IPhone NDA officially dropped
developer.apple.com
developer.apple.com
However, they shouldn't get undeserved praise for correcting something that was a bad decision in the first place and was undermining their own platform.
Apple is just doing this with control over their mobile OS, albeit in a much shorter time frame.
I'd say they just tried to keep control of as much as possible, as any company would, then relented when the whining from developers became too much to take.
So basically, Apple was out alone here. No one else is remotely as "evil" in this aspect. It's OK that you like the platform, there's lots to recommend it. But don't sugarcoat things. Apple were being repressive and obnoxious, and only relented because they were forced to by a competing platform.
When you lead a market, you get to set the rules somewhat.
Numbers from: http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/09/09/gartner_q22008_smart...
Q2 2008:
------------------------
Symbian: 57.1%
RIM: 17.4%
Windows Mobile: 12.0%
Linux: 7.3% (!)
iPhone: 2.8%
Who is they? There is a supply and demand issue with summer gasoline that tends to force prices up.
I don't think Apple can claim the same thing.
I'm getting too far off topic, I guess.
They've acknowledged that it was causing a problem for their developers, so to the extent that they want to help out their developers, that counts as admitting a mistake. Though yes, they do mention their other priorities, so technically it isn't a full admission.
Apple are the marketing masters, however, and this is just one more way to market the iPhone to developers. It's apparently working, judging from the 99 upmods so far.
Edit, from MacRumors.com
However, the NDA has created too much of a burden on developers, authors and others interested in helping further the iPhone’s success, so we are dropping it for released software. Developers will receive a new agreement without an NDA covering released software within a week or so. Please note that unreleased software and features will remain under NDA until they are released.
I suspect that very shortly (within the week, maybe?) we'll see a very detailed policy announcement about what criterion Apple uses to approve apps for the App store.
I also wouldn't be terribly surprised to see a way for private developers to distribute apps without that janky beta-release dance.
IPhone NDA officially dropped for released IPhone software
I think Apple was being naive if they expected an NDA to give them any sort protection for their technology. Am I missing something? Is there any reason to try to keep their documentation secret when anyone can buy an iPhone and take it apart?
There are only two reasons I can see for not dropping the NDA. One is that they didn't feel they needed to, believing that they owned the market, that dropping the NDA was an unnecessary concession of power, and that developer protests were largely symbolic.
The other reason is that they were perhaps getting so many applications that their quality control system was inundated, so they were doing everything they could to impose barriers to development. In this case, perhaps we may see the $99 fee vanish in the next year, as well?
At my company, our lawyers advised us to keep what we considered more-or-less public software under NDA for a very long time because demoing software to someone under NDA, no matter how many people it is, avoids “publishing” the software and any inventions contained therein. We know Apple’s been building up a patent strategy around multi-touch; maybe their lawyers believe there are patentable inventions described in the iPhone SDK and they are telling Apple to keep everything under NDA until they know provisional patents can be filed within a reasonable amount of time (you get a year after publishing in the US, but in the EU, I think you forfeit any patent claims once your invention is “published”).
It’s like, it doesn’t matter at all how broad/leaky the NDA process is, in the eyes of the USPTO, every invention in the iPhone SDK is a non-published invention and will continue to be so until the NDA is lifted.
http://daringfireball.net/2008/08/iphone_nda_patents
This take makes sense, because I agree that the NDA thing was otherwise completely self-defeating. It didn't actually protect any secrets and it certainly handicapped the developer community.
Someone should check Apple's patent filings and see if the NDA is disappearing today because the lawyers finally finished up their provisional-patent work last week.
It's a disappointing, though; the world really doesn't need more UI/software patents.
However, I think this highlights the mistake Google made in positioning Android as the 'open' alternative. The liabilities of Apple's strategy are all easily addressed by policy changes if being closed becomes a competitive disadvantage.
We don't know yet how it's all going to play out with regard to vendor cooperation (will HTC let us recompile the code for their phones? somehow I kind of doubt it, but we'll see), but in an ideal case it would be a platform for ongoing improvement and maintenance, changing the device upgrade landscape treadmill, possibly quite substantially.
Honestly, it could be argued that Android is less 'open' than its predecessors, since there's an assumption that handset manufacturers will take advantage of the UI Android provides instead of rolling their own from scratch. I suspect we'll see much more UI consistency with Android than has been the case with the older operating systems.
As for users customizing their phones, there's nothing novel about that either. Palm and Windows Mobile phones have always let users install applications. In fact, you can easily run tethering applications on many Windows Mobile and Palm-based phones - just don't try it on the G1.
I wish I knew how to spin PR like this.
(Full Disclosure: Poor attempt at sarcasm, I'm not an Apple hater)
This specifically states that unreleased software is still covered. I guess we'll be waiting for the new terms to be released.
RIP iPhone NDA, You will not be missed.