10 ms·

Steve Jobs Has Just Gone Mad

410 points by thafman 17y ago

MikeTLive 17y ago
Is Jobs taking these actions to prevent the commoditization of his platform? I refer the reader back to the Joel Article reposted a few days ago. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1250958 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1250958 If apps are portable from iphone to droid the phones step closer to being just another commodity portable device.
- MichaelGG 17y ago
  I wonder, how feasible is it for MS/Google to create a toolkit to allow instant porting of iPhone apps to WinPhone7/Android?
- ams6110 17y ago
  I think that's exactly what he's doing. He wants iPad/iPhone apps to work, to be elegant, and to be consistent. He wants the Android space to be full of sort-of-works crapware that you find when there are tools that let any half-wit drag-and-drop an app together.
grumpyfart 17y ago
Even though it's insane all developers will suck it up as Apple has the power (boat load of users) and developers want to make money. They'll suck it up and keep developing what they are developing. From Apple point of view this makes perfects sense, they are not loosing anything. They know as soon as they can keep the end-users happy developers will come. That what has been happening and it'll keep that until someone else comes up with a better marketing + product and take over a big chunk of the market. And Android is not ready for that kind of action yet.
theli0nheart 17y ago
Hasn't anyone else realized that this rule is totally unenforceable? How is Apple going to find out if something was originally written with Unity3D or Clojure? Everything is submitted to them as a binary. You can't inspect a binary and figure out what language the code that generated it was originally written in. So seriously, what's the problem here? Either there is none or I'm missing something.
- Zak 17y ago
  $ ghc --make helloworld.hs $ strings helloworld|grep ghc|wc -l 19 $ csc helloworld.scm $ strings helloworld|grep chicken|wc -l 1 There are more telltales that might be harder to mask. Other tools have similar giveaways. It wouldn't be hard to set up an automated test for the most common ones.
  - theli0nheart 17y ago
    Right but I'm assuming that these 3rd party tools are actually converting code to Objective-C / C / C++ and then compiling...is that right?
    - Zak 17y ago
      I think that's true for some tools and not others. csc converts Scheme in to C and then compiles it with the local C compiler. There are specific markers that will exist in every binary compiled with Chicken. Some of them are ASCII and easy to spot by hand by running strings on the binary, but I suspect there are also binary sequences that appear in every program compiled this way. It would also be possible to look at data structures in memory and detect patterns of access common to specific cross-compilation tools or abstraction libraries. These techniques don't produce proof beyond a reasonable doubt, but no such proof is required; Apple can and will reject applications that don't meet its standards.
  - d3vvnull 17y ago
    And how hard would it be for those code translators to remove these footprints or even offer the user the option of leaving them out? Doesn't this edict invite code translators to work harder at leaving no trace that the code was generated or translated? The bigger question too is, isn't this just another stupid rule that developers can find a workaround for anyway?
- krschultz 17y ago
  More importantly the tools that do the transferring will get killed
Vivtek 17y ago
You know, it just occurred to me that if Apple specifies the tools that may be used to develop applications for the iPhone, then all iPhone developers may legally be their employees for tax purposes....
- elblanco 17y ago
  You know that they'll need to pay at least minimum wage.
cturner 17y ago
Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++. Interesting: this excludes lex, bison and similar generators.
- FredZarguna 16y ago
  I think it also exludes psuedo-code scribbled on the backs of envelopes or napkins, code sketches sent via e-mail from the shop guru, anything appearing originally in Knuth, and your own boss's idiotic missives if they contain anything explcit.
celticjames 17y ago
Is it possible to turn things around and compile an iPhone app to run on Android/Flash/etc.? I'm sure it would be a monumental task, but could the headers in the Apple SDK be wrapped in a cross platform library? Or is there a rule against that too?
commieneko 17y ago
No, Steve Jobs is not insane, this interpretation of the new rule is insane. Apple is merely (!) trying to control what tools people use to create software on their platform. I can understand why they want to do this, just as I can understand why I might, or might not want to comply. The legal terms used are to give Apple the tools it needs to get compliance. The only real issue is: do you want to develop for this platform or not. (I probably am, but mostly on the webkit/webapp side of things, which, so far, is still completely open.) There are possibly some anti-competitive issues here, and if Adobe has any chance of getting around this rule, that's the way they will probably go. Good luck to them, but I'm not holding my breath.
- pmjordan 17y ago
  this interpretation of the new rule is insane OK, I'll bite. What's the correct interpretation, according to you?
  - tptacek 17y ago
    Presumably it's "as long as you're using the Cocoa Touch stack as your primary development environment, we don't care what other tools you use; however, if you want to use Flash, develop for a different phone."
    - stcredzero 17y ago
      Insane? No. Worrisome in its arbitrary restrictiveness? IMHO very much!
      - tptacek 17y ago
        Since my memory span goes more than a year or two back, I vividly recall Apple shipping a product that had native app development available only to Apple. I simply don't believe that Apple owes everyone Flash. Maybe this will get different when Apple owns 70% of the smart phone market. Right now, people are upset about not being able to use their preferred tools on the coolest phone. But they have no inherent right to develop on the coolest phone.
signa11 17y ago
storm in a teacup much ?
- yumraj 17y ago
  blinded and deafened by the fanboyism much?
charlesju 17y ago
I really doubt that this particular rule is aimed at the masses. Steve Jobs could care less about things like PhoneGap and random IDEs. In my opinion this is a strategic method to create optionality in case it needs to go into outright war against Adobe.
- peterarmstrong 17y ago
  That doesn't make it anything short of disgusting -- it's worse than anything MS ever did.
  - tptacek 17y ago
    REALLY. Saying "no alternate compilers on our hardware" is worse than using the threat of yanking OEM licenses for the then-monopoly desktop OS if they dared to feature another company's browser on the desktop?
    - vetinari 17y ago
      How many another companies' browsers are there for iPhone/iPad? Exactly.
      - lukev 17y ago
        Uhh... http://www.opera.com/press/releases/2010/03/23_3/ http://www.opera.com/press/releases/2010/03/23_3/
        vetinari 17y ago
        http://my.opera.com/community/countup/ http://my.opera.com/community/countup/ In other words: no, you can not use it. It is verboten. Imagine what would happen, if Microsoft had veto over Lotus 123, Ami Pro, Netscape, Apache, Mozilla, etc.
    - orangecat 17y ago
      Arguably yes. Microsoft never tried to stop users from running whatever software they wanted on Windows, they just made it more inconvenient in some cases to get that software.
stcredzero 17y ago
Summary: If you need to "originally" write your code in Swahili, while listening to Milli Vanilli, while reclining in a patch of mud, and then you need fifty oompa loompas to translate the Swahili into C, that is none of Steve Jobs f#ck^ng business.
- michael_dorfman 17y ago
  And Steve's response, I imagine would be: if you want to sell your app in my store, it's my business. If you don't like my rules, develop for a different platform. Seriously: if Barnes and Noble decides it only wants to sell fiction by authors whose last names begin with "Q", wouldn't we just consider it a bone-headed move, and not the cause for moral outrage? The iPhone is not the only smartphone on the market, and it's never pretended to be an open platform. I really can't see why folks are getting their knickers in a twist.
  - cousin_it 17y ago
    I really can't see why folks are getting their knickers in a twist. Your use of demeaning language doesn't make your opponents wrong. wouldn't we just consider it a bone-headed move, and not the cause for moral outrage? It's both. Legality != morality. A business practice can be perfectly legal but immoral. Of course you can say anything Apple does is moral because it's within their rights, but there are also other ways of assessing the morality of actions, e.g. weighing their consequences.
    - michael_dorfman 17y ago
      OK, then explain the consequences to me. A store-owner decides he wants to put an arbitrary restriction on the types of items he sells in his store. Let's say, perhaps, that a grocery store decides to stock only Organic produce. What's the moral harm?
      - cousin_it 17y ago
        It's proportional to market share. I think we both agree that such a move would be immoral for a monopolist (making developers stupid... stifling progress... blah blah). Assume it causes X amount of moral harm. Then someone with 50% market share would cause X/2 moral harm by the exact same mechanisms. 1% market share, X/100 moral harm. Think of it as voting for Hitler: less evil than being Hitler, but still evil.
vegashacker 17y ago
Sure I've had my moments of App Store frustration, but all in all, I haven't been as offended by it as a lot of folks. I think that's because I felt that Apple was giving me something that I couldn't easily find elsewhere (single point of distribution that everyone knows about, very few taps for users to install my apps, the ability to easily charge for apps), so I was okay if they were a little particular about the terms. But this is different. Apple telling us programmers not to write source to source compilers, is telling us to ignore a totally fundamental technique in computer science. They're telling us not to be too clever, which us programmers don't take kindly to.
- tptacek 17y ago
  I'm puzzled, since Apple has been shutting off fundamental techniques in computer science since day one. Today it's Flash compilers. Yesterday it was access to the filesystem, things that run in the background, etc.
  - rimantas 17y ago
    Yesterday it was access to the filesystem, things that run in the background, etc. No, yesterday they did add the things that run in background. Flash compiler being a fundamental technique in computer science? Please…
    - rimantas 17y ago
      Ok, correction: yesterday they introduced iPhone OS 4 with background services. How Flash is fundamental in CS is still a mystery to me.
      - reynolds 17y ago
        It's not necessarily Flash that's fundamental in computer science. It's compiler technology that's the computer science part.
        17y ago
dreadlabs 17y ago
This effectively kills an awesome project called titanium: http://www.appcelerator.com/ http://www.appcelerator.com/
warfangle 17y ago
While this sucks for iPhone developers who want to branch out / use other languages (clojure, etc), it might persuade these developers to move over to the Android platform. Especially given the several Android tablets forthcoming...
- fab13n 17y ago
  Apple is of course conscious of this trade-off (attractiveness of the platform+customer base vs. unattractiveness of being treated like shit by Apple). The thing is, they can easily back off when they will have to: today, most app developers won't snob the iPhone even if they're treated miserably. If they can't afford Android+iPhone portability, most of them will choose iPhone-only over Android-only. If/when a competitor starts to be attractive enough to represent a treat, Jobs will announce a big change towards a more developer-friendly policy. Today, he thinks he can get away with being a dick, and he's probably right IMO.
  - fauigerzigerk 17y ago
    I think you are largely right, but don't forget that this pragmatic business view of the world does not dominate every phase in every hacker's life. Apple would be well advised to take note of the emotional sea change that helped sweep IBM and later Microsoft from their all powerful positions. Being hated is not a good position to be in for anyone, regardless of how powerful they may be at one point in time.
    - pedalpete 17y ago
      Was it Microsofts business practices that brought it down a few notches? or was it their lack of quality products? Currently, business decision makers are likely looking at the market penetration/mindshare of iPhone vs Android. However, in the coming months, I suspect we'll see a few points which steer businesses away from the iPhone. 1)you'll be able to develop apps to run on Android, WinMo 7, RIM and Palm, all likely using a single code-base and hooking into a framework which manages the different device api's (such as PhoneGap, or even Flash). 2)the overcrowding of the Apple store means as a business, you are trying to compete with thousands of others, while the other stores have less apps (at the time being), and more overall users. The AppStore is like a huge mall with 50 million people and 150,000 stores. The competing stores is like a mall with 100 million people, and only 10,000 stores. I'd much rather be one of fewer stores in a larger market, than the one of many in a smaller market.
tibbon 17y ago
So Frameworks like Unity for game development are basically dead, making it so that indie developers who don't have the money/ability to write their entire engines from scratch are nearly banished and putting only the AAA title makers in the running. Great...
- ahi 17y ago
  That is precisely the point. They don't need more apps, they need more AAA apps.
  - Steve0 17y ago
    How about we let the consumer decide which apps are worthy of their cash. It's been going on for many years and this model works pretty good.
  - wvenable 17y ago
    That might be true, but the implicit assumption here is that only EA can make AAA games and indie developers just produce crap. That assumption has been demonstrated to be false on both points.
    - lallysingh 17y ago
      Not at all! You can buy a few C++ game engines (e.g. Torque) and port them. I have Torque running on Linux, Solaris, Mac, & Windows. Considering it's normal posix underneath, you just have to redo some plumbing.
      - potatolicious 17y ago
        The iPhone is POSIX, but not to you as the developer. Porting Torque to the iPhone will have to be done by GarageGames, not by you - even if you pull it off it will certainly be violating a laundry list of App Store rules.
        17y ago
danparsonson 17y ago
The key is where they say "Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++." Take a pause and think about what that "originally" really means. Developers are not free to use any tools to help them. If there is some tool that converts some Pascal or, Ruby, or Java into Objective-C it is out of bounds, because then the code is not "originally" written in C. Yes it is "originally" written in C - when the Objective-C compiler first sees it. There's nothing in the quoted clause from the Apple T&Cs that says "written == written by a human". I really don't think this clause is aimed at code converters, but rather at e.g. run-times that execute byte code - see also "(e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited)". You don't link to an API until either compile- or run-time. Making an API call from a piece of code that is then converted into C is not 'linking to APIs through an intermediary layer'. OK, it still sucks, but it seems to me that both this article and the other similar one on here at the moment ("Apple takes stance on consciousness", http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1252438 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1252438) are based largely on a misinterpretation of the use of the word 'originally'.
- isleyaardvark 17y ago
  e.g. run-times that execute byte code I thought that was already forbidden. If so, why the change, if not to stymie thins like Adobe's Flash-to-iPhone converter?
- ghshephard 17y ago
  The "Originally" clause was placed in their _precisely_ to forbid code converters.
  - danparsonson 17y ago
    Can I ask what your authority is on that? It seems that most people agree with you but I don't understand why!
    - smallblacksun 17y ago
      Because embedded interpreters in iphone apps are already banned in another part of the developer agreement?
etaque 17y ago
What about MacRuby ? It still isn't working for iPhone eventually, but does it mean "forbidden" now ?
00joe 17y ago
I've had a couple of close friends and relatives have health issues that almost killed them. Afterwords their personality changed. They became much more negative and harder to be around. The things I have read about Jobs is that he is a health nut. To have the problems he has had might have been a big emotional blow for him. Since he has come back, things have gotten much worse for partner relations and there is almost a continual barrage of news about Apple jerking someone around. I really think they could do better with a new CEO.
- ahi 17y ago
  You don't change CEOs because you want a nicer guy.
  - pwhelan 17y ago
    You may change CEOs if their behavior habits change significantly, including them turning from narcissistic jerk to narcissistic jackass. Instability at the helm isn't a good thing, even if you are currently still heading in a good direction. I seriously doubt the legality of this part of the contract, which only sets them up for more legal battles with Adobe (with MSFT and GOOG as supporters) which will bleed cash, create ill-will among developers and take the focus off of doing what Apple does that creates its value. If you are thinking of developing a good tablet app, are you doing to want to deal with Apple OR will you try doing it on the new HP slate?
  - Vivtek 17y ago
    You change CEOs when your current one starts making boneheaded power plays that will ultimately harm the company, but nobody has the balls to stand up to him because his eyes are weird.
endlessvoid94 17y ago
Enough! If you don't like Apple's terms of service, DONT USE APPLE, and DON'T DEVELOP SOFTWARE FOR APPLE'S PRODUCTS. It's not unfair. Whether or not he's insane is irrelevant. Stop bitching and solve the problem. EDIT: downvote me for having an opinion? come on, HN.
- megamark16 17y ago
  I'd rather just avoid the problem all together by building apps on an open system like Android.
  - thenduks 17y ago
    That's what he just said. Don't develop for the platform you dislike/don't agree with the policies of/etc.
thenduks 17y ago
I don't get this at all. Why does everyone act like the iPhone should be as 'open' as an OS on your computer? Did everyone forget that when the iPhone shipped you couldn't write apps at all? You can't write apps in Erlang for your Zune, your PS3, your cable modem, your microwave, your car or your apartments alarm system... no one cares. Yes, Apple wants (insists, even, if this ToS becomes final) you to use their tools, their stack, etc for making apps on their consumer electronics device - shocking? No. Annoying? Of course. Don't like it? Go somewhere else!
- wvenable 17y ago
  "Did everyone forget that when the iPhone shipped you couldn't write apps at all?" Yup. And did you forget all the complaints about that too and then the jailbreaking and then the development of apps without any SDK at all? You have to wonder if Apple would have ever created the app store if programmers hadn't done all that. "Why does everyone act like the iPhone should be as 'open' as an OS on your computer?" Why shouldn't it be? You act like merely complaining about something should be a crime. If Apple is well within their rights to do what they want with their platform, we're well within our rights to complain about it.
  - thenduks 17y ago
    Considering the level of polish on the Cocoa Touch frameworks and the surrounding tools at release I'd say Apple was planning the AppStore long before the mob started RABBLE-RABBLE-ing about it. Still, I am absolutely not saying you shouldn't be allowed to complain. My point is only that I don't see what there is to complain about. I wouldn't complain about this any more than I would about not being able to write apps for my current crappy cellphone. It isn't even that bad though, of course, because you can write apps for the iPhone, just not in arbitrary ways that Apple doesn't approve of. Anyway, it's ok that we don't agree -- it seems, at this time, that Apple and I are on the same page... We'll see if things change or not. I am obviously all for Apple being more open in general (having to use a Windows VM to sync my iPod is a huge pain in my ass, for example), I'm just not losing any sleep over it.
    - 17y ago
makmanalp 17y ago
This is another gem: “10.4 Press Releases and Other Publicity. You may not issue any press releases or make any other public statements regarding this Agreement, its terms and conditions, or the relationship of the parties without Apple’s express prior written approval, which may be withheld at Apple’s discretion.”
- warfangle 17y ago
  Somehow I doubt that clause is enforceable.
  - anigbrowl 17y ago
    It's not enforceable in the same way that having all your apps removed from the app store isn't actionable. Anyone engaged in commercial development for the iPhone only does so at Apple's pleasure, which may be revoked at any time. Of course, if this causes your users to seek refunds and you have already spent your earnings, that could get problematic.
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
grellas 17y ago
Legally, Apple can do pretty much what it likes on its own platform and there is nothing anybody can do about it except accept their restrictions or decline to deal with them and hope for the best with commercially viable alternatives. Someday, though, as Apple's strategy continues to unfold, and as it continues to tighten restrictions on others' ability to develop for each device, to use its dominance of one device (e.g., iPhone) to leverage market share in others (e.g., iPad), and to exert significant control over a range of devices that are nominally independent but actually inter-connected, the idea of "platform" will blur and Apple will likely have to own up to the antitrust police, just as Microsoft did with respect to the desktop OS market. I am not an antitrust lawyer and the above may in fact be naive. Instinctively, though, the apparent arrogance behind Apple's methods of throwing sharp elbows toward competitors has all the feel of what Microsoft did in the 1990s as it used its desktop OS leverage to favor MS Office/Internet Explorer, etc. and to harm independent software vendors trying to market their apps for the PC market. Ditto for IBM before that. And, while we are at it, though no two people could possibly be so different in so many ways, it would appear that Steve Jobs has drawn his competitive (or anti-competitive) inspiration right from John D. Rockefeller, who was a control freak over his markets and who often used such control in even ruthless ways to stifle competition. We are nowhere near the stage where Apple can seriously be declared a monopolist in any relevant market but Apple certainly seems bent on pushing the limit as it goes along its path on its quest for hegemony.
steamer25 17y ago
Couldn't another motivation be that they don't want to hire app reviewers with fluency in every language under the sun? They have no way of enforcing the Swahili/Milli Vanilli/mud -> C via Oompa Loompa exception, provided that the C is readable and appears to be 'orginally written'. I see it as a natural outgrowth of the chaperone model that a good number of users have tolerated/embraced.
- wvenable 17y ago
  App reviewers don't get the source code so that's not a valid point.
  - steamer25 16y ago
    How do they know what tools were used to create the app?
dpcan 17y ago
So this means, if you write a game for Android first, then want to write it for iPhone, tough luck, better start with them??
alexandros 17y ago
I was always critical of Apple's closed ecosystem but nobody saw this coming. In a sense, they're not even leaving room for doubt that they are not to be trusted. What's worse, essentially developers are now told that they have to put up or shut up, since Apple has the apps market cornered, and their app store full of apps. Developers take heed. Every time you write an application for Steve's app store, it's just one more weapon that steve can and will use against you and every other developer when he decides he has a reason. Nobody saw this one coming, and I shudder to think what's next. One more thing: what about apps that have been already written with some translation tool? Do the developers have to rewrite in Obj-C or abandon altogether? How is this in the interest of the users exactly?
- crux_ 17y ago
  > nobody saw this coming Surely you jest. Lots and lots of people saw this coming; they were just dismissed as radical idealistic free software hippies.
- jasonlotito 17y ago
  " but nobody saw this coming" No, lots of people did. People dismisses us. Oh, we might not have specified exactly what they were going to do, but essentially it turned out that way. Remember the Bikini Apps, and everyone who dismissed it and applauded Apples efforts? These people should be applauding yet more restrictions. Look, Apple has already demonstrated it want's control over everything. This means even the web. Open standards doesn't mean anything. WebKit is their ability to control it. Open standards is nice, but just look at what happened with Flash. The only thing they are doing is using open standards to get to the next step, and then locking it under their own key. This has been going on for a long time. It's not new. iHTML isnt a joke. I guarantee you Apple wants control over the web. If they could do it right now, Safari on the web would be restricted much more than it already is. People might still call me alarmist, but so far, I've been proven right, and they've been proven wrong.
icey 17y ago
The way the section is worded makes me wonder if this also prohibits ports of applications from other platforms. What does "originally" mean when Apple says it?
va_coder 17y ago
1984
- godDLL 17y ago
  newspeak
david927 17y ago
Developers! Developers! Developers! (Please go away...)
nfnaaron 17y ago
So why doesn't Adobe just add a feature to their tool, that will take an app originally written for the iPhone in Jobs-approved languages, suck that source up and produce either source for Adobe's tools or source directly for other phones? It doesn't take care of existing apps that were written elsewhere first, but it does take care people who can write iPhone apps and would like to port those elsewhere.
- 83457 17y ago
  Seems like a valid idea but defeats their current purpose of making flash development available for the iphone
bsaunder 17y ago
Gee, I thought they meant "originally" as in: "My code was originally written in C, but I've now ported it to Clojure." ;) Of course as I make changes, it produces C that compiles to normal .o files that are then (without any further translation, compatibility layer, or tool required) linked with the Documented APIs.
zppx 17y ago
The situation isn't new, what type of company press their employees to not write blogs or have twitter accounts about something they should be proud? This is my main instance against Apple, Apple is partly a soviet style bureaucracy, it's impossible to know right now from whom the good ideas came from, basically people blame or praise Steve Jobs after every show keynote for the work that a team of great anonymous engineers are developing for each new product. This don't show that Steve Jobs is mad, it only says that the board of directors is either oppressive towards Apple employee or submissive towards Jobs, anyway incompetent, but it is hard to say about incompetence when your company is so lucrative.
JeremyChase 17y ago
This rule is only in there so they can justify their selective enforcement. I'm sure you'll still be able to do whatever you want, but it gives them a line to point to when not approving certain apps they don't like for whatever reason.
grumpyfart 17y ago
"It is perhaps reasonable to specify the nature of the programs that can be sold in the AppStore. It is not reasonable to specify how developers create those programs so long as the end result meets the specified end result criteria." Can you see the pattern? About a couple of months ago we were swearing to Apple because of AppStore policies, and now AppStore policy to ban random apps is acceptable since they introduced even more ridiculous terms. I like the way how Steve plays!
doron 17y ago
It is interesting to revisit this thread based on Alex Payne moderate request for openness - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1243445 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1243445 Apple progression to restrictive hardline, is going against developers with a generally pragmatic approach. Apple seems to give no quarter when it comes to their inane lock down practices, developers shouldn't give much benefit of the doubt to apple either.
latch 17y ago
You know, this whole Apple thing finally makes sense to me. They are simply trying to tie their developer community to their platform. Now is the time to do it, when competition is low. There's virtually no chance of this having any noticeable impact in its established community of developers. By year-end, when competition is a bit stronger, the groundwork they've put in place today will make it less likely that developers will bother to learn another platform. Its what Microsoft did with Java and Netscape. It's what they did with IE. I'm not saying its right. I'm just saying I finally understand it. (and I know MS was sued, and lost, for each of those infractions).
- commieneko 17y ago
  > They are simply trying to tie their developer community to their platform. No, they are trying to tie the _consumer_ to their platform. They couldn't care less about developers outside them providing consumers a reason to buy their product. (and as a source of revenue.) Apple _does_ want to control what _media_ can be played on their platform. And they way to control that is to control what developers can do. Notice there is no VLC on the iPhone? No Mplayer? No open codecs what-so-ever. (and certainly no FLASH...) At some point expect there to be a (surprise!!!) clamp down on h264 encoding, enforced by patents and licenses.
j00lz 17y ago
How does Apple get away with such monopolistic behaviour, if Microsoft had an app store would antitrust lawsuits prevail?
MaysonL 17y ago
I wonder if the restrictions on language used in development will also apply to their new ad program?
- eagleal 17y ago
  As I understood, the developers will access the iAd network via APIs. Is the APIs available for different ad networks or only iAd. This is interesting because the thing where this is not clear, it's the fact that Jobs said you can use any ad serving network. Bur if the APIs are available only for the iAd, and since you are stack with Apple approval process (and the language restrictions) you can't use 3rd party technology (eg. embedding Flash ads), and as a result you can't use any other network.
robryan 17y ago
Problem is with the app store is that a number of developers could reject these changes and decide to develop elsewhere, but instead of improving the situation on other platforms it would probably just be that the remaining app store developers would be now getting a bigger piece of the pie. I think there is an incentive for developers to turn a blind eye to some of the more crazy apple app store policies because if people leave it benefits them and there is no viable alternative at the moment for someone wanting to make a living selling mobile applications.
jpark 17y ago
"Today, we celebrate the first glorious anniversary of the Information Purification Directives. We have created for the first time in all history, a garden of pure ideology. Where each worker may bloom secure from the pests of contradictory and confusing truths. Our Unification of Thoughts is more powerful a weapon than any fleet or army on earth. We are one people, with one will, one resolve, one cause. Our enemies shall talk themselves to death and we will bury them with their own confusion. We shall prevail!" How far we've come.
c00p3r 17y ago
Good news for those who had invested in Android.
azzleandre 17y ago
This is really funny, since this is just the transcription of their daily business practice, so your experience shold have told you earlier. But only now do people see it, after years of Apple behaving this way, people still cramming to get into the apple-bottom, who are you to blame apple for actually write it down?
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
profgarrett 17y ago
Actually created an account to write this... What surprises me is not as much Apple's move (though it is truly ridiculous), as some apologists' responses. Talking about how "Adobe's just as bad," or that "it'll reduce crappy software in the store," or that "Apple's within their rights" is really missing the point. The point is that this is totally unnecessary from a technological perspective. It's totally a business move to destroy competitors and pursue a bizarre vendetta against Adobe. I teach in a business school, and am very 'pro competitive edge,' but this is just so short-sighted. Apple's competitive moves seem oriented to reducing anyone who could be a competitor to rubble out of some misguided belief that the iPhone paradigm is theirs, and that they should be able to dictate who makes money off of it. Ultimately, any business adopting this approach dies. It make take 4-8 years for a competitor's product to reach equivalency, but it'll happen. Tech moves so fast that it'll be tough to keep a closed environment (even a good one) on top. Furthermore, (and really to the point) I don't want to do business with any firm that thinks they can dictate if or how much profit I can make, or how I can approach my particular niche of interest. Apple keeps on reducing the way you can build apps; how do I know that my next app isn't going to compete with mobile Pages & get pulled? They're creating a totally closed and controlled platform, and you better hope that you don't run across any of their plans. It's a terrible business environment, and totally destructive. Ridiculous.
ahoyhere 17y ago
I honestly can't believe the stupidity of the metaphors in this thread. Cattle grazing on the commons? Like Apple's telling you "Don't program in a functional style"? It's a problem if the only store in town won't stock your goods? Telling Leonardo da Vinci he can only use gummy? Is Apple pissing in your freedom flakes? Really? The iPhone is not a commons. It was never a commons. No smartphone device IS a commons. Apple is not dictating your programming style. They are dictating that you do not run cross-compiled software, written in a non-native language, on their device. This is not unreasonable. There is nothing illegal, or immoral, or even marginally unreasonable, with a store refusing to stock your goods. Even if it's the only store in town. It's not like telling Leonardo he can only use one medium, because of course, the iPhone is not the whole world, where da Vinci lived. If one customer of da Vinci's only wanted art done in gummy, that would be an accurate parallel. Seriously, guys, this is HN. Let's see some of that logical thinking.
coliveira 17y ago
If you develop software for the iPhone/iPad, you are just a supplier for Apple's app store. It is not unheard that companies require a process from their suppliers.
motters 17y ago
Apple, who is primarily a computer hardware manufacturer, shouldn't be in the business of dictating what tools or languages software engineers use to create applications.

410 points by thafman 17y ago

Is Jobs taking these actions to prevent the commoditization of his platform? I refer the reader back to the Joel Article reposted a few days ago. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1250958 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1250958 If apps are portable from iphone to droid the phones step closer to being just another commodity portable device.

MichaelGG 17y ago
I wonder, how feasible is it for MS/Google to create a toolkit to allow instant porting of iPhone apps to WinPhone7/Android?
ams6110 17y ago
I think that's exactly what he's doing. He wants iPad/iPhone apps to work, to be elegant, and to be consistent. He wants the Android space to be full of sort-of-works crapware that you find when there are tools that let any half-wit drag-and-drop an app together.

grumpyfart 17y ago

Even though it's insane all developers will suck it up as Apple has the power (boat load of users) and developers want to make money. They'll suck it up and keep developing what they are developing. From Apple point of view this makes perfects sense, they are not loosing anything. They know as soon as they can keep the end-users happy developers will come. That what has been happening and it'll keep that until someone else comes up with a better marketing + product and take over a big chunk of the market. And Android is not ready for that kind of action yet.

theli0nheart 17y ago

Hasn't anyone else realized that this rule is totally unenforceable? How is Apple going to find out if something was originally written with Unity3D or Clojure? Everything is submitted to them as a binary. You can't inspect a binary and figure out what language the code that generated it was originally written in. So seriously, what's the problem here? Either there is none or I'm missing something.

Zak 17y ago
$ ghc --make helloworld.hs $ strings helloworld|grep ghc|wc -l 19 $ csc helloworld.scm $ strings helloworld|grep chicken|wc -l 1 There are more telltales that might be harder to mask. Other tools have similar giveaways. It wouldn't be hard to set up an automated test for the most common ones.
- theli0nheart 17y ago
  Right but I'm assuming that these 3rd party tools are actually converting code to Objective-C / C / C++ and then compiling...is that right?
  - Zak 17y ago
    I think that's true for some tools and not others. csc converts Scheme in to C and then compiles it with the local C compiler. There are specific markers that will exist in every binary compiled with Chicken. Some of them are ASCII and easy to spot by hand by running strings on the binary, but I suspect there are also binary sequences that appear in every program compiled this way. It would also be possible to look at data structures in memory and detect patterns of access common to specific cross-compilation tools or abstraction libraries. These techniques don't produce proof beyond a reasonable doubt, but no such proof is required; Apple can and will reject applications that don't meet its standards.
- d3vvnull 17y ago
  And how hard would it be for those code translators to remove these footprints or even offer the user the option of leaving them out? Doesn't this edict invite code translators to work harder at leaving no trace that the code was generated or translated? The bigger question too is, isn't this just another stupid rule that developers can find a workaround for anyway?
krschultz 17y ago
More importantly the tools that do the transferring will get killed

Vivtek 17y ago

You know, it just occurred to me that if Apple specifies the tools that may be used to develop applications for the iPhone, then all iPhone developers may legally be their employees for tax purposes....

elblanco 17y ago
You know that they'll need to pay at least minimum wage.

cturner 17y ago

Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++. Interesting: this excludes lex, bison and similar generators.

FredZarguna 16y ago
I think it also exludes psuedo-code scribbled on the backs of envelopes or napkins, code sketches sent via e-mail from the shop guru, anything appearing originally in Knuth, and your own boss's idiotic missives if they contain anything explcit.

celticjames 17y ago

Is it possible to turn things around and compile an iPhone app to run on Android/Flash/etc.? I'm sure it would be a monumental task, but could the headers in the Apple SDK be wrapped in a cross platform library? Or is there a rule against that too?

commieneko 17y ago

No, Steve Jobs is not insane, this interpretation of the new rule is insane. Apple is merely (!) trying to control what tools people use to create software on their platform. I can understand why they want to do this, just as I can understand why I might, or might not want to comply. The legal terms used are to give Apple the tools it needs to get compliance. The only real issue is: do you want to develop for this platform or not. (I probably am, but mostly on the webkit/webapp side of things, which, so far, is still completely open.) There are possibly some anti-competitive issues here, and if Adobe has any chance of getting around this rule, that's the way they will probably go. Good luck to them, but I'm not holding my breath.

pmjordan 17y ago
this interpretation of the new rule is insane OK, I'll bite. What's the correct interpretation, according to you?
- tptacek 17y ago
  Presumably it's "as long as you're using the Cocoa Touch stack as your primary development environment, we don't care what other tools you use; however, if you want to use Flash, develop for a different phone."
  - stcredzero 17y ago
    Insane? No. Worrisome in its arbitrary restrictiveness? IMHO very much!
    - tptacek 17y ago
      Since my memory span goes more than a year or two back, I vividly recall Apple shipping a product that had native app development available only to Apple. I simply don't believe that Apple owes everyone Flash. Maybe this will get different when Apple owns 70% of the smart phone market. Right now, people are upset about not being able to use their preferred tools on the coolest phone. But they have no inherent right to develop on the coolest phone.

signa11 17y ago

storm in a teacup much ?

yumraj 17y ago
blinded and deafened by the fanboyism much?

charlesju 17y ago

I really doubt that this particular rule is aimed at the masses. Steve Jobs could care less about things like PhoneGap and random IDEs. In my opinion this is a strategic method to create optionality in case it needs to go into outright war against Adobe.

peterarmstrong 17y ago
That doesn't make it anything short of disgusting -- it's worse than anything MS ever did.
- tptacek 17y ago
  REALLY. Saying "no alternate compilers on our hardware" is worse than using the threat of yanking OEM licenses for the then-monopoly desktop OS if they dared to feature another company's browser on the desktop?
  - vetinari 17y ago
    How many another companies' browsers are there for iPhone/iPad? Exactly.
    - lukev 17y ago
      Uhh... http://www.opera.com/press/releases/2010/03/23_3/ http://www.opera.com/press/releases/2010/03/23_3/
      - vetinari 17y ago
        http://my.opera.com/community/countup/ http://my.opera.com/community/countup/ In other words: no, you can not use it. It is verboten. Imagine what would happen, if Microsoft had veto over Lotus 123, Ami Pro, Netscape, Apache, Mozilla, etc.
  - orangecat 17y ago
    Arguably yes. Microsoft never tried to stop users from running whatever software they wanted on Windows, they just made it more inconvenient in some cases to get that software.

stcredzero 17y ago

Summary: If you need to "originally" write your code in Swahili, while listening to Milli Vanilli, while reclining in a patch of mud, and then you need fifty oompa loompas to translate the Swahili into C, that is none of Steve Jobs f#ck^ng business.

michael_dorfman 17y ago
And Steve's response, I imagine would be: if you want to sell your app in my store, it's my business. If you don't like my rules, develop for a different platform. Seriously: if Barnes and Noble decides it only wants to sell fiction by authors whose last names begin with "Q", wouldn't we just consider it a bone-headed move, and not the cause for moral outrage? The iPhone is not the only smartphone on the market, and it's never pretended to be an open platform. I really can't see why folks are getting their knickers in a twist.
- cousin_it 17y ago
  I really can't see why folks are getting their knickers in a twist. Your use of demeaning language doesn't make your opponents wrong. wouldn't we just consider it a bone-headed move, and not the cause for moral outrage? It's both. Legality != morality. A business practice can be perfectly legal but immoral. Of course you can say anything Apple does is moral because it's within their rights, but there are also other ways of assessing the morality of actions, e.g. weighing their consequences.
  - michael_dorfman 17y ago
    OK, then explain the consequences to me. A store-owner decides he wants to put an arbitrary restriction on the types of items he sells in his store. Let's say, perhaps, that a grocery store decides to stock only Organic produce. What's the moral harm?
    - cousin_it 17y ago
      It's proportional to market share. I think we both agree that such a move would be immoral for a monopolist (making developers stupid... stifling progress... blah blah). Assume it causes X amount of moral harm. Then someone with 50% market share would cause X/2 moral harm by the exact same mechanisms. 1% market share, X/100 moral harm. Think of it as voting for Hitler: less evil than being Hitler, but still evil.

vegashacker 17y ago

Sure I've had my moments of App Store frustration, but all in all, I haven't been as offended by it as a lot of folks. I think that's because I felt that Apple was giving me something that I couldn't easily find elsewhere (single point of distribution that everyone knows about, very few taps for users to install my apps, the ability to easily charge for apps), so I was okay if they were a little particular about the terms. But this is different. Apple telling us programmers not to write source to source compilers, is telling us to ignore a totally fundamental technique in computer science. They're telling us not to be too clever, which us programmers don't take kindly to.

tptacek 17y ago
I'm puzzled, since Apple has been shutting off fundamental techniques in computer science since day one. Today it's Flash compilers. Yesterday it was access to the filesystem, things that run in the background, etc.
- rimantas 17y ago
  Yesterday it was access to the filesystem, things that run in the background, etc. No, yesterday they did add the things that run in background. Flash compiler being a fundamental technique in computer science? Please…
  - rimantas 17y ago
    Ok, correction: yesterday they introduced iPhone OS 4 with background services. How Flash is fundamental in CS is still a mystery to me.
    - reynolds 17y ago
      It's not necessarily Flash that's fundamental in computer science. It's compiler technology that's the computer science part.
      - 17y ago

dreadlabs 17y ago

This effectively kills an awesome project called titanium: http://www.appcelerator.com/ http://www.appcelerator.com/

warfangle 17y ago

While this sucks for iPhone developers who want to branch out / use other languages (clojure, etc), it might persuade these developers to move over to the Android platform. Especially given the several Android tablets forthcoming...

fab13n 17y ago
Apple is of course conscious of this trade-off (attractiveness of the platform+customer base vs. unattractiveness of being treated like shit by Apple). The thing is, they can easily back off when they will have to: today, most app developers won't snob the iPhone even if they're treated miserably. If they can't afford Android+iPhone portability, most of them will choose iPhone-only over Android-only. If/when a competitor starts to be attractive enough to represent a treat, Jobs will announce a big change towards a more developer-friendly policy. Today, he thinks he can get away with being a dick, and he's probably right IMO.
- fauigerzigerk 17y ago
  I think you are largely right, but don't forget that this pragmatic business view of the world does not dominate every phase in every hacker's life. Apple would be well advised to take note of the emotional sea change that helped sweep IBM and later Microsoft from their all powerful positions. Being hated is not a good position to be in for anyone, regardless of how powerful they may be at one point in time.
  - pedalpete 17y ago
    Was it Microsofts business practices that brought it down a few notches? or was it their lack of quality products? Currently, business decision makers are likely looking at the market penetration/mindshare of iPhone vs Android. However, in the coming months, I suspect we'll see a few points which steer businesses away from the iPhone. 1)you'll be able to develop apps to run on Android, WinMo 7, RIM and Palm, all likely using a single code-base and hooking into a framework which manages the different device api's (such as PhoneGap, or even Flash). 2)the overcrowding of the Apple store means as a business, you are trying to compete with thousands of others, while the other stores have less apps (at the time being), and more overall users. The AppStore is like a huge mall with 50 million people and 150,000 stores. The competing stores is like a mall with 100 million people, and only 10,000 stores. I'd much rather be one of fewer stores in a larger market, than the one of many in a smaller market.

tibbon 17y ago

So Frameworks like Unity for game development are basically dead, making it so that indie developers who don't have the money/ability to write their entire engines from scratch are nearly banished and putting only the AAA title makers in the running. Great...

ahi 17y ago
That is precisely the point. They don't need more apps, they need more AAA apps.
- Steve0 17y ago
  How about we let the consumer decide which apps are worthy of their cash. It's been going on for many years and this model works pretty good.
- wvenable 17y ago
  That might be true, but the implicit assumption here is that only EA can make AAA games and indie developers just produce crap. That assumption has been demonstrated to be false on both points.
  - lallysingh 17y ago
    Not at all! You can buy a few C++ game engines (e.g. Torque) and port them. I have Torque running on Linux, Solaris, Mac, & Windows. Considering it's normal posix underneath, you just have to redo some plumbing.
    - potatolicious 17y ago
      The iPhone is POSIX, but not to you as the developer. Porting Torque to the iPhone will have to be done by GarageGames, not by you - even if you pull it off it will certainly be violating a laundry list of App Store rules.
      - 17y ago

danparsonson 17y ago

The key is where they say "Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++." Take a pause and think about what that "originally" really means. Developers are not free to use any tools to help them. If there is some tool that converts some Pascal or, Ruby, or Java into Objective-C it is out of bounds, because then the code is not "originally" written in C. Yes it is "originally" written in C - when the Objective-C compiler first sees it. There's nothing in the quoted clause from the Apple T&Cs that says "written == written by a human". I really don't think this clause is aimed at code converters, but rather at e.g. run-times that execute byte code - see also "(e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited)". You don't link to an API until either compile- or run-time. Making an API call from a piece of code that is then converted into C is not 'linking to APIs through an intermediary layer'. OK, it still sucks, but it seems to me that both this article and the other similar one on here at the moment ("Apple takes stance on consciousness", http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1252438 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1252438) are based largely on a misinterpretation of the use of the word 'originally'.

isleyaardvark 17y ago
e.g. run-times that execute byte code I thought that was already forbidden. If so, why the change, if not to stymie thins like Adobe's Flash-to-iPhone converter?
ghshephard 17y ago
The "Originally" clause was placed in their _precisely_ to forbid code converters.
- danparsonson 17y ago
  Can I ask what your authority is on that? It seems that most people agree with you but I don't understand why!
  - smallblacksun 17y ago
    Because embedded interpreters in iphone apps are already banned in another part of the developer agreement?

etaque 17y ago

What about MacRuby ? It still isn't working for iPhone eventually, but does it mean "forbidden" now ?

00joe 17y ago

I've had a couple of close friends and relatives have health issues that almost killed them. Afterwords their personality changed. They became much more negative and harder to be around. The things I have read about Jobs is that he is a health nut. To have the problems he has had might have been a big emotional blow for him. Since he has come back, things have gotten much worse for partner relations and there is almost a continual barrage of news about Apple jerking someone around. I really think they could do better with a new CEO.

ahi 17y ago
You don't change CEOs because you want a nicer guy.
- pwhelan 17y ago
  You may change CEOs if their behavior habits change significantly, including them turning from narcissistic jerk to narcissistic jackass. Instability at the helm isn't a good thing, even if you are currently still heading in a good direction. I seriously doubt the legality of this part of the contract, which only sets them up for more legal battles with Adobe (with MSFT and GOOG as supporters) which will bleed cash, create ill-will among developers and take the focus off of doing what Apple does that creates its value. If you are thinking of developing a good tablet app, are you doing to want to deal with Apple OR will you try doing it on the new HP slate?
- Vivtek 17y ago
  You change CEOs when your current one starts making boneheaded power plays that will ultimately harm the company, but nobody has the balls to stand up to him because his eyes are weird.

endlessvoid94 17y ago

Enough! If you don't like Apple's terms of service, DONT USE APPLE, and DON'T DEVELOP SOFTWARE FOR APPLE'S PRODUCTS. It's not unfair. Whether or not he's insane is irrelevant. Stop bitching and solve the problem. EDIT: downvote me for having an opinion? come on, HN.

megamark16 17y ago
I'd rather just avoid the problem all together by building apps on an open system like Android.
- thenduks 17y ago
  That's what he just said. Don't develop for the platform you dislike/don't agree with the policies of/etc.

thenduks 17y ago

I don't get this at all. Why does everyone act like the iPhone should be as 'open' as an OS on your computer? Did everyone forget that when the iPhone shipped you couldn't write apps at all? You can't write apps in Erlang for your Zune, your PS3, your cable modem, your microwave, your car or your apartments alarm system... no one cares. Yes, Apple wants (insists, even, if this ToS becomes final) you to use their tools, their stack, etc for making apps on their consumer electronics device - shocking? No. Annoying? Of course. Don't like it? Go somewhere else!

wvenable 17y ago
"Did everyone forget that when the iPhone shipped you couldn't write apps at all?" Yup. And did you forget all the complaints about that too and then the jailbreaking and then the development of apps without any SDK at all? You have to wonder if Apple would have ever created the app store if programmers hadn't done all that. "Why does everyone act like the iPhone should be as 'open' as an OS on your computer?" Why shouldn't it be? You act like merely complaining about something should be a crime. If Apple is well within their rights to do what they want with their platform, we're well within our rights to complain about it.
- thenduks 17y ago
  Considering the level of polish on the Cocoa Touch frameworks and the surrounding tools at release I'd say Apple was planning the AppStore long before the mob started RABBLE-RABBLE-ing about it. Still, I am absolutely not saying you shouldn't be allowed to complain. My point is only that I don't see what there is to complain about. I wouldn't complain about this any more than I would about not being able to write apps for my current crappy cellphone. It isn't even that bad though, of course, because you can write apps for the iPhone, just not in arbitrary ways that Apple doesn't approve of. Anyway, it's ok that we don't agree -- it seems, at this time, that Apple and I are on the same page... We'll see if things change or not. I am obviously all for Apple being more open in general (having to use a Windows VM to sync my iPod is a huge pain in my ass, for example), I'm just not losing any sleep over it.
  - 17y ago

makmanalp 17y ago

This is another gem: “10.4 Press Releases and Other Publicity. You may not issue any press releases or make any other public statements regarding this Agreement, its terms and conditions, or the relationship of the parties without Apple’s express prior written approval, which may be withheld at Apple’s discretion.”

warfangle 17y ago
Somehow I doubt that clause is enforceable.
- anigbrowl 17y ago
  It's not enforceable in the same way that having all your apps removed from the app store isn't actionable. Anyone engaged in commercial development for the iPhone only does so at Apple's pleasure, which may be revoked at any time. Of course, if this causes your users to seek refunds and you have already spent your earnings, that could get problematic.

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

grellas 17y ago

Legally, Apple can do pretty much what it likes on its own platform and there is nothing anybody can do about it except accept their restrictions or decline to deal with them and hope for the best with commercially viable alternatives. Someday, though, as Apple's strategy continues to unfold, and as it continues to tighten restrictions on others' ability to develop for each device, to use its dominance of one device (e.g., iPhone) to leverage market share in others (e.g., iPad), and to exert significant control over a range of devices that are nominally independent but actually inter-connected, the idea of "platform" will blur and Apple will likely have to own up to the antitrust police, just as Microsoft did with respect to the desktop OS market. I am not an antitrust lawyer and the above may in fact be naive. Instinctively, though, the apparent arrogance behind Apple's methods of throwing sharp elbows toward competitors has all the feel of what Microsoft did in the 1990s as it used its desktop OS leverage to favor MS Office/Internet Explorer, etc. and to harm independent software vendors trying to market their apps for the PC market. Ditto for IBM before that. And, while we are at it, though no two people could possibly be so different in so many ways, it would appear that Steve Jobs has drawn his competitive (or anti-competitive) inspiration right from John D. Rockefeller, who was a control freak over his markets and who often used such control in even ruthless ways to stifle competition. We are nowhere near the stage where Apple can seriously be declared a monopolist in any relevant market but Apple certainly seems bent on pushing the limit as it goes along its path on its quest for hegemony.

steamer25 17y ago

Couldn't another motivation be that they don't want to hire app reviewers with fluency in every language under the sun? They have no way of enforcing the Swahili/Milli Vanilli/mud -> C via Oompa Loompa exception, provided that the C is readable and appears to be 'orginally written'. I see it as a natural outgrowth of the chaperone model that a good number of users have tolerated/embraced.

wvenable 17y ago
App reviewers don't get the source code so that's not a valid point.
- steamer25 16y ago
  How do they know what tools were used to create the app?

dpcan 17y ago

So this means, if you write a game for Android first, then want to write it for iPhone, tough luck, better start with them??

alexandros 17y ago

I was always critical of Apple's closed ecosystem but nobody saw this coming. In a sense, they're not even leaving room for doubt that they are not to be trusted. What's worse, essentially developers are now told that they have to put up or shut up, since Apple has the apps market cornered, and their app store full of apps. Developers take heed. Every time you write an application for Steve's app store, it's just one more weapon that steve can and will use against you and every other developer when he decides he has a reason. Nobody saw this one coming, and I shudder to think what's next. One more thing: what about apps that have been already written with some translation tool? Do the developers have to rewrite in Obj-C or abandon altogether? How is this in the interest of the users exactly?

crux_ 17y ago
> nobody saw this coming Surely you jest. Lots and lots of people saw this coming; they were just dismissed as radical idealistic free software hippies.
jasonlotito 17y ago
" but nobody saw this coming" No, lots of people did. People dismisses us. Oh, we might not have specified exactly what they were going to do, but essentially it turned out that way. Remember the Bikini Apps, and everyone who dismissed it and applauded Apples efforts? These people should be applauding yet more restrictions. Look, Apple has already demonstrated it want's control over everything. This means even the web. Open standards doesn't mean anything. WebKit is their ability to control it. Open standards is nice, but just look at what happened with Flash. The only thing they are doing is using open standards to get to the next step, and then locking it under their own key. This has been going on for a long time. It's not new. iHTML isnt a joke. I guarantee you Apple wants control over the web. If they could do it right now, Safari on the web would be restricted much more than it already is. People might still call me alarmist, but so far, I've been proven right, and they've been proven wrong.

icey 17y ago

The way the section is worded makes me wonder if this also prohibits ports of applications from other platforms. What does "originally" mean when Apple says it?

va_coder 17y ago

1984

godDLL 17y ago
newspeak

david927 17y ago

Developers! Developers! Developers! (Please go away...)

nfnaaron 17y ago

So why doesn't Adobe just add a feature to their tool, that will take an app originally written for the iPhone in Jobs-approved languages, suck that source up and produce either source for Adobe's tools or source directly for other phones? It doesn't take care of existing apps that were written elsewhere first, but it does take care people who can write iPhone apps and would like to port those elsewhere.

83457 17y ago
Seems like a valid idea but defeats their current purpose of making flash development available for the iphone

bsaunder 17y ago

Gee, I thought they meant "originally" as in: "My code was originally written in C, but I've now ported it to Clojure." ;) Of course as I make changes, it produces C that compiles to normal .o files that are then (without any further translation, compatibility layer, or tool required) linked with the Documented APIs.

zppx 17y ago

The situation isn't new, what type of company press their employees to not write blogs or have twitter accounts about something they should be proud? This is my main instance against Apple, Apple is partly a soviet style bureaucracy, it's impossible to know right now from whom the good ideas came from, basically people blame or praise Steve Jobs after every show keynote for the work that a team of great anonymous engineers are developing for each new product. This don't show that Steve Jobs is mad, it only says that the board of directors is either oppressive towards Apple employee or submissive towards Jobs, anyway incompetent, but it is hard to say about incompetence when your company is so lucrative.

JeremyChase 17y ago

This rule is only in there so they can justify their selective enforcement. I'm sure you'll still be able to do whatever you want, but it gives them a line to point to when not approving certain apps they don't like for whatever reason.

grumpyfart 17y ago

"It is perhaps reasonable to specify the nature of the programs that can be sold in the AppStore. It is not reasonable to specify how developers create those programs so long as the end result meets the specified end result criteria." Can you see the pattern? About a couple of months ago we were swearing to Apple because of AppStore policies, and now AppStore policy to ban random apps is acceptable since they introduced even more ridiculous terms. I like the way how Steve plays!

doron 17y ago

It is interesting to revisit this thread based on Alex Payne moderate request for openness - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1243445 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1243445 Apple progression to restrictive hardline, is going against developers with a generally pragmatic approach. Apple seems to give no quarter when it comes to their inane lock down practices, developers shouldn't give much benefit of the doubt to apple either.

latch 17y ago

You know, this whole Apple thing finally makes sense to me. They are simply trying to tie their developer community to their platform. Now is the time to do it, when competition is low. There's virtually no chance of this having any noticeable impact in its established community of developers. By year-end, when competition is a bit stronger, the groundwork they've put in place today will make it less likely that developers will bother to learn another platform. Its what Microsoft did with Java and Netscape. It's what they did with IE. I'm not saying its right. I'm just saying I finally understand it. (and I know MS was sued, and lost, for each of those infractions).

commieneko 17y ago
> They are simply trying to tie their developer community to their platform. No, they are trying to tie the _consumer_ to their platform. They couldn't care less about developers outside them providing consumers a reason to buy their product. (and as a source of revenue.) Apple _does_ want to control what _media_ can be played on their platform. And they way to control that is to control what developers can do. Notice there is no VLC on the iPhone? No Mplayer? No open codecs what-so-ever. (and certainly no FLASH...) At some point expect there to be a (surprise!!!) clamp down on h264 encoding, enforced by patents and licenses.

j00lz 17y ago

How does Apple get away with such monopolistic behaviour, if Microsoft had an app store would antitrust lawsuits prevail?

MaysonL 17y ago

I wonder if the restrictions on language used in development will also apply to their new ad program?

eagleal 17y ago
As I understood, the developers will access the iAd network via APIs. Is the APIs available for different ad networks or only iAd. This is interesting because the thing where this is not clear, it's the fact that Jobs said you can use any ad serving network. Bur if the APIs are available only for the iAd, and since you are stack with Apple approval process (and the language restrictions) you can't use 3rd party technology (eg. embedding Flash ads), and as a result you can't use any other network.

robryan 17y ago

Problem is with the app store is that a number of developers could reject these changes and decide to develop elsewhere, but instead of improving the situation on other platforms it would probably just be that the remaining app store developers would be now getting a bigger piece of the pie. I think there is an incentive for developers to turn a blind eye to some of the more crazy apple app store policies because if people leave it benefits them and there is no viable alternative at the moment for someone wanting to make a living selling mobile applications.

jpark 17y ago

"Today, we celebrate the first glorious anniversary of the Information Purification Directives. We have created for the first time in all history, a garden of pure ideology. Where each worker may bloom secure from the pests of contradictory and confusing truths. Our Unification of Thoughts is more powerful a weapon than any fleet or army on earth. We are one people, with one will, one resolve, one cause. Our enemies shall talk themselves to death and we will bury them with their own confusion. We shall prevail!" How far we've come.

c00p3r 17y ago

Good news for those who had invested in Android.

azzleandre 17y ago

This is really funny, since this is just the transcription of their daily business practice, so your experience shold have told you earlier. But only now do people see it, after years of Apple behaving this way, people still cramming to get into the apple-bottom, who are you to blame apple for actually write it down?

deleted 17y ago

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profgarrett 17y ago

Actually created an account to write this... What surprises me is not as much Apple's move (though it is truly ridiculous), as some apologists' responses. Talking about how "Adobe's just as bad," or that "it'll reduce crappy software in the store," or that "Apple's within their rights" is really missing the point. The point is that this is totally unnecessary from a technological perspective. It's totally a business move to destroy competitors and pursue a bizarre vendetta against Adobe. I teach in a business school, and am very 'pro competitive edge,' but this is just so short-sighted. Apple's competitive moves seem oriented to reducing anyone who could be a competitor to rubble out of some misguided belief that the iPhone paradigm is theirs, and that they should be able to dictate who makes money off of it. Ultimately, any business adopting this approach dies. It make take 4-8 years for a competitor's product to reach equivalency, but it'll happen. Tech moves so fast that it'll be tough to keep a closed environment (even a good one) on top. Furthermore, (and really to the point) I don't want to do business with any firm that thinks they can dictate if or how much profit I can make, or how I can approach my particular niche of interest. Apple keeps on reducing the way you can build apps; how do I know that my next app isn't going to compete with mobile Pages & get pulled? They're creating a totally closed and controlled platform, and you better hope that you don't run across any of their plans. It's a terrible business environment, and totally destructive. Ridiculous.

ahoyhere 17y ago

I honestly can't believe the stupidity of the metaphors in this thread. Cattle grazing on the commons? Like Apple's telling you "Don't program in a functional style"? It's a problem if the only store in town won't stock your goods? Telling Leonardo da Vinci he can only use gummy? Is Apple pissing in your freedom flakes? Really? The iPhone is not a commons. It was never a commons. No smartphone device IS a commons. Apple is not dictating your programming style. They are dictating that you do not run cross-compiled software, written in a non-native language, on their device. This is not unreasonable. There is nothing illegal, or immoral, or even marginally unreasonable, with a store refusing to stock your goods. Even if it's the only store in town. It's not like telling Leonardo he can only use one medium, because of course, the iPhone is not the whole world, where da Vinci lived. If one customer of da Vinci's only wanted art done in gummy, that would be an accurate parallel. Seriously, guys, this is HN. Let's see some of that logical thinking.

coliveira 17y ago

If you develop software for the iPhone/iPad, you are just a supplier for Apple's app store. It is not unheard that companies require a process from their suppliers.

motters 17y ago

Apple, who is primarily a computer hardware manufacturer, shouldn't be in the business of dictating what tools or languages software engineers use to create applications.