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>1. Adobe isn't completely innocent.

Who cares about a company being "innocent" ? What does that even mean ?

>(their Creative Suite costs as much as a MacBook Pro)

Do you have a serious study saying that Creative Suite is overpriced ? Because it doesn't look that way to me. And what does that even have to do with anything ?

>I'm sure they don't want to deal with developers using up their support time over things that are the fault of Adobe's Flash SDK or Novell's C# one.

So they could have added a clause to the dev agreement saying they won't support the dev choosing to go with other SDK's or languages. That would have been a TOTALLY different story no ?

> 3. It's also in Apple's interest to [...]

Of course it's in Apple's interest. The way they're ready to alienate a non negligible part of their partner's base (because that's what devs should be, partners) for their short term interrest is kind of scary though. I even really doubt it's a clever strategy if you consider Apple's interest alone.

>Do I like Apple's stance? No. As a user and a developer, it's bad for me. However, Apple's the market leader and getting people to use their API gives them control

However what ? You know the problem isn't even the fact that the platform is closed to others languages. If it has been like that from the beginning of the IPhone/Ipad, it wouldn't be the same problem at all. The real problem in this story is that Apple is ready to screw other peoples businesses. It reminds me of the Playstation3/Linux story, in some ways. People have invested time and money in this platform, and yet Apple decides to change the terms of the game and screw them over completely. The fact that they have the right to do it doesn't make it right. It's immoral and wrong.

> Adobe isn't known for being open. Given the chance, Adobe seems to wall itself off as much as Apple.

Examples please. I may have forgotten some things, but on the top of my mind, i can't find anything even remotely similar to this.

  People have invested time and money in this platform, and yet Apple decides to 
  change the terms of the game and screw them over completely.

Investing in a platform does not guarantee you'll profit from your investment, nor does it oblige the provider to continue providing you the means to recoup your investment.

The fact that they have the right to do it doesn't make it right.

What in this sentence do you not understand ?

Also, Apple relies on developers to make some of their profit. Even if it's a relatively small profit, screwing theirs openly doesn't look like a very clever business practice to me.

Is it "wrong" or is it just obnoxious and bad business?

Did Apple make some sort of promise not to pull this sort of nonsense? Such promises do exist, BTW. They are called Open Source licenses. (Not an Open Source zealot by any means!)

Lesson learned, time to move on. Make a note that Apple is capable of this. Protect yourself with platform diversification or with platform on a FOSS license. Move on and make something of value.

Clearly you've never spent a lot of your hard earned money and time on something just to have it squashed by some big company :) Believe me it's not fun feeling...

Adobe doesn't restrict the creation of swf players or swf creation tools. Gnash,Swfdec are free open source alternatives to Adobe Flash Player.

There is some debate about whether the Adobe/Macromedia Flash EULA can be considered binding, but Gnash developers prefer to avoid the issue by not installing Adobe/Macromedia tools, and thereby not accepting the EULA. We can use tools like Ming to generate Flash testcases, and we rely on the efforts of volunteers to run our testcases on commercial software and report the result.

http://www.gnashdev.org/?q=node/25#eula http://www.gnashdev.org/?q=node/64

Other implementations do exist, but Adobe has taken action to hamper those efforts.

EDIT: Other people can argue for as long as they like about what is considered hampering, but Adobe isn't exactly free and open with flash.

I know i will get downmodded for saying this, but the blog entry is from 2008 and and the faq you linked to speaks only of a debatable possibility of possible restrictions in Adobe's then EULA.

See http://www.openscreenproject.org/about/faq.html to see how much Adobe has opened up since.

Also, it is worth noting that Adobe has never gone after these open source swf player projects.While i agree that Adobe is not as open as it should be, i dont see any reason not to appreciate a good gesture from a powerful company.

> I know i will get downmodded for saying this

I hate when people say this. It's like saying "my point is valid, but people on HN are too stupid to get it".

Or you could look at it as someone saying that they know saying something will cost them karma, but they feel it's important enough to say anyway.

Or you could look on it as someone trying to pretend that's the case. No one knows for sure, maybe not even the poster.

> Adobe has never gone after these open source swf player projects.

They went after rtmpdump, a tool developed by the gnash devs after clean-room reverse engineering to eventually bring RTMP support (client video streaming) to gnash and other free players:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Time_Messaging_Protocol#RT...

> rtmpdump is an open-source command-line tool that is designed to dump the full RTMP stream. It implements the RTMPE protocol, which Adobe believes to be an encryption and copyright protection scheme: however analysis of RTMPE shows that RTMPE is nothing of the kind. rtmpdump was removed from its original SourceForge page due to Adobe issuing a Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown notice, which Sourceforge did not have the resources to contest, and could not place any other sourceforge projects at risk. flvstreamer is a fork of rtmpdump which removes all the code that Adobe believed was in violation of the DMCA (due to the belief by Adobe that RTMPE is an encryption mechanism). flvstreamer still allows users to download a stream of audio or video content from all RTMP servers, as long as RTMPE is not enabled on the server. rtmpdump development was restarted in October 2009 and is hosted at the MPlayer site[5]. It has much improved functionality and has been rewritten in C (was C++).

How do you explain this then? http://www.scaleform.com/

It's also in Apple's interest to get people using Objective-C and their toolkit. It brings developers to the Mac by forcing them to buy one.

I'm not convinced Apple is trying to force developers to buy Macs, and I'm far from convinced that such a strategy would actually work.

While I agree that Apple isn't forcing developers onto the Mac from a financial perspective, I think it's in their best interest to promote it from a holistic one.

Indie Mac developers think a little differently than any other, and it's a direct result of the influence from Apple's UX aesthetic. There is immense respect for the conventions that have been established, and any feature that breaks away from them better have a damn good reason. I just can't see a developer that chooses Windows XP as their main operating system completely understanding the platform and putting the same amount of care into their work.

While I agree that Apple isn't forcing developers onto the Mac from a financial perspective, I think it's in their best interest to promote it from a holistic one.

The funny thing is, Apple has been promoting their platform to developers for years by making it a Unix that just works. And now they're un-promoting it by having a bunch of developer-hostile policies.

I bought a Mac Mini with my iPod touch solely so that I could potentially write applications for it.

I never did get around to it - my girlfriend went farther than I did - and so it sits, gathering dust, under my desk.

But if I had a toolkit that let me develop iPhone apps without having to buy a Mac Mini, then I'd be much more likely to develop an iPhone app.

So take me as a data point: the existing practical restrictions forced me to buy a Mac.

If you don't want it, I am open to donations...

It turns out that Embarcadero Technologies, the company I work for, is now developing an IDE that targets the Mac. It will be useful for testing that, at least.

Continuing on the theme of my comment to the parent, I'll say: good riddance.

The App Store is 185k titles strong, most of them crap. Developers without a passion for the platform are exactly what they don't need any more of.

The iPhone platform isn't the same as the Mac platform. And Sturgeon's law will most likely always apply.

Companies tend to go for openness insofar as it's in their interests.

I've been developing this metaphor while reading and posting to other threads:

    - Companies are like states.  
    - Ownership is like sovereignty
    - Open Source licenses are like constitutions and the rule of law
    - Community processes are like democracy

Totalitarian states can also discover that being open to commerce can be in their interest, but still act coercively when doing so suits them more. Constitutional democracies can be considered safer for business, since it disallows arbitrary actions and ensures due process. By analogy, Open Source platforms can be considered safer for business.

(This doesn't mean that I won't publish on the App Store. But it does mean that I'm going to look at platform diversification as a safety measure! I guess this move by Apple has had the opposite from desired effect in my case.)

The Flex SDK is free, you can develop and compile Flash apps and web apps without buying any of their software. And they don't require a $99 fee just to have the opportunity to sell your work, or take 30% of the cut.

Clearly, they are evil.

And you don't have to buy a whole computer (if you don't already have a mac) just to compile you app! Did you know also the $99 fee is per year??

And they also don't provide hosting, credit card transactions and millions of users that can buy your app with one click.

I too don't like what Apple did, but you are comparing different things.

They don't provide that, but it's not like there aren't plenty of companies that will provide all of those things. The main factor here is that with Flex or (almost) any other platform, you have the choice of how you want to go about selling and distributing your work.

> Jobs wanted web apps. Developers balked. Web apps would have been cross-platform (at least with Android and webOS). Apple responded to developers and now they've seen their chance to lock users and developers to their system.

Jobs didn't want web apps, he wanted no apps. Web apps would have been more than useful given the right js APIs. It wouldn't have done a thing for games, but there's a great deal of stuff you could technically build in html + js if it were a true first class development environment.

Go back and watch the first iPhone keynote. It was all about web apps.

Probably because that was the only thing possible at the time.

Not really. Native third party apps were originally a concession to demands from users/developers by all accounts I've heard. Regardless, the original strategy was to encourage web-based apps.

Do you really think they are that stupid and applications were not planned since day one? Come on. They even have games on plain old iPods.

Well, since there was an SDK since day one, of course they anticipated third party development. The point is that they were pointing developers at web apps at launch. Why am I explaining this to you? It's public record. Look it up.

Well, you did not read a lot of accounts then. Unless you believe that it was possible to develop the SDK (and APIs and App Store) to the level it was released at in six months. Of course it was planned from the very start it was just a matter of resources and priorities. SDK was not ready by the time iPhone was launched, was it a good reason to delay the product? No.

> It brings developers to the Mac by forcing them to buy one

No. Thanks. I have no urge to develop for iPhone, iPod or iPad, much less in Objective C.

I think I am gonna pass this one. ;-)

I will assume the down-voter thinks Apple is forcing him to buy a Mac.

If you want a Mac, go buy one. You don't need Apple as an excuse. They are very good computers, very well built and have an OS that, IMHO, is second only to a decent Linux box as a development platform.

It's so good it breaks my heart to install Linux on top of it. So much in fact I never did it.

Except once, when I installed MkLinux on a Power 9500. Very nice X terminal, BTW.

Nope, you're getting downvoted because your comment doesn't actually add anything to the discussion. Snarky replies aren't (generally) considered valuable here.

Well then, rephrasing the first comment for those who didn't get it, I see no reason to think developers are being forced one way or the other.

As a developer, you choose the platform you intend to use to deliver your application. Nobody is being forced anything. There is a huge potential market outside the App Store.

If you bet the company on Apple's good mood, it's only your fault they pull your app, change the rules of the game and drive you out of business. They own the clients. If you want to sell to their clients, you better be ready do jump when they tell you to. Actually, it's no different than selling to a telco on a platform like Brew.

As a dominant player, Apple not only has to foster the development of killer apps for their platform, they cannot afford killer apps evolving on other platforms. Unless they change course, that's what will happen.

I don't disagree with any of your points in a fundamental sense: sure, Apple is well within their rights to set the policies they have set, and I understand that Apple believes that all this gives them a distinct market advantage (I won't try to pass judgment on whether or not that's correct; I don't think anyone here knows for a fact whether they'd be better off another way).

Development for a mobile device is different. If you were developing a Windows application, you'd be expected to own a Windows system. If you're developing a MacOS X application, you'd be expected to own a system that runs MacOS X.

But what about an iPhone application? By the above logic, you should only be expected to own an iPhone. Now, this analogy breaks down a bit, because I wouldn't expect anyone to actually develop a serious piece of software directly on an iPhone (at least not without an external monitor, mouse, and keyboard). So you need another platform to do your development on. Apple is requiring you to buy a Mac. Clearly they have development tools that work on Windows, otherwise Win Safari wouldn't be possible. A port of the iPhone SDK to Windows (or Linux, or whatever) is certainly not out of the question... it's just a matter of throwing resources and time at it. Now, again, I can certainly believe that Apple would think that restricting iPhone development to Macs is in their best interest, but it's ludicrous to suggest that this decision is also in their developers' best interests. I think that's what a lot of people are pissed off about.

Go to another mobile platform? Sure, you can do that, but then you're restricting your market. Yes, there are quite a few other lucrative mobile platforms (several of which have greater market share than the iPhone), but, as a developer, you end up with the unfortunate choice of having to either not develop for the iPhone, or buy an expensive piece of hardware that you only use for iPhone development. And by "expensive" I don't just mean the price tag. I also mean costs in training (even if it's self-training), maintenance (in 5 years your speedy Mac won't be so speedy anymore), and upgrades (IIRC you already can't install the latest version of Xcode on anything older than Snow Leopard; I imagine this trend will continue).

I know people like you seem to think that it's an easy binary decision: 1) don't buy a Mac and don't develop for the iPhone, or 2) buy a Mac and develop for the iPhone, but there's a lot that goes into that decision, including a judgment of whether or not developing an app that you may not be "allowed" to distribute is worthwhile.

It's not so cut and dried.

> I know people like you seem to think that it's an easy binary decision

As with any business decision, you have to weight as many factors as possible. Unless you have some marketing muscle for promoting your app, chances are it will drown in an ocean of similar applications. Worse: in an ocean of applications with similar names and descriptions.

Going the Apple way has never been an easy thing. At least in the pre Xcode days, Macs had a wider choice (like two vendors?) of development tools. I never liked MPW and preferred the Metrowerks tools. On the Mac, you program to a small slice of the pie, but a less crowded one. The iPhone is different - it represents a huge slice of the "people willing to pay for mobile apps" pie, but the slice is very, very crowded.

Yep, very true. With the huge number of free apps with similar features to many of the paid apps, it sounds pretty hard to make it big in this space. And despite all the buzz and publicity the iPhone gets, it's still not the dominant mobile platform by market share.