No sooner than the ink dried on the updated iPhone 4.0 developers agreement than the complaints flared up. Apple was engaged in a plot to destroy Adobe, and kill a number of third-party development tools that were supposed to make it easier to build iPhone apps — and those for other mobile platforms too.

Here’s the key paragraph that generated the furore: “Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs. Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited).”

This may not mean a thing to most of you, but the key is that this evidently means that apps created through some sort of “runtime” scheme, such as a port from Flash, or using a cross-platform compiler, are prohibited. No ifs, ands, or buts.

So you can understand that Adobe and a number of other companies are complaining about the alleged hubris in Apple’s decision to want to force you to do use their own development tools to build apps for the iPhone and iPad. How dare they?

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This article was posted on Sunday, April 11th, 2010 at 5:30 PM and is filed under News and tagged with: Adobe, developer, Flash, iPad, Iphone, iPhone 4.0, IPhone OS, Webkit.