Apple Bans use of Third Party Apps for Iphone Development

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Gus Higuera on April 8, 2010 at 6:29pm

Yeah, I was personally looking forward to tryin out the flash-to-iphone development but now it looks like we're hosed and imma have to continue trying to learn obejctive-c

Permalink Reply by Ken Berkun on April 8, 2010 at 6:53pm

Dan, he is not loosing friends. He might be losing them, but that's another story. Sorry, pet peeve of mine.

Permalink Reply by Daniel Leuck on April 8, 2010 at 7:03pm

Actually this really pisses me off. Dictating what IDE developers can use is pure jackassery. It stymies innovation for absolutely no good reason. It would be slightly less horrible if they had an elegant modern language and brilliant IDE, but they have neither.

This smells of Jobs. I guarantee it came straight from the top. Bad, bad move Steve. You are already losing old friends left and right.

Permalink Reply by Gus Higuera on April 8, 2010 at 7:15pm

There can only be one explanation, Microsoft has replaced Steve jobs with a clone. Think about it, Steve takes a hiatus to recover for health reasons then comes back a super angry asshole(even more than he was before). I bet they couldn't figure out how to sustain the clone on a vegetarian diet and that's why he's all skinny.

Permalink Reply by Scott Murphy on April 8, 2010 at 9:04pm

Crap. That was one of the things I was looking forward to in Flash CS5.

Permalink Reply by Jim Thompson on April 9, 2010 at 12:33am

Brian Russo said:

So...
Sherman Act, anyone?

Sure... Sherman Act. WTF, Over?

Want to explain how this is anti-trust? Just as a review:

A Section 1 violation has three elements:

(1) An agreement
(2) which unreasonably restrains competition
(3) and which affects interstate commerce.
A Section 2 violation has 2 elements:

(1) the possession of monopoly power in the relevant market and
(2) the willful acquisition or maintenance of that power as distinguished from growth or development as a consequence of a superior product, business acumen, or historic accident.

Lets take Section 1. Perhaps you think the license agreement that restricts how developers behave as 'an agreement', but now you have a problem. You've run afoul of the little fact that you've agreed, but that you've not restricted the market. Lets take Section 2 now. Does Apple have monopoly power in the relevant market? Yes, certainly. Are they acting to maintain that monopoly power outside of the fact that they have a superior product (or business acumen)?

Completely unclear. Is it your position that Flash (or .Net) are superior? Careful, because you might get laughed off-stage.

The simple fact is that Apple has lawyers, and they're bound to have thrown the towel if the new wording had Sherman violations all over it.

Just 'cause you can't write (objective) C doesn't mean that you're smarter than Apple.

I think Gruber has it mostly right: http://daringfireball.net/2010/04/why_apple_changed_section_331

See also: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1250946


If you don't like it, go write apps for Android, in Java. Make that platform better.

(as if)

Permalink Reply by Daniel Leuck on April 9, 2010 at 1:23am

Jim Thompson: Just 'cause you can't write (objective) C doesn't mean that you're smarter than Apple.

I don't think this is a particularly fair statement. There is no relationship between being able to grok Objective C and liking it. I understand NSNumber* value = [[NSNumber alloc] initWithFloat:1.0];. I just think its a ridiculously verbose and cumbersome way to instantiate and assign a float. You have to admit, Objective C has a lot of legacy warts. I don't understand why Apple is preventing others from targeting the platform from other languages. They make money on Apps, not Objective C. If someone can write a solid app in another language, why not let them? Let the languages and UI builders compete on merit.

This doesn't mean we will stop developing on Apple's platform because that would be a stupid financial decision. It doesn't mean we think we are smarter than Apple because our company isn't worth $220B :-) I am, however, disappointed that Apple isn't competing on merit. I also think telling Adobe "sorry" four days from the release of CS5 is, at the very least, very poor form considering all Adobe has contributed to the success of the Mac platform.

Permalink Reply by Cameron Souza on May 9, 2010 at 6:46am

It looks like the FTC and DOJ agree with Brian regarding the antitrust issue.