My own take in MFi controllers is that they were always intended to primarily be used with the new Apple TV. Supporting them early was just a Trojan Horse to get them in the stores in advance of the TV launch.
The alternative to requiring thinning is to allow fat app downloads and pretty much guarantee that app thinning stays a niche capability with low adoption, so Apple is making sure devs and their tools vendors just have to suck it up. It also means developers of apps that can conceivably fit inside the 200mb limit will work their buts off to make sure it does, which will tend to improve download speeds.
Both effects will lead to a better user experience at the cost of some developer inconvenience, but frankly they're not asking anything unreasonable. Apple provide support for app thinning in their own frameworks, and if devs still freely choose to use different tools then that's up to them but a professional tool or framework that doesn't support thin apps in this era isn't worthy of the name.
> My own take in MFi controllers is that they were always intended to primarily be used with the new Apple TV.
Then Apple shouldn't have allowed Lightning-connected game controllers. I bought one for development purposes when their price dropped from $99 to "let's clear this shelf" ($15 in my case), and not only can I not use it with an Apple TV, it's also a terrible controller, on par with a $10 USB gamepad.
I agree that tvOS was probably the driving force behind MFi controller support, but I also think it was a complete failure. (Sadly!)
The alternative to requiring thinning is to allow fat app downloads and pretty much guarantee that app thinning stays a niche capability with low adoption, so Apple is making sure devs and their tools vendors just have to suck it up. It also means developers of apps that can conceivably fit inside the 200mb limit will work their buts off to make sure it does, which will tend to improve download speeds.
Both effects will lead to a better user experience at the cost of some developer inconvenience, but frankly they're not asking anything unreasonable. Apple provide support for app thinning in their own frameworks, and if devs still freely choose to use different tools then that's up to them but a professional tool or framework that doesn't support thin apps in this era isn't worthy of the name.