Tim was probably on the way out sooner rather than later anyway, but I don’t think the larger problem with the Vision Pro is that the Venn diagram of people who think it’s cool and people who can afford it is way, way too small.

An Apple Developer account is $99 a year and the only prerequisite to putting an app on the store. If it’s free, there are no other fees. I wouldn’t call $99 a small fortune.

There are many “open source” apps on the App Store, though most may argue they technically are not because you never have the option of compiling yourself, so perhaps “source available” would be more apt. Things like KDE-Connect are on the App Store so clearly there is some demand for iOS counterparts to open source multiplatform applications.

Feel dumb? I am dumb.

I’m fairly certain what you’re experiencing is just how lockdown mode works. It even specifically states in the menu that it’s gonna break some stuff because certain features that apps might need to function are completely disabled. The fix is “don’t use lockdown mode” because you simply cannot work around entire critical feature sets being unavailable on a system level.

To be honest, you probably shouldn’t be using lockdown mode if apps behaving weird is going to bother you. It’s an extreme measure and it says so right when you enable it, it’s not meant for casual use.