Apple Facing Antitrust Inquiry Over Flash-to-iPhone Compiler Ban?

[ranReloaded]

Maybe I didn't state my position, my position Apple is being too secretive and heavy handed that it's burning bridges with lot of companies, and in the long run, Apple will feel the heat.

Maybe I ranted too much... but it seems that Adobe burned bridges with Apple long time ago and it's feeling the heat now.

So, no I am not saying that Apple is a monopoly, and I am not sure if this anti trust case will even fly.

It wasn't aimed at you specifically!

And about Unity, last post about apple is under April 13th (http://blogs.unity3d.com/2010/04/14/unity-and-the-iphone-os-4-0-update/) which says, they think they will be okay, but they are talking to Apple about it. So I think I was correct that they are in a limbo state.

Again, NOT certainly dead, as I said.

I am not low level programmer, but from how Adobe describes its compiler, it compiles directly into ARM code. So yes, it is a a compiler. From Adobe site:
"We created a new compiler front end that allowed LLVM to understand ActionScript 3 and used its existing ARM back end to output native ARM assembly code. We call this Ahead of Time (AOT) compilation—in contrast to the way Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR function on the desktop using Just in Time (JIT) compilation. Since we are able to compile ActionScript to ARM ahead of time, the application gets all the performance benefits that the JIT would offer and the license compliance of not requiring a runtime in the final application."
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/logged_in/abansod_iphone.html

I heard a different story. But if it skips the SDK altogether, then the SDK agreement doesn't apply, does it? Oh, I forgot: The SDK is one with the Developer Agreement. So the problem boils down to: What's wrong with requiring the developers use the Official SDK? Nobody ever sued for Apple rejecting apps using private APIs. I wonder if bypassing Xcode makes it easier to secretly use Private APIs. Their use in widespread 3rd party apps prevents Apple from safely upgrading the OS. Again, we don't want Win32 all over again.

Also, just because you are not a "fill a 3d model and you have a finished game" person, it doesn't mean that there is no need for developers to have rapid development frameworks and spend more time on designing the game and less on writing support code.

That part was my opinion. I never said they don't have the 'right'. I just find it lame and unchallenging!

 

[badmac78]

Apple making statements like they are the largest mobile manufacturer certainly don't help.

Largest handset manufacturer in the US.
http://www.tuaw.com/2010/04/29/apple-passes-motorola-now-the-largest-us-phone-maker/

Since the issue covers iPhone/iPod/iPad then you have to take into account those markets also. Therefore no monopoly since there are quite a few other manufacturers of mobile devices.

I'm confused how this is anti-trust, since before Apple came along every handset had proprietary OS's and complete lockdown of the phone and you couldn't develop at all.

Write once-run anywhere works well on paper, and not so good in practice when you are talking about extremely good user experience.

 

[cryonic49]

Well outside of the investment of a Mac to develop in the first place (which Apple has always recommended, Apple doesn't stand to benefit financially since developers have to pay 99 bucks no matter what tools they use in order to distribute.

But if they can corner the frameworks, developers must code in their SDK to run on iPhone and no time for other less popular platforms(such as Android or WinMo 7).

 

[macsmurf]

Wit is not your mark in the world. Any compilier is an abstraction layer between the CPU and the code.

True, but LLVM has runtime components, thus making it a virtual machine. It's a layer between the developer and the platform. That means worse performance and battery life according to the fundies on this site.

 

[shawnce]

That's weird. LLVM is a virtual machine, an abstract layer, between the CPU and the code. Steve says that's bad.

LLVM can be used as a virtual machine to JIT compile IR at runtime but it also can, and more often is, used as a code generator to build binaries/executables (aka not as a virtual machine).

It isn't clear if LLVM is being used at all as a VM/JIT by the iPhone OS (it is used on Mac OS X in OpenGL, etc.) and last time I looked you can't use LLVM to generate binaries for iPhone OS.

 

[Reed Rothchild]

I actually saw this coming, and I am glad it is happening.

Anyone not drunk on Kool-Aid understands that Jobs does not want Flash or Java, because Flash and Java can break the wall of his walled garden and allow iPhone/iPad users to obtain apps and media without paying 30% to Apple.

That is true generally, but do note that this request for an inquiry isn't anything to do with running Flash or Java apps on your iDevice. I know you know that, but I thought I'd get it in before someone else does .

Anyone who is not an idiot understands that banning cross-compilers is a way to keep Android from getting iPhone/iPad apps. Jobs sees Android as the iPhone's first real competitor, and want's to kill it.

That is more relavent to this thread, but Jobs can't ban cross-compilers as such, only the end result. Obviously if the Apple store has the biggest chance of making a buck then developers will abandon the cross-compiler environment, possibly resulting in less apps on other platforms. There is certainly an argument there that Apple are deliberately trying to force that to happen by their recent change in policy. That could backfire though. The counter-argument is that devs will go to where the most opportunities are. Android is gaining momentum, which is why it's so interesting to see these behemoths moving into position. A bit like watching a hippo tap dance.

 

[*LTD*]

Sorry, but nothing in this article has meat.

It's all fantasy. It's a fishing expedition with only 2 sentences of merit:



By the way, the same 3 players are currently involved in dealing with lawsuits between Apple vs. Nokia/Nokia vs. Apple, etc.

How this turns into Ban on Flash for iPhone being investigated is nothing but fantasy.

So in other words this whole story is baloney?

 

[Shintocam]

I completely agree with Steve Jobs. Flash sucks and is the ONLY THING that makes Safari (or any other web browser) on my Mac crash. HTML5, CSS and JavaScript ALL THEY WAY!!!!!!!!

You know what makes my Mac crash most often (by a wide margin)? OSX. Sure I realise that is just one person's experience, but I constantly have issues with my Mac - will not wake up, will not go to sleep, finder stops responding etc....none of that has to do with Flash.

Poorly utilised ANY application can cause instability on a particular platform. Adobe makes a tool (Flash in this case) that when used well can create some pretty amazing results. When used poorly it can cause some huge issues.

 

[ranReloaded]

Wow... sweet-16 pages... I saw this thread since it was like one page. I feel so old now.

 

[xIGmanIx]

the irony is for a supposed "tech savy" forum, about 80% of the folks posting on this are just regurgitating what el jobso has said. If i were a developer i wouldn't want to be limited in the tools i use to create applications. apple fails to realize its the developers that will suffer and they are their bread and butter. Instead of locking down their platform they should help the community make it better.

But i am sure there will be plenty of posts about IE explorer and poor battery life and how flash is dead

 

[spacemanspifff]

Anti-trust?

While I don't believe that anyone can forcibly tell Apple what software to allow on it's own devices. I do think that this could be the thin end of the wedge. I don't develop for the iPhone OS (at the moment), I do however develop for the Mac and I don't use Apples XCode dev. software to do it - why should I need to? Will Apple decide in the future to not allow my software to run on Macs?
I can't see why Apple would want to restrict developers using Adobes software or any other cross compiler for that matter, unless they want to avoid the app store titles being available elsewhere on competing systems [Droid WinMob]. This is not anti-trust but is very anti-competitive against the developers, I can understand their argument about user experience, but it still seems pretty weak, if the software that is not iPhone native is crap/slow/not following UI guidelines, people will most likely vote it down.

 

[Augure]

Hmmm, just enjoyed a Nexus One with an early installation of Flash Mobile 10.1

Displayed dozens of website I couldn't on my Iphone, flash animations on Newgrounds, Games are not that ready but some of them could work.

 

[ksgant]

I love when people argue without any clue what they are talking about

This is NOT about flash on iphone or ipad, its about using flash or flexbuilder for that matter to build native iphone apps. If an app compiles as an iphone app it should not matter what tools were used to build it. Personally i think flashbuilder is a MUCH better dev tool than apples own mess of a dev environment. I think apple is way off base on this one and hope they lose. I love my iphone, ipad and every mac I have ever owned but their attitude lately is horrible and they are my like MS than MS these days.

Love it when people preface their clueless posts with how much people don't have a clue.

Here, here's a post that has a clue. Take note:

It certainly does matter and Steve pointed this out perfectly. As a matter of fact, Apple is not only protecting the customer but is also protecting the developer. For example, you build an app using a 3rd party development tool under iphone OS3.0. iPhone os4.0 comes out with a whole plethora of features, you as the developer are at the mercy of that middlewear company to incorporate all of these features into their software so that you can take advantage of it. Maybe they lag 6-12 months to incorporate those features, maybe they don't incorporate some features or none at all. All of which leave the developer at a disadvantage to those can can innovate at the freedom of all the platform has to offer.

Exactly.

 

[macsmurf]

LLVM can be used as a virtual machine to JIT compile IR at runtime but it also can, and more often is, used as a code generator to build binaries/executables (aka not as a virtual machine).

It isn't clear if LLVM is being used at all as a VM/JIT by the iPhone OS (it is used on Mac OS X in OpenGL, etc.) and last time I looked you can't use LLVM to generate binaries for iPhone OS.

That is apparently what Adobe did.

 

[lilo777]

Just because that pie chart keeps getting referenced, here's the pie chart from the article linked by someone else (sorry, lost the post) to debunk it.

jW

The issue of whether Apple is a monopoly or not is an interesting one. It indeed could be viewed from different points of view.

1. I think it is quite clear that the number of applications does not matter. Here is why. If, say, there were 1M applications for Windows, 1M applications for Linux and 1M applications for OS X but 95% of all computers in the World were running Windows (which they do BTW) obviously everyone would agree that MS had a monopoly power.

2. The number of cell phones is a trickier thing. In this regard, Apple may claim that they have only, say, 20% of the smart phone market and therefore they are not a monopoly. I do not think this argument is valid though. Here is why.

3. If 95% of all sold applications (ignoring the free ones here) are the applications for iPhone OS, I'd say this does constitute a monopoly. If you are a mobile software developer, and you want to build a profitable business, these 95% is all that matters. Free apps do not matter ("market" and "free" have nothing in common), the number of phones/types does not matter. What matters is the income sources and as we all agree 95% of them are controlled by Apple. Being in this position Apple does have a monopoly power over mobile software developers and as such probably should be regulated.

 

[Berio]

They have been acting like a monopoly and while its too early to see if anything actually occurs, they need to understand they're no above the law.

what do you mean by "They have been acting like a monopoly"? isn't that a rather senseless thing to say? A bit like "he is acting like a murderer".

the term monopoly is a clearly defined in economics, it's not an attitude or state of mind.

either you're a murderer or you're not a murderer

 

[pmjoe]

I think the policy sucks and there's more to it that the lame "reasons" given. However, I'm on the fence as to whether it's anti-competitive. In the usual sense of anti-trust, the situation would be reversed - where Apple would be preventing a third party tool to port native apps over to other platforms. That would damage Apple's competitors. Here, that's not the case - the policy only hurts Apple themselves - they're actually self-limiting their own product offering.

Software companies may also incur damages, but is that really Apple's responsibility? I don't know. Just conjecture, as I'm sure it takes teams of lawyers to sort it all out.

Well, the problem is that this restriction from Apple works in multiple ways. In theory, my company could create a great development environment for the iPhone internally, specifically for the iPhone, to support whatever type of development we do. But developers using this environment don't program in C, C++, or Objective-C; the environment instead compiles what they develop into Objective-C, and pushes that through Xcode. The development environment is specifically designed to make sure my developers stick within Apple's UI Guidelines and creates more reliable code for the type of tools we do, than if they hand coded it in Objective-C. A resulting iPhone app from this environment would be rejected by Apple under their current license agreement. Why? Because I might be able to take an app from my environment, modify my environment to produce code for other devices and sell it elsewhere?

What if they suddenly said I can only use the text editor in Xcode to write code for the iPhone? That really would not be any different than this current restriction. The problem here is that they're actually attempting to dictate practice, not the product.

From what I can see, Apple is attempting to dictate internal business practice from their pseudo-monopolistic position in the app market for the sole purpose of being anti-competitive.

 

[shawnce]

But if they can corner the frameworks, developers must code in their SDK to run on iPhone and no time for other less popular platforms(such as Android or WinMo 7).

We develop Windows, Mac OS X, iPhone OS (including iPad), Android, etc. applications. A vast majority of our code base was purposely written in C++ since it has historically been a highly portable, efficient, flexible language to develop in. We then take this common code base and develop platform specific user interfaces over it and platform isolation layer on the back side (now using more and more of boost for this).

If your code is well enough designed then an relatively small amount of platform specific code need exist (heavy use of MVC and related design patterns).

For example our Mac and iPhone/iPad applications use a AppKit/UIKit developed user interface written in Objective-C/Objective-C++ that wraps our C++ application logic core.

We have been able to target the above platforms given their ability to consume natively compiled C/C++ code.

Anyway... many options exist to develop cross platform code that don't include things like flash but IMHO the good ways to do it involve using the native APIs of the targeted platform for UI development and not some 3rd party cross platform layer.

 

[ranReloaded]

Well, the problem is that this restriction from Apple works in multiple ways. In theory, my company could create a great development environment for the iPhone internally, specifically for the iPhone, to support whatever type of development we do. But developers using this environment don't program in C, C++, or Objective-C; the environment instead compiles what they develop into Objective-C, and pushes that through Xcode. The development environment is specifically designed to make sure my developers stick within Apple's UI Guidelines and creates more reliable code for the type of tools we do, than if they hand coded it in Objective-C. A resulting iPhone app from this environment would be rejected by Apple under their current license agreement. Why? Because I might be able to take an app from my environment, modify my environment to produce code for other devices and sell it elsewhere?

They can not enforce that. They couldn't tell. And even then, Xcode would be the "middle layer". I think as long as Xcode/Objective-C is the only thing between your code and machine code, they're OK with that. Any thing that translates to Objective-C/Cocoa and is then fed into Xcode should be fine.

 

[ranReloaded]

We develop Windows, Mac OS X, iPhone OS (including iPad), Android, etc. applications. A vast majority of our code base was purposely written in C++ since it has historically been a highly portable, efficient, flexible language to develop in. We then take this common code base and develop platform specific user interfaces over it and platform isolation layer on the back side (now using more and more of boost for this).

If your code is well enough designed then an relatively small amount of platform specific code need exist (heavy use of MVC and related design patterns).

For example our Mac and iPhone/iPad applications use a AppKit/UIKit developed user interface written in Objective-C/Objective-C++ that wraps our C++ application logic core.

We have been able to target the above platforms given their ability to consume natively compiled C/C++ code.

Anyway... many options exist to develop cross platform code that don't include things like flash but IMHO the good ways to do it involve using the native APIs of the targeted platform for UI development and not some 3rd party cross platform layer.

+10. A good craftsman knows its ways.

 

[cryonic49]

I heard a different story. But if it skips the SDK altogether, then the SDK agreement doesn't apply, does it? Oh, I forgot: The SDK is one with the Developer Agreement. So the problem boils down to: What's wrong with requiring the developers use the Official SDK? Nobody ever sued for Apple rejecting apps using private APIs. I wonder if bypassing Xcode makes it easier to secretly use Private APIs. Their use in widespread 3rd party apps prevents Apple from safely upgrading the OS. Again, we don't want Win32 all over again.

I may be wrong, but from what I remember about Adobe's videos, I am pretty much sure you still need xcode, iphone SDK, along with the Flash CS5 complier in order to compile a usable iphone app.

Flash CS5 just precompiles the action scripts, package everything as an xcode project, and then have xcode assemble everything into an app.

And no, Flash developers will not be able to use the private iphone APIs unless Adobe secretly uses private APIs with their complier, which I assume they don't, as they really tried to make sure their complier complies with the old developer agreement.

We certainly don't want Win32 again, but as I have said in my previous replies, if third party SDK sucks, Darwin will get them (Darwin got Win32 pretty quickly), no need to have Apple baby-sit the developers. If they don't die, then it means that they are full filling something that Apple doesn't provide.

Also, AFAIK Adobe didn't burn any bridge. Apple was dieing in the 90s and Adobe, as with any sane company, jumped ship. When Apple became viable again, they started to pour more resources into it.

 

[pmjoe]

They can not enforce that. They couldn't tell. And even then, Xcode would be the "middle layer". I think as long as Xcode/Objective-C is the only thing between your code and machine code, they're OK with that. Any thing that translates to Objective-C/Cocoa and is then fed into Xcode should be fine.

That is not what the license agreement says.

 

[legacyb4]

Yup, Jobs got tired of Apple being treated as a second-class citizen. The opportunity has come to go out and do his own thing and he's doing it.

What the f*ck does Adobe do except whine?

It has nothing to do with irrational hatred. Flash is a pig, especially on the Mac platform, because Adobe stopped developing for the Mac in the '90s. They never really began again until very recently. They gave us cheesy, secondhand version of Flash for 10 years. They never moved over to the Cocoa platform for their CS suite until 9 years after the launch of OS X, making their applications slower and buggier than they had to be.

Flash is still on the Mac, and I'm running a 10.1 beta now, with hardware acceleration. Finally, equal citizenship. There are still large problems, however. Some pages show the animations in layers, and a dialog will pop up behind the video, making it unusable. After 10 years, couldn't they do better?

 

[macsmurf]

Anyway... many options exist to develop cross platform code that don't include things like flash but IMHO the good ways to do it involve using the native APIs of the targeted platform for UI development and not some 3rd party cross platform layer.

I agree with you when it comes to applications other than games but it really should be the decision of the developers. Luckily for you, Jobs didn't outlaw C++ Also, some of these cross platform layers are independent of the look & feel of the platform.

 

[MikhailT]

OMG! Lot of you people need to stop drinking that Apple KOOLAID!

First off, Anti-compeitive and monopoly are two separate things. Apple does indeed have a monopoly in several areas.

- Digital Music Players (iPods)
- They have the largest share in Mobile Web Surfing (iPod, iPhone & now iPad)
- Largest online music retailer (iTunes)

And all three of these I see clearly how Apple is extremely anti-compeitive and tries to limit consumer choice.

I'm happy to see regulators are now focusing attention. Apple is super evil when it comes to anti-compeitive practices. .

This inquiry doesn't just target the iPhone, if you all forgot iPod also! which BTW DOES HAVE A MONOPOLY!

Despite the fact that I disagree that Apple has a monopoly, I'll play with you and pretend they are.

Having a monopoly in those area does not mean anything, because believe it or not A MONOPOLY ISN'T ILLEGAL. When a company becomes a monopoly through illegal paths, which MS has done (such as forcing vendors to include Windows computers only, forcing IE on Windows, etc) that's when they are breaking the anti-trust laws. Apple has not done any illegal activity to become a monopoly in those area, no anti-trust.

There's no anti-competitive issue in those area either. For the music retail business; there's Amazon MP3 store, Walmart, Rhapsody and many other companies. Apple has not done anything to force those companies out of the market nor have they done anything to restrict their actions. You can buy those mp3 and put it on the iPods. No problem. Just because Apple markets their stuff first on the iPod does not make it illegal. Every other companies done the same thing. MS Zune markets their stuff first as well.

Having the largest web share of the Mobile internet? What in the world does that have to do with anything? It doesn't make them anti-competitive since Apple has no total control of the Internet. Everybody can access it without restrictions.

Digital Music Players? Ok? same story from the music retail business, nothing Apple has done is anti-competitive. People have the choice of buying MS zunes and everything else. Just because people likes iPod much better and prefer buying them only does not make Apple anti-competitive. Apple did not force anybody else out of the market, nor have they don't anything to restrict them from making better MP3 players. They have taken some actions against music players that look like iPods, but that's not anti-competitive, that's defending their IP which is allowed.

I fail to see why anybody here would see Apple being an abusive monopoly. Show me one action done by Apple that's not related to defending their IPs? One single action. Show it to me.

If Apple forced Best Buy to throw out all the MP3 players in their stores to sell iPods. That's an abusive monopoly there and Apple will get an anti-trust lawsuit against them.