Apple Locks iPhone Developers in Its Walled Garden

From PC World: Developers waiting for Flash or Java support on the iPhone and iPad can be thankful for one thing, at least: Apple is finally talking straight. The new license agreement for the iPhone 4.0 SDK makes it clear that neither technology is forthcoming on Apple's platform -- not now or anytime soon. But the license's wording couldn't have been any more obvious than Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who spoke at the iPhone 4.0 launch event last week. Asked by InfoWorld's Paul Krill whether his company's stance on Flash or Java would change, Jobs responded with a curt "no."

Previously, Apple and its apologists had offered various excuses why Flash and similar technologies weren't a good fit for the iPhone. At first, pundits speculated that they might pose security risks, either to the phone itself or to AT&T's mobile network. Then Jobs himself suggested Flash would run too slowly on the iPhone's ARM-based processor; Adobe protested. Now the truth is out: Developers can't use these platforms not for any technical reasons, but because Steve Jobs and his lawyers say they may not -- period.

According to the revised iPhone SDK license, "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)."

Such wording appears to exclude not just Flash and Java runtimes from the iPhone platform, but also cross-compilers that translate foreign platforms into iPhone binaries. That nixes technology forthcoming in Adobe's Flash CS5 and MonoTouch, a Novell tool that allows developers to compile iPhone apps from C# code.

This unprecedented move has iPhone developers in an uproar, and the situation is only likely to get uglier. Rumor has it that Adobe plans to file a lawsuit against Apple in the next few weeks, alleging anticompetitive practices. But the real question is, given such a hostile environment, why on earth would developers stick with Apple's platform?

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