iPhone developer program is a joke

The developer program is turning out to be bunch of hype for something stupid. The restrictions on what your application is allowed to do is total, laugh-out-loud, crap.

I was initially excited about the SDK and developer program for the iPhone. I was willing to live with Apple being only distributor of Apps and getting a cut of the profits. I was willing to live with an entrance criteria to get into the App Store.

But then I heard about the other restrictions, and if you haven’t heard yet about the restrictions placed on your applications, here are gritty details:

• “Applications may only use Published APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any unpublished or private APIs.” (section 3.3.1 in the SDK license agreement) That means currently no access to IOKit
• “An Application may write data on a device only to the Application’s designated container area, except as otherwise specified by Apple.” (section 3.3.4 in the SDK license agreement). No full file system access basically.
• Your application is completely closed when the user leaves it like when they get a call or any of a number of actions happen. (specified in the Human Interface Guidelines). Only one application can run at a time basically so no background applications. (Something you can do in the current Open SDK)
• “An Application may not itself install or launch other executable code by any means, including without limitation through the use of a plug-in architecture, calling other frameworks, other APIs or otherwise. No interpreted code may be downloaded and used in an Application except for code that is interpreted and run by Apple’s Published APIs and builtin interpreter(s).” (section 3.3.2 in the SDK Agreement)
• “If Your Application includes any FOSS, You agree to comply with all applicable FOSS licensing terms. You also agree not to use any FOSS in the development of Your Application in such a way that would cause the non-FOSS portions of the SDK to be subject
  to any FOSS licensing terms or obligations.” (section 3.3.14 in the SDK license agreement)
• No way to write plugins for the apps that exist on the phone right now, even for apps that openly support it plugins like Safari.
• Applications can be rejected for not meeting the Human Interface Guidelines
• No VoIP apps that work over cell network (that is acceptable, VoIP is a bandwidth hog and with unlimited data, it hurts the carrier)

Porting Firefox would be impossible because it supports downloading and running “interpreted code” with its Javascript engine. Things like Mono could only be used if you included a version Mono with your application, so basically no system wide install. No way to write a usable IM or IRC client on it, since apps can’t run in the background. Since we won’t be able to write plugins for existing apps like Safari, it means no Silverlight/Moonlight and no third party Flash support. IOKit isn’t in the list of document APIs even though its on the iPhone today, so no way to access the dock port to get to the PC or access the Bluetooth hardware. No way to tie into the data sync integration as well, so you can have it sync data with other things on your PC when docked.

What we get is so much more limited then what you can get natively in the unofficial Open SDK that is out there for the jail broke iPhones today. What annoys me is that Apple only played it off like their was only restrictions around application acceptance criteria for the application if was porn or a bandwidth hog. Not all this crap.

I think its idiotic of Apple to think this is what we were looking for. It’s pretty much a giant joke. I hope the public out cry about this is enough to knock Steve out of his black sweat-shirt and blue jeans, and have another wake up call.

Syndicated 2008-03-15 04:01:42 from Zac Bowling's Blog