>Well, how could Epic continue developing unreal engine for iOS without a developer account?
I thinl this nicely sumariges whats wrong - why the hell should one need an account somewhere to develop software for an OS!
Thats a totally arbitrary limitation and as nicely illustrated by Apple - very very dangerous.
Sure and while that's still bad IMHO, for general purpose devices this should simply not be required ever.
I can develop and distribute software for my tablet (Android), Notebook (Linux/Fedora), gaming PC (Windows), smartphone (Sailfish OS) or e-reader (Kobo) without the need to open an account with a third party and be at their mercy.
Sure, in some cases a repo system account can make things easier, but I can just as well put the source and binaries on a website and any users wanting to use that will not be needlessly hindered by stupid OS maintainer policies.
The issue is not necessarily that you need an account, it's that punitive action is being taken against this other related account as a form of coercion/arbitrary punitive action. Imagine if your Gmail account was deleted because you made a nasty comment on YouTube. It would be a clear abuse of administrative power.
IIRC the Gmail & Youtube example is actually true - they are all a single Google account and if it gets blocked due to one service, you loose everything.
> Apple originally wanted to terminate the developer accounts of both Epic Games and Epic International, a separate account linked to Epic's Unreal Engine used by third-party app developers, but a judge issued a temporary restraining order preventing Apple from doing so.
Why would they need their own account to just develop the engine? They could use any employee's personal account, or a third party partner company's account, anything
Apple is know to cracking down abuse of developer accounts, so they could ended up playing cat and mouse game with apple. Also, the dev tools are probably licensed in a way that you can't use it legally after getting kicked out of apple dev program. Maybe epic can get around this by divesting unreal engine into a separate company. I think it's already done that (unreal is under epic international), but as apple was considering taking down epic international's account too, maybe that too is not enough.
You can use Xcode and the SDKs without even having an account! A free account is required to sign code temporarily to run on test devices. Apple shouldn't even get to know what is being signed.
Apple might be cracking down on people who sign apps for others as a service, publish signed stuff online, etc. but they literally have no way of preventing development of anything.
