No you are not only paying to get access to publish. You're paying because upkeep of the entire App Store ecosystem is not free. You also get a bunch of tooling, code-level technical support, and more importantly a bunch of SDKs that are tremendously powerful and useful (Metal, ARKit, etc).
Yes Xcode and APIs like ARKit are free to develop (for obvious reasons), but Apple captures some of the costs at publish time (as it should be).
>... but Apple captures some of the costs at publish time (as it should be).
This forces you to pay 100$ a year when you just wish to use your own hand made app on your own phone if you wish it to work longer then 1 week offline. While using app of someone else doesn't require that.
100$ per year x 4 years = 400$ to use your own app.
What makes you think that this is how it should be?
If the whole idea that one should pay for ability to program his own device seems logical to you then perhaps some monthly fee for using your fingers to control the phone would seem logical too? After all finger touches use many features of the phone that "are tremendously powerful and useful" too.
The upkeep of the Apple store ecosystem is easily found within its margins on taking money from developers plus billions in profits. This page is telling you how they're classifying it for tax reasons. There is no need to charge $100 or even $20 like Microsoft.
This page is an excuse. There is no reason except greed and corporate accounting.
Yes. That page align with Apple Accounting. Since 2017 Apple has been putting iOS cost and development, SDK as part of their Services Strategy expenses.
In a sense Apple is now think you are buying iPhone just as Hardware ( with huge margins ), and you are paying for all the development of iOS, macOS through their Services Revenue coming from App Store and Google Search.
In Steve Jobs days Apple used to lump all those together as one product. But now you are basically renting the usage of iOS and Apple experience Hence from Apple's POV the user aren't even paying enough for the usage of iOS.
One can make a case that people learn to breath merely to prepare themselves to rent Apple services and not paying enough untill they do in Apple's POV.
But there is another POV. One that includes rights of a person to be a human being rather then income source for some company. One of those rights should be ability to install whatever software you choose on your own computer without any artificial restrictions.
Yes Xcode and APIs like ARKit are free to develop (for obvious reasons), but Apple captures some of the costs at publish time (as it should be).
Here's a full list of stuff that the fee go towards supporting and developing: https://developer.apple.com/programs/whats-included/