If that's the intent, they could just as easily (and more sensibly) charge the fee when you submit your first app into the store. As is, they seem to want you to pay up even to deploy an app you wrote onto your own phone. That's just obnoxious. (Googling around, I can find workarounds, but most seem to require jailbreaks or other strange mummery; see http://stackoverflow.com/questions/246422/how-can-i-deploy-an-iphone-application-from-xcode-to-a-real-iphone-device http://stackoverflow.com/questions/246422/how-can-i-deploy-a... for a procedure that's alleged to work without requiring that, but which does require other undocumented mummery with certificates.) Also, it keeps a lot of people from learning to tinker in ways that could develop into job skills later. While $100 is probably a nuisance fee to most of the people posting here, there are a lot of people in the US (to say nothing of the rest of the world) for whom it blows their hobby budget for the month, if not for the year.