My iPhone 8 Refuses to Die: Now It's a Solar-Powered Vision OCR Server

>I’m saving approximately $84-120 CAD annually.

I suppose most of this is eaten up by the need to pay apple $99 per year just to run your own app on your own phone for longer than a week.

This Apple fee is one of the most absurd things they do. Like, how is it even justified—does Apple really spend $99 on infra maintenance and server costs to host your app?

When I buy a device I want to know that I own it, but Apple keeps pushing the narrative that "we LET you use this device in ways we see fit". So basically the customer is just borrowing a device from Apple while paying the full price.

I'm a longtime Apple user but can't shake off this love-hate relationship with the company.

I think it's fair to also cover the fairly rigorous testing that occurs for each app store submission. I'm not sure a hundred bucks is the right number, but it's not fair to say all they do is host the file.

You have to pay $99/year even if you only want to use the app on your own device.

You can only sideload for free if you are willing to reinstall every X days.

They don't need to test an app if you're not asking them to distribute it through their store.

What’s worse is it used to be 90 days. Apple changed it to 7 days years ago.

90 days is still absurd. I have custom apps I install on my Android phones once per phone. I go years without bothering to rebuild them.

I would guess they do it because they want to minimize the chance that someone will install an unapproved app to someone’s phone and cause harm. I know it’s already pretty hard but Apple seems to be very particular when it comes to this.