My point was that you said Google was also successful and I agree, but they are successful WITHOUT doing what Apple does. The yearly fee is indeed nominal, but it IS there, and no I don't think that has anything to do with malware. Plenty of devs spend boatloads of cash on iOS memberships in order to get enterprise/adhoc certificates to distribute their apps (not all are "good"). I blame the "malware" part on it just being Android and far less secure IM.
Also, for the last year (or two?) Google does indeed review apps. They just do it much faster (and perhaps less thoroughly?) than Apple.
I still maintain Apple is far stricter than they need to be and make many decisions that are more in line with their bottom line than any real concern for their end users. You mean to tell me that Adobe (and others that have distributed the libraries) can make tools to compile iOS apps on Windows, but they couldn't?
Does it improve security that you can't upload an ipa file directly to app store connect anymore and must use an up to date mac with the transporter app? That alone is one of the reason I went to Virtualbox. I used to have a macbook JUST for submitting apps to Apple. At one point it would no longer update to the latest OSX, which meant I couldn't submit apps. Their solution? buy more Apple hardware I won't really use.
Sure, if I were building a AAA title for a console investing in the hardware to do so would be a no brainer. But this isn't a console and there's no reason I should have to.