Free and Open Source Software

To make apps for Android you can take a 15 years old PC from the dumpster and a 5 years old smartphone that your cousin threw away and you're done. No other payment required.

To make apps for iOS you need to have a supported Mac and you need to have a supported iPhone. The OS upgrade treadmill means you need to buy a new one of both every 5-6 year (or used every 2-3 years). Finally, you need to pay a yearly $100 development subscription forever. (When you stop paying, your apps are unpublished)

Also: on Android you share the source and anyone can compile it even a decade after release. On iOS compiling old source is much more difficult as you probably need to change or fix to the updated apis

On apple/iOS - The app store, you have to pay a annual fee to be a registered developer.

On android you have f-droid, fully open source, no fees.

I've made some apps in my life and one time I made something for myself and simply skipped apple because it isn't worth the headache.

For starters you'll need an OSX VM, then pay 100 eur a year for a dev account, and then manage those god awful provisioning profiles.

Finally, side loading wasn't possible back then and their store is a black box and follows strange arbitrary American centric rules.

Edit: Also I should add that in order to get my hands on an OSX iso ten years ago I had to find someone with an apple computer to be able to purchase the OS with my account. And apparently this is a legal gray zone.

These days it's a bit easier because you can use a cloud build provider and just stuff the provisioning profiles in there, for example if you use Unity3d.

Are you new to Apple?

In addition to the reasons already mentioned, Apple has a requirement that applications have a novel component. While it's often questionable as to what is considered "novel" Weather applications get contrasted against the built-in weather app. If the app simply duplicates the functionality it will be rejected.

This goes for any phone app:

• No onerous Terms of Service Agreement required
• cheap and easy to develop
• Easy to make fully open source apps
• great backwards compatibility (some apps built for Android versions from 13 years ago can still be used)
• no need to be locked into Apple's ecosystem
• no need to pay Apple fees to "be a developer".
• easy to load apps into phone without going through the official store or "test flight"

Where do these opensource apps get their data from? Usually retrieving weather data costs money when you use an api. I guess those „opensource“ weather apps use an ad model to finance this api calls. May work on a large user base.

Usally iOS users buy their products so i guess gathering a large user base for ad revenue model isnt working for those devs