iPhone is far from a monopoly, and surely Apple can dictate what tools are used to develop with?
Apple is said to have over 95% of the mobile device application sales -- which can certainly be considered a monopoly, and a huge one at that.
They're using that monopoly to force developers to use Apple's products
only to develop, including the price of purchasing a Mac and keeping the OS up-to-date. That's not even included in the $100 per year for the privilege to even run applications on a physical iDevice. They're also using that monopoly to, now, force developers out of markets on other devices.
They're setting up a situation that goes like this:
- Apple has 95%+ of the mobile application market.
- Developer wants to create a mobile application. Pretty much has to produce a product for iPhone for success.
- Developer can either write two versions entirely from scratch (almost twice the work), or develop solely for the product that gives them 95% of the market. They'll often choose the latter for more profits with less work.
- Apple now has 95%+1 of the mobile application market, pushing more developers out of competing markets (hurting the products of competitors severely with "We have the most apps, buy our phone!" campaigns).
If that's not abusing a monopoly to lock out competitors, I don't know what is. Without this clause the developers had the option of using a cross-platform development kit (such as MonoTouch, Unity, or the Flash compiler) to eliminate some of the duplicated work -- now they don't.
It also isn't even smart/logical from an 'application quality' perspective. Most applications that are cross-developed for multiple platforms are running on touch-based platforms, such as a two-platform application for iPhone and Android. They're both multi-touch interfaces, and all it takes, at most, is a bit of tweaking to make it look like a native application for both platforms. The actual interface gestures, touches, etc. would be near-identical for both to begin with, no matter what tools created it. Second, they're locking
themselves out of the game market to a large extent, just as they're trying to inspire developers to create for it. No developer in their right mind would write a full game engine from scratch in Objective-C, in
XCode.
It's just another evil corporation abusing a monopoly, which hopefully gets smacked back down into its place.