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Apple Eases Restrictions On iPhone Developers

Posted by timothy on from the ok-but-you're-on-thin-ice dept.

WrongSizeGlass writes "MacRumors has a story on a report by Apple Outsider's Matt Drance that Apple is easing their restrictions on interpreted code used in iPhone development, a change which allows game developers in particular to continue to use interpreted languages such as Lua in their App Store applications. The change comes alongside Apple's further modifications of its iOS developer terms that again allow for limited analytics data collection to aid advertisers and developers, but appear to shut out non-independent companies such as Google's AdMob from receiving the data. It's not enough of an 'about face' to let Adobe or Google back in the picture but they've backpedaled enough to let the little guys squeeze through."

4 of 195 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Common sense prevails by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Troll

    The restriction made no sense. If you're not allowed to embed lua, you'd probably write a small DSL for your app.

    And at what point does merely switching on data at runtime become an interpreted language? How about parsing data from a declarative data format (eg: xml/yaml)?

    Ruby, python, perl, flash, mono, java... There's valid reasons to not want all this crud on customers devices, there's also valid reasons for specialist apps to bundle runtimes. Nobody is served by the dimwit developer who bundles a language runtime and several libraries for the appstore equivalent of hello world. One suspects this is what Apple really wanted to avoid.

  2. Re:big nothing by kanweg · · Score: 0, Troll

    I can only imagine the parent saying "QED".

    Bert

  3. Re:Today they allow it, tomorrow it will be forbid by jo_ham · · Score: 1, Troll

    You're ignoring a 100 million installed base because you're worried about losing development resources if you do something against the terms of the dev agreement?

    I guess your company's website only works in IE too, right?

  4. Re:Common sense prevails by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Troll

    At least Python users generally admit that they're using Python as a prototyping language, just because it allows for quick, but shitty, development. When their idea is somewhat proven, then go back and rewrite it using a real programming language like Java or C++.

    Ruby users, on the other hand, are usually quite ignorant of other technologies. It becomes the old when-all-you-have-is-a-hammer scenario. They try to build large systems using Ruby (see Twitter), which then subsequently perform like utter shit (see Twitter), and finally prove to be unusable (see Twitter).