Disclaimer 1: I’ve been an Apple Fan Boy for 5 years, I own an iPhone and iPad.
The emotions have been running high among 3rd party iPhone/iPad developers since Apple has introduced this new clause (3.3.1) into their iPhone OS 4.0 beta Agreement. Basically, it reads that you can only use Objective-C, C & C++ to build iPhone Apps. If this sticks that would block many of the 3rd party developers tools (Unity3D, Appcelerator Titanium, Flash CS5 iPhone Packager and many, many others) from building iPhone Apps.
I can say that this has been pretty disheartening to read and see the fallout in the developer communities. I’ve been on the Flash CS5 beta team since the beginning of the year, have even developed 2 iPhone Apps (one live in the iTunes App Store and the other is “In Review”). I even ported one to work on my iPad at full resolution.
Adobe’s CTO, Kevin Lynch, has stated in this blog post, that they intend to keep the Flash CS5 iPhone Packager in the CS5 bundle launching tomorrow.
Greg Slepak is said to have email Steve Jobs and here is the correspondence on Greg’s Blog.
Steve is said to have written, “We’ve been there before, and intermediate layers between the platform and the developer ultimately produces sub-standard apps and hinders the progress of the platform.” in reference to how well Firefox works across multiple platforms.
MY QUESTION… How are apps created with Flash CS5 or Unity3D hindering the progress? These companies that are developing these 3rd party tools have teams of engineers constantly updating their tools based on whatever Apple updates in their SDK. As I have developed an iPhone App and iPad App using Flash CS5 I can say that there are no performance issues. Heck, go check out the South Park App or any of these other apps created with Flash. No issues at all. Quality isn’t the issue. Look at how many Fart Apps are in the iTunes App Store.
It appears Apple is becoming the IBM of the 1980’s. As they gain more market share, more power, they are becoming less open, less transparent and are turning their developer-friendly platform into an elitist club. If you don’t know the special handshake, you don’t get it.
THIS SUCKS! Instead of reaching out and building their developer community, they are alienating a good chunk of us. That doesn’t make any sense to me. Why wouldn’t a company want more developers, especially when Apple gets 30% of every sale.
This is still a beta agreement, but it doesn’t appear that Mr. Jobs cares to even reconsider changing his mind, no matter the fallout!
THERE IS STILL HOPE… If this goes through, there will be a huge community of developers wanting to put their apps on mobile phones and tablets and I think this is where Google and Android come into the picture. Google has always been so good about being transparent and cultivating a strong, open developer community. Android’s app store is growing at an incredible pace and they are selling a huge number of devices… including a huge wave of tablets slated to hit the market this year.
If Google wants to be my hero… I’m here waiting to be save from the closed-mindedness of Apple.
