Very appropriate in this case:

Nope, no need for open-source. If it was so easy to make an iOS app we'd have one available on the App Store already. There's works in progress and TestFlight releases just to cater for the increasing demand but even those will take time to reach full maturity and polish.

There's no reason for someone to work so hard and give away their IP for free. From what you see from many apps, the authors are continuously working hard to work on it, adding new features, fixing bugs and with it being still the relatively early days of the Fediverse, keeping up and reflecting changes on the platform.

App developers should be free to decide how they protect their IP and how they market their product. I gladly paid for Apollo and would be more than happy to pay for my preferred Fedi app to support the effort behind it.

A better approach would be for the Kbin/Lemmy project to open-source an SDK for iOS