[disclaimer: I am an Adobe employee and an Adobe and Apple shareholder, my opinions are my own and not those of my employer.]
Like the rest of the software industry, I’ve been pondering what the effect section 3.3.1 of the iPhone 4.0 SDK will have. I had fully been planning to make an iPhone application at some point. I had planned to do the initial version with Flex to prototype, but then also spend time doing a Cocoa version to better learn that SDK for myself. This iPhone 4.0 SDK announcement honestly has me questioning if I do really want to develop for the iPhone. Not just because of a higher-minded sense of indignity at Apple’s lack of openness of their platform, but rather because of that combined with their somewhat arbitrary and opaque app store approval process. Could I spend months of my spare time learning ObjectiveC and working on an iPhone application only to have that time be a complete waste if the App store reviewers decide that they don’t want that app in the store?
Thinking about it this morning, I realized that not only was Apple’s move to lock in developers nothing new, but that I’d already written about it before (in fact, I’ve been blogging about it since almost the day I started doing professional development for the Macintosh): iPhone SDK: The carrot for Cocoa, the stick for Flash, The difference between being an Apple developer and a Microsoft developer, Developers Developers Developers Developers.
Gruber had the motivation right, I think, but I also think he got the ramifications wrong. Since Steve returned to Apple, they have been applying the screws tighter and tighter to their developers, trying to get them to lock in. It was somewhat indirect at first, but the long term implication was clear: “We’ll tell you how to develop for our platform, if you do as we say, then you’ll be fine. If you don’t do it the way we tell you, your life will be a never-ending stream of headaches.” The move to Intel (forcing all developers onto X-Code and a big rewrite of any PPC-assembly) was step one, the move to 64-bit (dropping support for Carbon after promising it) was step two. The iPhone 4.0 SDK is just the most obvious move in this process because it basically spells it out. You no longer have a choice: it is Apple’s way or the highway. The problem is the App store. On the Mac, I control my own distribution. On the iPhone platform, Apple does. That means that they no longer have to negotiate with their developers, they can now finally dictate to them.
As a developer, this makes the iPhone platform a lot less attractive because I also can’t be sure that they won’t change the terms again. Once I’m locked in, I’m locked in. Apple can do whatever they want and I’m forced to rewrite my apps or get forced out. As someone who writes software for a living, this scares the crap outta me.
Here are some other blog posts that I thought were good reading around this:
The iPad isn’t a computer, it’s a distribution channel (O’Reilly Radar)
Five rational arguments against Apple’s 3.3.1 policy (37 Signals blog)