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Comment by jasonlbaptiste | Hacker News Reader

This is absolutely retarded.

a) The market will figure this out. If developers don't want to code in just Cocoa touch or make apps for other platforms a priority because the language is easier, they will.

b) Things are in such a nascent stage. Android is growing like a weed. A suit like this might make some partial sense a few years down the road if there was enough data there.

c) The department of justice will probably hire a bunch of people with no real domain expertise to look into the subject.

d) The potential precedent set could be scary. @archgrove mentioned the xbox example. So now, microsoft might HAVE to allow us to build XBLA games using any tools out there. If I were microsoft, I wouldn't want sub standard crap getting in there.

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How do you know something is substandard just because it's made with some other library / language ? Especially with an "yet to be created" library / language ?

If you think "the market will figure this out" (which I think in itself is wrong) why don't we let the market figure out which language is better ? If the users don't like some products, they won't buy them. If all Cocoa touch apps make money and all the Flash apps lose money the market will fix itself, no ?

It's a question of whether you want regulatory intervention preventing the possibility of there being "closed" systems in addition to there being "open" systems. If you prevent Apple from going their "closed" route, you lose the possibility of any benefits that might come from such a different model. When people say "let the market sort it out", they mean that if Apple's model puts out a significantly worse product than the more open models, they'll be forced to open up or die. So it's a question of whether all platforms have to be open: this would arguably lead to increased competition within each platform, but with less distinction between platforms and would prevent the possibility of exploring different models for whole platforms (and letting those models compete).

As long as Apple has the DMCA preventing a well functioning, commercial jailbreaking kit from being released with every model, I'm all in favor of them being pried wide open by the US government.

Once jailbroken phones are both legally allowed, easy to make, and required to be given all the same benefits non-jailbroken phones, they can make all the rules for their store they wish to.

Ex-post facto control of already purchased items is bupkis, bunk and any other old-fashioned word connoting completely illegitimate.

I think there's certainly a certain bar of quality apple has in terms of the human interface guidelines / look+feel of the app. The fart apps might be crap, but they still look like iPhone apps. I have no desire and i can understand apple's desire to not want apps that have that shitty flash/flex look on the iphone. Now... if the apps look the same, I don't think this matters.

Is it a valid theory to say: this is less about the back end/performance issues and more about the front end/look+feel of apps?

Interface guidelines and look and feel matter a lot less when you are making a game doing OpenGL. This is a big market where Flash apps could have competed quite nicely with the Objective-C apps and Apple is blocking that for no actual reason.

Games consume a lot of resources (battery included) anyhow so it's really hard to claim doing it in Objective-C is in any way better.

They can enforce this by rejecting ugly apps (I hope they don't). These definitely don't look like iPhone apps, even though they are native: http://nativegui.posterous.com/

What if market can't figure this out? It's an exaggeration, but what if discrimination by programming language ("Applications must be originally written in ...") is the version of [insert your favorite type of discrimination] applied to programming? You can't program in X for iPhone, so go write your programs for Android == you can't work in our company, but you can go work on plantation.

Maybe it's not the antitrust issue, but it's definitely a law issue: i.e. what can be enforceable by contracts.

Regarding d, you CAN (theorically) build an XNA game with any tools you want. It just has to be compiled to .NET bytecode and use the microsoft APIs for accessing system resources.

Nobody is saying that apple has to give developers the ability to run native code, or to use private iPhone APIs. What they are saying is that Apple shouldn't be able to require us to use C/C++/Objective C to create the executable. That would be like Microsoft requiring XNA to be build with C#.

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