6 ms·

Apple banning apps built with PhoneGap

45 points by geuis 17y ago

tzury 17y ago
software dictators!
davidw 17y ago
In the short term, open and/or free might not be as attractive, but after you've seen these things come and go, they become more attractive, even if there are some initial deficiencies with regards to proprietary systems.
bad_user 17y ago
Google's Android looks more attractive every day. Although I do understand that Apple has to keep some level of quality in their store (they're not doing a good job imho), clearly they haven't learned anything from their own history ... a platform friendly to hackers wins in the long run.
- tlrobinson 17y ago
  As much as we'd like for that to be true, I don't think it is, otherwise Linux would have "won" a long time ago.
  - bad_user 17y ago
    One of the reasons Windows won was by being open to developers. It was pretty common back in the days for OS vendors to put a price on the SDK. And Linux was just starting. Linux is friendly on the server side, but on the client side there are many things lacking.
    - jasongullickson 17y ago
      "One of the reasons Windows won was by being open to developers. It was pretty common back in the days for OS vendors to put a price on the SDK" Until recently, Windows development more or less required commercial development tools costing hundreds of dollars; how is that any different? Even now, the free Microsoft tools are much more limited than their for-pay counterparts and if you use tools outside of the ones Microsoft provides, you risk lack of support, incompatibility and less-than-seamless integration with operating system features.
      - ajross 17y ago
        Windows, and MS-DOS before it, were vastly more open to development than competing platforms. Microsoft and Borland's development tools weren't free, but they were cheap. MSDN subscriptions didn't start becoming a significant revenue source for Microsoft until well after its monopoly status was assured.
        jasongullickson 17y ago
        I won't contest you in regard to MSDOS, in many ways the Borland tools were superior to Microsoft's and were fairly affordable as well. I disagree in regard to Windows however, although to be clear, what "competing platforms" are you referring to?
- jasongullickson 17y ago
  That depends on what you mean by "win". If by winning you mean their platform is adopted by hackers and becomes popular with the subculture, then yes I agree with you. On the other hand, they may be more interested in defining "winning" as selling product to an audience that is not opposed to paying a premium price for quality if that means sacrificing some flexibility. Anyway, I'm not sure what's so "hacker un-friendly" about the current SDK. You can write and use anything you want on your own phone by paying nothing more than the $99 "anti-bozo tax", you just can't count on being able to distribute it via iTunes. If you're serious about being "open and free", you can even distribute your app without restriction in source code form. ...and for "serious" hackers, there's always the jailbreak option. Yes that will void your warranty and such but when has that stopped a good hacker before?
  - mcantelon 17y ago
    Hackers care about being able to work unfettered. Not being able to distribute your application in a form that anyone with the hardware can use would qualify as fettered. The jailbreak option is not a viable option when jailbreaking requires extra work on the user's part and carries the risk of impeding the upgrading of the phone's operating system.
lethain 17y ago
I think the developers of phone gap are at fault here for suggesting that their platform/toolkit is usable on the iPhone. Whether or not developers agree with the restriction against interpreted code, it has been very clear since long before the public iphone developer kit that it was not allowable to write code in an interpreted language. The exception to this is websites running javascript when a browser visits them (i.e. client side javascript for a webapp), and that is quite different than packaging javascript into an application and deploying that application to an iPhone.
- mbrubeck 17y ago
  Here's the actual text from the iPhone SDK Agreement: "No interpreted code may be downloaded and used in an Application except for code that is interpreted and run by Apple’s Published APIs and built-in interpreter(s)." It only forbids applications from interpreting code that they download. The JavaScript code for PhoneGap apps is installed on the phone. Also, it has an explicit exception for using built-in, documented interpreters like WebKit/JavaScriptCore. (Otherwise no applications that embedded a WebKit control could legally view any web page that contained script elements.)
  - lethain 17y ago
    Although I understand the appeal of your argument, using a 3rd party workaround to provide support for performing javascript interpretation outside of the browser--whether or not they happen to be hijacking the system's underlying javascript interpreter--is not an "Apple Published API".
    - mbrubeck 17y ago
      As far as I can tell from the PhoneGap source code, it just embeds a UIWebView and hooks into its standard APIs and events. I didn't spot any unpublished APIs in use. Can you give an example of what you mean by "hijacking"? If I built a non-PhoneGap application that used a WebView to display pages I built with HTML/CSS/JavaScript, do you think that would violate the SDK agreement?
jrnkntl 17y ago
As someone who has an iphone app live in the app store created with PhoneGap I call BS on this one. I think the problem is consistency within the approval process instead of lying the problem at PhoneGap.
- mcantelon 17y ago
  How is it BS? Are they not disapproving iPhone apps on the grounds that they use Phonegap?
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
themanual 17y ago
I think the problem might be that Phonegap allows people to develop rich internet applications. From there, it's only a hop and a skip to implementing a web browser, which they do not want app developers to do. Look at these two pages to see how I arrived at that theory: http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.dev.platforms.mobile/browse_thread/thread/ca8a7fe623451635/04b770306a55326b http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.dev.platforms.mobile/... http://gizmodo.com/5072333/opera-for-iphone-ready-to-go-if-not-for-apples-app-store-policies http://gizmodo.com/5072333/opera-for-iphone-ready-to-go-if-n...
- Morn 17y ago
  I don't think this can be true - look at iCab Mobile, for example - it's pretty upfront about being a web browser.
ieatpaste 17y ago
If this is merely based on platform, Apple is simply setting a precedent for other frameworks. From a business perspective, they don't want to lose direct control of the development of applications, especially since the Apple app approval ;) process has been shown to have holes as of late.

45 points by geuis 17y ago

tzury 17y ago

software dictators!

In the short term, open and/or free might not be as attractive, but after you've seen these things come and go, they become more attractive, even if there are some initial deficiencies with regards to proprietary systems.

bad_user 17y ago

Google's Android looks more attractive every day. Although I do understand that Apple has to keep some level of quality in their store (they're not doing a good job imho), clearly they haven't learned anything from their own history ... a platform friendly to hackers wins in the long run.

tlrobinson 17y ago
As much as we'd like for that to be true, I don't think it is, otherwise Linux would have "won" a long time ago.
- bad_user 17y ago
  One of the reasons Windows won was by being open to developers. It was pretty common back in the days for OS vendors to put a price on the SDK. And Linux was just starting. Linux is friendly on the server side, but on the client side there are many things lacking.
  - jasongullickson 17y ago
    "One of the reasons Windows won was by being open to developers. It was pretty common back in the days for OS vendors to put a price on the SDK" Until recently, Windows development more or less required commercial development tools costing hundreds of dollars; how is that any different? Even now, the free Microsoft tools are much more limited than their for-pay counterparts and if you use tools outside of the ones Microsoft provides, you risk lack of support, incompatibility and less-than-seamless integration with operating system features.
    - ajross 17y ago
      Windows, and MS-DOS before it, were vastly more open to development than competing platforms. Microsoft and Borland's development tools weren't free, but they were cheap. MSDN subscriptions didn't start becoming a significant revenue source for Microsoft until well after its monopoly status was assured.
      - jasongullickson 17y ago
        I won't contest you in regard to MSDOS, in many ways the Borland tools were superior to Microsoft's and were fairly affordable as well. I disagree in regard to Windows however, although to be clear, what "competing platforms" are you referring to?
jasongullickson 17y ago
That depends on what you mean by "win". If by winning you mean their platform is adopted by hackers and becomes popular with the subculture, then yes I agree with you. On the other hand, they may be more interested in defining "winning" as selling product to an audience that is not opposed to paying a premium price for quality if that means sacrificing some flexibility. Anyway, I'm not sure what's so "hacker un-friendly" about the current SDK. You can write and use anything you want on your own phone by paying nothing more than the $99 "anti-bozo tax", you just can't count on being able to distribute it via iTunes. If you're serious about being "open and free", you can even distribute your app without restriction in source code form. ...and for "serious" hackers, there's always the jailbreak option. Yes that will void your warranty and such but when has that stopped a good hacker before?
- mcantelon 17y ago
  Hackers care about being able to work unfettered. Not being able to distribute your application in a form that anyone with the hardware can use would qualify as fettered. The jailbreak option is not a viable option when jailbreaking requires extra work on the user's part and carries the risk of impeding the upgrading of the phone's operating system.

lethain 17y ago

I think the developers of phone gap are at fault here for suggesting that their platform/toolkit is usable on the iPhone. Whether or not developers agree with the restriction against interpreted code, it has been very clear since long before the public iphone developer kit that it was not allowable to write code in an interpreted language. The exception to this is websites running javascript when a browser visits them (i.e. client side javascript for a webapp), and that is quite different than packaging javascript into an application and deploying that application to an iPhone.

mbrubeck 17y ago
Here's the actual text from the iPhone SDK Agreement: "No interpreted code may be downloaded and used in an Application except for code that is interpreted and run by Apple’s Published APIs and built-in interpreter(s)." It only forbids applications from interpreting code that they download. The JavaScript code for PhoneGap apps is installed on the phone. Also, it has an explicit exception for using built-in, documented interpreters like WebKit/JavaScriptCore. (Otherwise no applications that embedded a WebKit control could legally view any web page that contained script elements.)
- lethain 17y ago
  Although I understand the appeal of your argument, using a 3rd party workaround to provide support for performing javascript interpretation outside of the browser--whether or not they happen to be hijacking the system's underlying javascript interpreter--is not an "Apple Published API".
  - mbrubeck 17y ago
    As far as I can tell from the PhoneGap source code, it just embeds a UIWebView and hooks into its standard APIs and events. I didn't spot any unpublished APIs in use. Can you give an example of what you mean by "hijacking"? If I built a non-PhoneGap application that used a WebView to display pages I built with HTML/CSS/JavaScript, do you think that would violate the SDK agreement?

jrnkntl 17y ago

As someone who has an iphone app live in the app store created with PhoneGap I call BS on this one. I think the problem is consistency within the approval process instead of lying the problem at PhoneGap.

mcantelon 17y ago
How is it BS? Are they not disapproving iPhone apps on the grounds that they use Phonegap?

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

themanual 17y ago

I think the problem might be that Phonegap allows people to develop rich internet applications. From there, it's only a hop and a skip to implementing a web browser, which they do not want app developers to do. Look at these two pages to see how I arrived at that theory: http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.dev.platforms.mobile/browse_thread/thread/ca8a7fe623451635/04b770306a55326b http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.dev.platforms.mobile/... http://gizmodo.com/5072333/opera-for-iphone-ready-to-go-if-not-for-apples-app-store-policies http://gizmodo.com/5072333/opera-for-iphone-ready-to-go-if-n...

Morn 17y ago
I don't think this can be true - look at iCab Mobile, for example - it's pretty upfront about being a web browser.

ieatpaste 17y ago

If this is merely based on platform, Apple is simply setting a precedent for other frameworks. From a business perspective, they don't want to lose direct control of the development of applications, especially since the Apple app approval ;) process has been shown to have holes as of late.