Apple pulls the Van Pelt maneuver on developers
April 8th, 2010Daring Fireball reports that Apple has changed their iPhone Developer Agreement to exclude applications that aren’t written with purely native C/C++ or Objective-C code or HTML/Javascript/CSS and webkit.
If it proves to be true, this move can only sound the death knell for a number of projects:
and possibly
I’ve personally put a few weeks of effort into a Rhomobile project that is now a big pile of wasted money unless Apple changes this requirement.
I can only imagine how completely gobsmacked the developers and funders of these projects will be to know that Apple has decided to take away their football. We’re talking literally millions of dollars of value suddenly disappearing on Apple’s whim.
I will be watching this issue with interest. These projects were only just starting to make iPhone/iPad development interesting by providing higher levels of programming abstraction.
See this response from PhoneGap for whatever it might be worth – http://twitter.com/phonegap/statuses/11843827934
Van Pelt?
Sorry, perhaps it’s a North American reference.
In the Peanuts comic strip, Lucy Van Pelt always pulls the football away from Charlie Brown just as he is about to kick it.
Apple’s behavior towards developers and 3rd parties has, of late, been very … confusing. From the outside, it looks like a dysfunctional relationship in which Apple is Ike and the developers are Tina.
Maybe they’re trying to stem the tide of inevitable iPad Apps ’49ers, just there for the Gold Rush to make a quick buck with a half-assed gew-gaw.
Personally, I’m holding out for a more open version of the iPad, possibly with Android, though a trimmed Win7 could work.
Apple are amazing at execution and design and, most especially, marketing, but they vacillate between loving and hating their 3rd parties, which makes me wary of spending ANY time researching iP[hone|od|ad] development. I’d love to buy in, but I don’t want a black eye. 😀