iirc, it costs $99 a year to be able to upload apps on the apple app store rather than a one-time $25 on android. Also, apple test flight or whatever has a limited amount of people who can use it, rather than just installing an apk on android. Apple's ecosystem makes it much harder for open source or small apps to exist for iOS devices.

Sometimes when people put their hard work into building an app for free, they don’t also want to pay $99 a year so that some bullshit company can profit off of the app developers hard work.

iOS developers are REQUIRED to own a mac and are REQUIRED to pay apple $99 a year. That means it is more costly to develop open source for iOS or any apple product. That’s why apple is terrible.

People say it's the price (to develop), but it's not IMO. It's the community. Lots of developers use iOS (in the US), but in my experience, power users who develop FOSS in their free time have a high propensity to be Android users. There's just so much more freedom in the platform.

Add this to the fact that outside of the US Android is more popular as the device costs are lower and there is less blind brand loyalty due to that, so developers in those countries focus on the platforms they use.

I believe the latter was the case with the current FOSS weather app I use (Breezy Weather).

Update: This is personal experience, but I've never met a free-time FOSS app creator (or contributer) that didn't develop for the device they use. And I've met a lot of them.

Final edit: Weather apps may be biased with age. With React Native and Flutter taking over new apps, platforn agnostic apps may slowly go away over time. But which FOSS dev wants to build a new weather app when there are so many (for Android) already?

From the perspective of FOSS developer:

I simply don't want to pay €100 every single year to Tim Apple to make a free hobby app.

Android has more ways to distribute, and the "official" way is one time €25 fee and that's it.

~~weather~~

Because Apple damn sucks. Its useless to have FOSS apps on this platform if you ask me. Plus they go fully "license business" and dont allow many FOSS licenses that have "this software comes with no guarantees" in it, e.g. the GPL

Foss and Apple don't really go hand in hand. The foss apps that are currently on iOS though, I fully support and encourage more development of.

You make an Android app, you leave the binary on Github or wherever, or even just get people to compile it themselves.

On Apple, you need to go though the whole appstore bullshit.

Don't you have to pay a monthly fee to be listed ln the App Store?

I think this goes for open source in general. I guess its just because of Apple and how locked down and restricted they make things. AOSP is open source and as a whole is pretty open with allowing things like sideloading and more freedom and control to developers and users in general, so I guess that encourages more FOSS developers to support it and the platform, over something like iOS for instance with its locked down ecosystem.

Apple does not like FOSS

Apple is actively hostile to software freedom. Even if a particular iOS app is free, actually exercising the four freedoms is difficult given the barriers Apple puts up against developers.

This is not considering the culture of Apple users which is generally indifferent to software freedom, of course.

This issue isn't limited to weather apps. iOS apps in general tend to be closed source.

Apple users use to pay a lot for their device. So they just continue on with theme.

Because it cosys money to offer an app on iOS.