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iPhone SDK Agreement Shuts Out HyperCard Clone
Halo1 writes "Demonstrating it's not just about Flash, Apple has officially rejected for the first time another alternative iPhone development environment following its controversial iPhone SDK Agreement changes. Even though RunRev proposed to retool its HyperCard-style development environment to directly expose all of the iPhone OS's APIs, Steve Jobs still rejected its proposal. The strength of RunRev's business case, with a large-scale iPad deployment project in education hinging on the availability of its tool, does not bode well for projects that have less commercial clout. Salient point: at last February's shareholders' meeting, Jobs went on the record saying that something like HyperCard on the iPad would be great, 'but someone would have to create it.'"
Just imagine the outcry if Microsoft banned all other development environments than Visual Studio and .NET from Windows. It would be hit with lawsuits and there would be tons of stories and tens of thousands of comments dissing MS on slashdot.
People also always cry about how consoles are locked down. Slashdotters cry about DRM, restrictions and not giving them control of the devices they buy.
But suddenly when it's Apple it's all ok. Why the hell?
Jobs went on the record saying that something like HyperCard on the iPad would be great, 'but someone would have to create it'.
This being the same Steve Jobs that effectively killed the original Apple Hypercard back in 2000?
Maybe that should have read, "something like HyperCard on the iPad would be great, but we would have to create it, otherwise it clearly would not be insanely great..."
For something like Hypercard? Sure.
This isn't just the 10,000th fart app.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Steve is really trying to sell himself short, here. His reality distortion field has gone to his head, and he thinks he's bulletproof. And you know what? When he was the only game in town, he was bulletproof.
But he's not the only game in town. In fact, as of 1st Q 2010, he's not even the biggest game in town! As an application developer myself, the recent shenanigans around dictating to developers like me how we can or can't do our job and/or what tools we can use make the iphone a non-starter.
Sorry, too hostile for me, too much lockin for my clients, and not enough benefit. Android it is!
Isn't it ironic that the company responsible for opening up the smartphone market is now offering the most closed platform?
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
This is not about an iPhone app, but about a development environment to create iPhone apps. The company contacted Apple after the SDK agreement changes to determine whether there was any way they could adapt it to the new requirements, and apparently got their final rejection notice from Steve Jobs (see the fine article).
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Then perhaps the question should be phrased as:
- how would this app need to be created so as to meet the requirements of the license?
That's exactly what they asked Apple, including offering several suggestions of their own. The result, quoting the article:
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Do you mean to say that Microsoft is now going to force developers to publish through its app store and nothing else?
This appears correct.
I did not know that. Citation needed please.
From this InformationWeek article: "All apps must be approved by Microsoft, and can only be distributed via the Windows Marketplace for Mobile."
Everything that has gotten approved so far uses XCode as a build step. You don't necessarily have to do all your development work in XCode (i.e. Unity game engine),
Where have you seen that Unity has been approved by Apple? All I've seen is the Unity people saying "we think we're fine because Apple can't afford to remove all apps on the appstore that have been built with our engine, but obviously we can't offer any guarantees".
Cross compile to an XCode project with things like static libraries for your runtime and everything will be fine.
I'm not sure how you can interpret an SDK agreement stating, a.o.,
as
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Are you completely new to the cellphone industry? There have been development kits available before the IPhone or IPod even existed. I wrote my own apps using J2MEE long before Apple decided to enter the market. That is on phones NOT considered smart phones.
Apple is not the first cellphone manufactuer to support dev tools, but they are definitely one of the first to disallow someone who owns a device from choosing what to create or run on it.
They are also a first for dictating what development environments or even PREPROCESSORS a developer can use. XBox, Nintendo, Sony, etc all allow apps to be compiled in C/C++ to their target ABI (Application Binary Interface).
You present a failed comparison. In the world of cellphones, and closed systems, this is a first, and it should anger anyone who thinks they should actually OWN a device.
Microsoft is doing what it always does: Copying.
But in this case, the copying went the other way around. Microsoft had the XNA Creators Club ($99 per year) and Xbox Live Indie Games several months before Apple had the iPhone Developer Program ($99 per year) and App Store. This is just Microsoft extending the XNA model to phones.
I'd hate to tell you this, but no one cares about openness except a handful of geeks.
This is why when I flew last weekend I saw two groups of devices being handled by passengers flying. E-ink readers and iPads.
Not tablets, slates, netbooks. iPads and Kindles/nooks.
Revolution isn't about what YOU as a super nerd can do with devices it's about what everyone can do with a device.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Apple is not selling the iPad as a PC or even as a computer. It's a device.
Ah, but the PC Folks' world is slipping away. When iPads are all that exist, no one can compute anything Jobs doesn't allow. And that happy thought is what keeps him alive.
I hate it when people trot out that tired convicted monopolist argument.
So if tomorrow the Supreme Court found Apple to be a monopolist with regards to smartphones (setting aside all plausibility arguments as to such, this is a hypothetical), I presume that would make you say what Apple is doing is wrong?
I somehow doubt that would be the case for most people that raise the convicted monopolist argument.
Legality is not the same as morality.
If we were all guaranteed with a crystal ball that Apple would forever remain a niche player and that the iPhone/iPad mobile ecosystem would not become the dominant paradigm of mobile computing, then I would agree with you. However, given Apple's current trajectory, this conclusion is by no means clear to me. So in the meantime, I am trying to prevent that from happening, but raising attention to the bad things that would happen if Apple's current growth continues unimpeded.
This is about rights and freedoms. Freedom of choice is meaningless if when the time comes to make a choice, there is only one thing to choose from.
Eh, nowhere in my post do I reference individual Macbook models, or Macbooks in general. There is also no "rugged Macbook" (which I would love), etc. I guess I don't understand your argument here.
Regardless of what hardware they offer, when it comes to developing for OS X it's like any other operating system, and that will never change.
Unless you're referring to the word monopoly by its legal definition, which would not be relevant to discussions of whether what Apple does ought to be considered a problem, how you define whether something is a monopoly is crucially important.
Everyone loves to trot out that Nokia owns something like 50% of the global market for smartphones. Then they gleefully point out, Apple isn't a monopoly!
However, you take the players that are bigger than Apple on the market, and you examine their products. Nokia's so-called smartphones are not used as smartphones by the vast majority of their users. What percentage of Nokia users have ever installed a program on their phone? Likewise Blackberry's so-called smartphones are used basically as email/messenger terminals. The only significant installed programs on Blackberry's are those that are pre-installed by the corporation's IT department.
The only major player besides Apple in the real general purpose mobile computing device market is Google Android. However, despite their recent uptick in sales, at the moment, if we were to look at installed base of Android and iPhone OS mobile devices, iPhone OS is in a monopoly position.
It may not be a legally cognizable category to act upon (yet), but the real market we need to be looking at is mobile general computing products. Mobile computing very likely will replace what we now call desktop computing in the future, and if current trends continue, we may find ourselves in a situation where what we can run on our computers is in the hands of a single company that has exercised power ruthlessly in the past.
Long story short, Apple is a monopoly in an emerging market that looks like it will be incredibly important in the future. When it acts like a dick with the power that it has now, I'm going to try to convince others to consider Apple's business practices as a bad thing.
I don't know anyone here in the US personally who gets by with their iPad/iPhone alone
That's because it has to be synced to iTunes before it will work. Once Apple drops that restriction, watch people start "get[ting] by with their iPad/iPhone alone". A lot of people in Japan, where homes are smaller due to exorbitant land values, already get buy with other models of phone alone.
I haven't heard Toyota calling for developers to come develop for their platform, nor have I seen them using developers to create the usefulness that justify the price a Prius commands. A Prius is worth its price out of the box. IMO, the iPhone and the iPad would be worth much less than they are if not for 3rd party developers. Apple quite often uses the work of these 3rd party developers as bullet points to why you should purchase one of their devices. Without them, you've just purchased an $800 combination Movie/Music player and internet browser.
The word "entitlement" is thrown around as a negative, but in this case - perhaps yes - developers are entitled some amount of consideration from Apple. Note - I said consideration. Thus far, it's only been Apple's way or the highway.
That's only because of the limited and artificial way in which 'monopoly' is defined'.
If apple computers were "PC-compatible" and could run all PC programs just as well as any Win7 box, then I'd say they can be judged in the same class. But that's not the case.
Apple's != PC's. Therefore, they should be judged as being in a separate container.
There are few or NO competitors to Apple in the OS-"x" (x={6,7,8...}) space.
There are no competitors to Apple in the "iphone-compatible" space. There are no other phones by other manufacturers, that can run iphone programs. When there ARE, then we would have 'competition'. But Apple is a monopoly in this space. As well as in the OS-x space.