I could be wrong but I would think that Apple uses the yearly fee to pay for the people that review the apps before they are published on the app store. Whereas on Google Play it's more an automated process.
As a user I find good and bad apps on both platforms. From my personal experience I don't see any benefit in Apple's policies. Quite the contrary. For example you get automatic refunds in the Play Store, no questions asked.
Also, the quality of Android apps has been going up since Lollipop and the introduction of material design. I was an iOS fanboy not so long ago, but now I'm really happy with Android.
As a developer, working for Android is a joy compared to iOS.
You don't have to pay money to use Xcode or the iOS SDK. This is whining. You are not forced to do anything. You can live a happy life not doing iOS development. One could say that you have to pay money to learn/do programming, period.
You are not going very far away by deploying apps on the simulator. You can't even test on a real device without paying the fee.
> You can live a happy life not doing iOS development
As a mobile developer? Not really, at least not where I live.
Users are both on iOS and Android. I'm not so stubborn as to ignore that truth.