Buying a test phone was a given and understandable, Paying $100 for a developer account was silly but whatever, Needing an actual Mac to do builds.. that really hurt.

So, after buying a Mac Mini, I'm about $1000 into Apple just to run a build for iPhones.

Probably could have figured out slightly cheaper ways, but time has value too.

After that it's mostly dumb proprietary things that are foreign to me as someone outside the Apple bubble. For example, I spent way longer than I should have trying to figure out some device ID thing in the dev account... only to eventually realize I needed to physically plug the phone to the mini. No good reason for it, no documentation either, just randomly needed to because Apple decided that's how they'd make it "just work" at some point.

We're using Ionic so that the app runs on anything from a single code base, the good news (at least so far) is that there hasn't been any nasty rabbit holes on platform specific tweaks, relative to PWA and Android. Past dalliances with React Native had me expecting much worse tbh.