iPhone OS 4.0: now with added evil
Hidden among the details of Apple’s announcement of the next version of the iPhone operating system last week was a nasty, snide little addition to the terms and conditions that iPhone app developers must agree to in order to get their apps into the App Store.
In effect, it says that you must use Apple’s developer tools and preferred programming language to develop iPhone apps. Which, on the face of it, is uncontroversial. It’s Apple’s platform, so you use Apple tools and languages. The problem is that there are significant efforts from other companies and projects to make it easier to transition to iPhone app development from other platforms, such as Microsoft’s .NET and Adobe’s Flash, as well as to make it easier to write apps that run on multiple mobile platforms. Apple’s devotees have had problems with these alternative platforms before, as I wrote a few months ago, but now Apple have taken the extraordinary step of embedding their own language preference in the terms and conditions of even being an iPhone developer at all.
