The new APIs wouldn’t be for everybody in the early stages and that’s fine. It’s impossible to build something that everybody can get on board with from day one. There will be early adopters who are willing to pay the price of admission.

Staying in app stores in my experience has not been particularly difficult or resource intensive. If you stick to first party toolkits and don’t go nuts with custom widgets, maintenance is minimal and often you only need to compile against a newer SDK every few years. The horror stories are generally coming from projects with severe NIH syndrome and sometimes of users of cross platform frameworks.