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New iPhone Agreement Bans Flash-to-iPhone Compiler & Others

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Re: New iPhone Agreement Bans Flash-to-iPhone Compiler & Others

#141

Post by cschep »

Zak wrote: post #83
icey wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This change doesn't just cover Flash though; it also hits all of the Mono cross-compilers (and Scheme, and everything else that happens to cross-compile). I can't see any way that this turns out as remotely positive for developers.

Apple has consistently demonstrated that they don't care about what developers want. They seem to believe, and have so far been shown to be correct that if they can get the consumers, developers will follow. The only way I can see this changing is if a killer app that consumers want becomes available on another platform and not iPhone OS due to Apple's restrictions.

I think you're forgetting that it's also really fun to make an app that has the best "look and feel". I can make things that make people say "Wow." A lot easier on the iPhone than on Android.

Developers will make apps where it is fun to make apps. I haven't had any horror stories with the app store, so it's still just more fun to make iPhone software than anything else.

Re: New iPhone Agreement Bans Flash-to-iPhone Compiler & Others

#142

Post by loire280 »

mortenjorck wrote: post #76
raganwald wrote: post #46

Getting away from the frenzied rhetoric, my opinion is that what Apple really wants to prevent is people releasing multi-platform compilers. So taking Flash as just one example, if I can build one app and the compiler can make me an iPhone executable, an Android executable, and so forth, Apple don't want that. In my experience so far with such "cross platform compatibility layers," they always produce results that wa…

If the cross-platform experience is subpar, Apple should just let these apps fail in the market.

If Apple's strategy of toolkit lockdown (to improve app quality, performance, and differentiation) is overly draconian, their platform will fail in the market.

Re: New iPhone Agreement Bans Flash-to-iPhone Compiler & Others

#143

Post by GHFigs »

andreyf wrote: post #37

Looking forward to Adobe's response. Going to wager it'll be in the form of a lawsuit, and that the FCC will get involved. Whip out the marshmallows, this should be interesting :)

Going to wager it'll be in the form of a lawsuit, and that the FCC will get involved.

On what basis?

Re: New iPhone Agreement Bans Flash-to-iPhone Compiler & Others

#144

Post by rayval »

ptomato wrote: post #107
tumult wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, they're clearly doing this to lock people down and prevent strong innovation on their platform. They want tons of toy apps, but nothing threatening. They don't want people abstracting over their platform. They are deliberately restricting developer freedom. If they wanted to avoid crap apps, they would just reject crap apps. They don't care about that. They want to prevent developers from innovating on top of the…

Really? Bullshit. You honestly believe that stuff made in Obj-C can only be a toy whereas something written in ActionScript will bring the "strong innovation"? Yes, they're certainly restricting developer freedom (which, again, I don't like any more then anyone else), for the same reason they have been in the past: because they don't want their users to have a shitty experience. I mean, how the hell do you define a "…

Tumult's point is not about writing a single script-based solution but rather about developing an enabling technology for a whole raft of solutions. A platform-on-platform.

Re: New iPhone Agreement Bans Flash-to-iPhone Compiler & Others

#145

Post by jrockway »

lispm wrote: post #120

Okay, there is ECL (Embeddable Common Lisp) which has been hacked up to work on the iPhone. It compiles to C. I can't use it? I hope there are other companies that will release usable tablet hardware.

I'm no Clojure fan, but if you want to write Lisp-like for a phone, why not Android? Your Clojure app can run on everything from the G1 to the Nexus One to the Archos 5" and 7" tablets, not to mention the wide variety of no-name Chinese tablets that run Android.

I've heard you can even get a SLIME/Swank REPL from the emulator or actual hardware. Seems like this beats the iPhone any day; better development cycle, and nobody can ever stop you from selling your app.

Re: New iPhone Agreement Bans Flash-to-iPhone Compiler & Others

#146

Post by cheald »

AndrewO wrote: post #88

While Adobe is going to bear the brunt of this, this looks like a calculated move against Android as well. By precluding things like PhoneGap (if it turns out that it's "an intermediary translation or compatibility layer"), they're forcing developers that can only afford to write an application once to choose one platform. Right now, iPhone is the easy choice for a lot of developers, just based on market. The end res…

If I have to pick one platform, it's going to be Android. I already know Java, but even more simply than that, I know Javascript, and Appcelerator's Titanium lets me basically write an app as though it was a web app. I don't have to invest 2 months of intensive study at the cost of my other work; I'm going to go with what I know.

Companies that have existing resources in Objective C, sure, they may choose to go with the iPhone. Developers who already know Objective C will go with the iPhone. Developers who, like me, don't yet know Objective C, and have been interested in development on the iPhone through PhoneGap or Titanium? We're not going to bother with the iPhone.

Re: New iPhone Agreement Bans Flash-to-iPhone Compiler & Others

#147

Post by aidenn0 »

dfj225 wrote: post #82
paulsmith wrote: post #39

Putting aside the intention of this agreement which does seem targeted at the Flash-to-iPhone compiler, this just seems overly broad and silly from a "how things work" point of view. Let's say I write an iPhone app originally in Scheme (like this guy did: http://jlongster.com/blog/2009/06/17/write-apps-iphone-schem... ), and compile it down to C, which is then compiled to object code and linked against the iPhone lib…

I had the same thought and wondered, if a developer did follow such a path, how would Apple identify that they did? I'm not sure Apple could detect that such a method was used. Although, I suppose they could ban an app even if they only suspected that it had been developed in such a fashion.

1) They may not be able to detect all frameworks, but they will easily be able to detect the top N frameworks, where N scales with how serious they are about enforcing this.

2) The app approval process is so opaque that it might be hard to tell if they were banning you due to this reason (note I hear things have improved, so this point may be out of date).

Re: New iPhone Agreement Bans Flash-to-iPhone Compiler & Others

#148

Post by jrockway »

niravs wrote: post #133
jrockway wrote: post #96

Who's going to know? My C happens to look exactly like what Chicken Scheme generates!

If everybody's C starts to look like what Chicken Scheme generates then you've (Apple) just detected Chicken Scheme.

Or I'm just ultra-productive and very helpful to The World At Large.
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