Steve Jobs Offers Explanation About iPhone SDK Changes Restricting Adobe and Other Cross Compilers

[ranReloaded]

And as you can see these OpenGL apps all suck!!! Without OpenGL 3D apps would be much faster. I hope Apple bans this crap pretty soon!!!11

Without OpenGL, 3D apps would not exist. Unless you are planning to issue all the graphics commands through inline assembly.

 

[aristotle]

No need to wait. Just read what Steve said about it here. Unity is banned.

Where does it say anything specific about Unity from Steve? Answer: Nowhere. We still don't know if it is banned as Unity outputs a standard x-code project which you then compile into the app.

 

[jerome65]

So you're saying that because another company forced devs to use some type of lock-in framework instead of well written portable middleware, Mac gaming suffers ?

Gee, I wonder what kind of parallel we could draw with the current situation...

The fact is, the Mac stayed relevant exactly because developers had a choice in how to write their apps. They could chose the right tools out of a plethora of available ones for the app they were writing. Limiting developer choice usually ends up limiting the kind of apps you will get.

It's unfortunate the many users in this thread that don't have the first clue about programming are insisting this is a good choice.

Compiling straight ARM machine code is not black magic. Writing library bindings is not black magic either. You don't need a big translation layer or VM to run a program written in another language than C, C++ or Objective-C. You just need Cocoa bindings and a ARM compiler/linker. This effectively destroys any chance of someone making such a tool.

Maybe not, but they would have to rely on Adobe to implement the code equally well on for the Apple products as they do on the other platforms. Adobe currently has a flash plug-in that runs better on Windows than it does the Mac from all reports I have read, so why would Apple expect they would ensure that the iPod/iPhone implementation performs as well on as the Android or Windows 7 Phones OS? And if those applications ran worse on the iPhone OS than the others because of Adobes implementation then that would harm the reputation of Apple's products when the performance reports came out saying that a certain major application runs 10% better on the other platform.

Also, why should they make it easier for developers to use other systems to develop software for Apple's products, Apple after all is in the hardware business and their software strategy supports the sale of it's hardware, not the other way around. The iPod/iPhone/iPad market is there to support the sale of Macs so they would naturally want the developers creating software for these platforms to be using Macs. I'm not positive, but I doubt that Microsoft would actively support a development environment that allowed Mac users to develop Windows applications without ever having to buy a copy of Windows.

 

[anthonylambert]

Quote:
Originally Posted by anthonylambert
What about Microsoft Office, PhotoShop, Quark et al... If Apple didn't have these apps all developed with layers then they would of gone bust long ago...


jragosta reply:
if the iPhone had a multi-GHz processor with multi-GB of RAM, that might be reasonable. Unfortunately, it's not.

One of the first things I learned on my comp sci courses (possibly before you were even born) was that if computing resources are limited, you have to be very careful not to waste them. And computing resources on smart phones are VERY limited by today's standards. (although it's funny that my iPhone has more computing power than the mainframe I used to punch Fortran cards for).


In Reply
Look firstly I started writing software on Apple ][ in 1978 and have been a commercial developer on Apple ][, Macs since 1984, and NeXT using Objective C and all Major Pc Platforms C/C++ and C#. So trying to be-little someone personally based on no knowledge is rather stupid and give you no credibility!

Secondly: The first system I worked on had 12k of ram, the first Apple 48k. In that ram when I was part of Robocom I wrote the BitStik the first Professional CAD system on a Personal Computer in assembler which was ground breaking at the time - 1982, I think I know about resources.... maybe this was before you were born?

An iPhone actually has 256mb of real ram and at least 8GB of Flash Ram. It has more processing power than a Cray XMP super computer. Things have changed and you are not right.

 

[KnightWRX]

Maybe not, but they would have to rely on Adobe to implement the code equally we.. blah blah

Stop focussing so much on Adobe. This change does not just impact their Flash packager. If 3.3.1 said "No flash!" then you'd have a point.

EDIT : On the point of limited ressources : a 600 mhz A8 processor, a PowerVR GPU and 256 MB ram is not limited ressources. Macromedia had Flash running on PCs with a quarter of those specs and I wasted a lot of time of newgrounds back then watching all the crazy Flash stuff.

The fact is, the iPhone is a lot less limited than PCs from the early 2000s. And PCs in the early 2000s ran all sorts of crazy abstracted code (interpreters, VM, emulators, name it) without any sort of hiccups. That argument about limited ressources is just a bunch of bull.

 

[WilliamLondon]

iPhone at the moment has a virtual monopoly on the mobile software market and has the ability to push the market into a direction which is not good for the consumers or the competition.

Are you saying that open standards are bad for consumers? I think the utter opposite is true, that open standards benefit consumers very much.

As for the competition, to whom are you referring? If one promotes open standards, competition is freer (because entry is easier) than in a situation where one (i.e. Adobe or Microsoft, take your pick) owns the format and others are shut out of the market.

 

[ranReloaded]

Compiling straight ARM machine code is not black magic. Writing library bindings is not black magic either. You don't need a big translation layer or VM to run a program written in another language than C, C++ or Objective-C. You just need Cocoa bindings and a ARM compiler/linker. This effectively destroys any chance of someone making such a tool.

But Adobe isn't making any Cocoa bindings. They are spitting an "executable" that in reality bundles AS byte code and a runtime module, so their developers can lean on Action Script. It does not even load resources on need, but all at once.

 

[KnightWRX]

But Adobe isn't making any Cocoa bindings. They are spitting an "executable" that in reality bundles AS byte code and a runtime module, so their developers can lean on Action Script. It does not even load resources on need, but all at once.

Actually, according to their docs, they aren't spitting out bytecode and a runtime. That would already be against 3.3.2 of the TOS anyway. They are spitting out straight ARM machine code.

Unless you've had early access to their Flash packager product and can provide insight and evidence to back up your claim, you are just repeating what Apple is spoon feeding you.

 

[lloydhooson]

Load of rubbish!

I'm a developer and I think this is a load of rubbish from Apple!

I do agree with Apple in terms of the flash player being crap on the Mac and not on windows, Adobe could sort this out and then Apple might forgive a little.

BUT!!!!!

How can some app that is available cross multiple platforms effect the sales of that platform!? Yes competition can increase across the devices however I would still buy an Iphone over a blackberry or Android due to the integration with Itunes, better build quality and other reasons(performance). Not beacuse my favourite game is on both blackberry Iphone and android hmmmm i think I might get the one with the smaller screen and slower frame rate? I THINK NOT!!!

Secondly developers use Unity 3d and others that use X-code to compile the code into an Iphone application these may be effected and the quality of application produced are very high compared to a totally built from scratch solution.

From a developers point of view if I had to code a 3D game engine make the 3D art make all the design and then put that together for one platform (yes maybe the best currently) But I aint gonna do that for speed. This is where Unity comes in!

personally I think that if Apple wanted to be lock down the Iphone development then they should make all these 3rd party compilers use X-code like Unity so every developer still has to use a Mac and X-code.

But just to Kill off all these tools that developers use is absurd.

Apple need to sort this out with Adobe before there is too much collateral damage with developers.

Sorry just needed a rant.

 

[JustSomeDude]

It depends on how the OOM process works. With multitasking the amount of memory available is wildly variable, and if they're using an LRU strategy then your app's bug may cause other apps to be terminated harming their user experience.

Memory management is hard. The OS and stdlib provide some abstraction, but every abstraction introduces its own assumptions. Different languages impose, on top of these assumptions, more assumptions about how memory is managed. These can be very different and even incompatible. Even the different ways that garbage collection works (when it is triggered, etc.) in language runtimes which support it can lead to the adoption of different styles of development. Worse, because of their nature, the bugs caused by mistakes (conceptual or otherwise) in the binding of language memory management models are often very erratic and hard to pin down. When you have luxuries like virtual memory, this is bad but shouldn't hurt anyone else's software. In embedded systems, this may not be the case.

I am not saying this is what Apple are worried about, but that this is possible means that it would be wrong to say that Apple have no possible technical justification for their decision.

Note also that it still annoys me that this limitation exists (a couple of ideas I had for iPad apps would have been a lot easier with a prolog runtime) but I am not going to jump the gun and claim that it is unscrupulous.

I'm basing this on what I think I remember reading, so perhaps I'm wrong, but I thought with the multitasking on the iPhone, an app's state got saved to flash, before being moved out of memory, and then when being run again, got it's state restored. Wouldn't this prevent any additional issues for the memory management? It seems like the app would be unaware that it had been removed from memory. I've haven't had to actually implement garbage collection or any advanced memory management techniques so perhaps I am missing something or misunderstanding the issue?

 

[Rodimus Prime]

But Adobe isn't making any Cocoa bindings. They are spitting an "executable" that in reality bundles AS byte code and a runtime module, so their developers can lean on Action Script. It does not even load resources on need, but all at once.

Go back and read his post again instead of blinding saying it is all Adobes fault.

I almost feel as Apple is using Adobe to hide the real reason for doing this and it is a lock in issue. There are a lot of other programing languages out there other than flash that could make great use of a middleware compiler.

Python, C#, V, .net ect. None of those are flash and none of them are allowed per apples new rules.

In programing yes you can learn multiple programing languages and many programs do but you will always be the best at only one language and will normally prefer to work in one language over the others if given the choice. Each language has its own strengths and weaknesses. Middleware allows people to over come limitation of other given language and work in one that they might be stronger in or prefer over the others.
It is pretty clear that a lot of the people here are completely missing that point and stuck on the Adobe BS.

 

[cmaier]

I hope that Apple has a really smart legal team to protect itself because what Apple just did with the iPhone SDK changes is skating really close to violating the Sherman and Clayton Antitrust Acts in regards to deliberately harming a competitor, especially since Adobe's Creative Suite 5 can in theory actually write apps for the iPhone OS. It's almost the equivalent of saying you can drive from San Francisco to Los Angeles, but you can only do it with a Toyota Corolla.

Adobe can cite the US v. Microsoft case precedent, where Microsoft's decision to include--then eventually tightly integrate--Internet Explorer from Windows 95 OEM Service Release 2 forward pretty much destroyed Netscape as a viable company.

For the nth time - Adobe can't cite anything, because Adobe has no standing. It's US v Microsoft, not Netscape v. Microsoft or Opera v. Microsoft.

And this is no antitrust violation in any case. You are allowed to intentionally harm a competitor. You are not allowed to leverage a monopoly - Apple has no monopoly.

 

[jerome65]

Stop focussing so much on Adobe. This change does not just impact their Flash packager. If 3.3.1 said "No flash!" then you'd have a point...

Because the main focus of the discussion is on Adobe's tool, though a few others are mentioned that may or may not be effected. The point is the same no matter what company makes the tools though, if their product favors another platform over Apple's and those applications developed with it run better on the other platform then it is damaging to Apple's reputation.

Currently the Flash implementation probably has the largest chance of harming Apple since there are a lot of web developers out there that know Flash and could enter the cross platform software market without really learning how to develop for a specific platform.

If major developers found that they could save time and money by moving to a single development environment they would be sure to do so. Again if that environment favored another platform then it could damage Apple place in the market.

 

[Arnia]

I'm basing this on what I think I remember reading, so perhaps I'm wrong, but I thought with the multitasking on the iPhone, an app's state got saved to flash, before being moved out of memory, and then when being run again, got it's state restored. Wouldn't this prevent any additional issues for the memory management? It seems like the app would be unaware that it had been removed from memory. I've haven't had to actually implement garbage collection or any advanced memory management techniques so perhaps I am missing something or misunderstanding the issue?

It is possible that is how it is done. I am not part of the developer programme, and even if I were I am not sure whether the documentation or APIs would give much clue on the ins-and-outs of this part of OS memory management strategy. My point was solely that unless we know to the contrary that this strategy copes amazingly with space-leaks so that they'd not break another app, and unless we know that the OOM makes no assumptions about the memory management model used, it is wrong to say that there is no possible technical reason for them making this change.

I hope that the reason is technical actually, and that they find a way around it. I would quite like to be able to use other languages.

 

[Stella]

iPhone at the moment has a virtual monopoly on the mobile software market and has the ability to push the market into a direction which is not good for the consumers or the competition.

Incorrect, iPhone does not have a monopoly on anything, world wide they are in 3rd place in terms of marketshare, with around 15% - give or take a few percentage points.

If Apple had 90% of smartphone marketshare then questions would be asked.

As it stands, there is plenty of competition in the smartphone world including Applications - so which your post was about.

 

[Kurite]

I'm an outsider without an iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch. I do have an iMac.

I'm completely unqualified for what I think about this. I think Steve Jobs is right. The less entry points into the iPhone OS ecosystem, the better general quality of apps and the more control that can be had on ensuring great battery life, performance, and user experience. I imagine some really awesome trainwrecks can be had using a Flash -> Obj-C compiler! E.g., crashes, amazing memory corruption, etc.

Given their history, I would be surprised if Adobe produced a very high quality cross-compiler that would minimize software problems. And since they likely have not, Apple would not want to deal with it on a support level. If they know all apps are created using their development strategy, it's a little easier to support, particularly if it is a problem that the software vendor could not have prevented (e.g., API not working as expected). Granted, I'm sure Apple defers customers straight to the software developer in such situations. But at least they have the proper channels to discuss the problem and perhaps get it solved in OS updates down the line. They know exactly who to turn to. Put Adobe or an other company in between the software developer, things can get rather muddy as to who is at fault.

Minimize complexity.

 

[McLarenTopTeam]

And this is no antitrust violation in any case. You are allowed to intentionally harm a competitor. You are not allowed to leverage a monopoly - Apple has no monopoly.

I would disagree. Apple has a monopoly in the mobile software market (similar percentage to IE share which they were forced to advertise competing browser for). Apple is using this to leverage the market into a direction which is not good for the consumers or competition.

 

[KnightWRX]

Because the main focus of the discussion is on Adobe's tool, though a few others are mentioned that may or may not be effected. The point is the same no matter what company makes the tools though, if their product favors another platform over Apple's and those applications developed with it run better on the other platform then it is damaging to Apple's reputation.

The point isn't the same. Let's say someone made a ARM ports of g77, made Fortran Cocoa bindings, and released it all to the Fortran community, how would it be the same ? It would still use xib files for interfaces, as built by Interface Builder, it would still use all the Cocoa APIs, it would just be Fortran instead of C.

Language doesn't dictate quality, performance or usability. Even if Steve would like to claim it is so. This move has nothing to do with providing users with a better experience, because in essence, it doesn't. This move is strictly about lock-in.

And the main focus is not Adobe, only ignorant users that have no clue about programming are making it the main focus (at least we're lucky this thread hasn't devolved into a HTML5 is best rant... talk about not understanding the issue there...).

 

[KnightWRX]

I would disagree. Apple has a monopoly in the mobile software market (similar percentage to IE share which they were forced to advertise competing browser for). Apple is using this to leverage the market into a direction which is not good for the consumers or competition.

Oh please, and McDonald's has a monopoly on Bigmacs. Get real guy, Apple is far from a monopoly on anything, except on dumb moves to hurt developers of their iPhone platform, "in the name of the users!". Won't somebody please think of the child... er.. users!

 

[Stridder44]

Awesome explanation/replies to other people I read on Engadget by a user with the name of Neotko:

That kind of movements, should have happened while the first consoles went to the market. If you wanna publish a Sony-Xbox-Nintendo program (games mostly) you must pay way much more than the 99$ SDK, and if they dont like what you publish then you are screw. Apple tactics ain't different than the others, but in retrospective they are much softer and easy to access than many of them. OFC linux based devices with 'all open' would be great, but to build a great program you need lots of ppl, and ppl with time, and ppl need money to live, eat...

Many ppl can say apple's is the new evil, but somehow it's one of the teddy-bear's of the evils on the market. People are making software solutions without having to make a big-dog company, and they are making a living out of it with the so much criciced Appstore. Please before saying that they are doing that or that wrong, check what the other companys do to their developers and how much restrictive are their systems. Ofc they could be more 'open' but also, they could be much worse.

And another one by ttringle:

Why should they be sued for Antitrust again? I made the same defense for Microsoft way back when with the BS Internet Explorer crap and I'll do the same now for apple.

It's their damned platform, you do not like it you do not have to use it. If you are a developer you are developing for THEIR device, running THEIR software. If you don't like it. Hit the road or go develop for the Android platform.

I can't believe people take the time to complain about this BS. Apple does not have to make it easier for rivals to put stuff on their platform. Apple can't open up the iPhone OS as they can on the desktop because of one thing, IT NEEDS TO RUN ON A DAMNED PHONE. You want to complain to someone, complain to the phone companys who have kept the phones close for as long as a phone has been able to run any kind of real apps. AT&T won't even release tethering even though they said they would over a year ago.

I find it odd that I'm defending Apple as I long hated the company. But to be honest the iPhone and iPod's have worked just fine letting Apple do things the way they want. You don't like apple's way of doing things, don't buy it.

Last week everybody was bitching they didn't have multitasking, now that they are going to do it, everybody looks for the next thing to bitch about. Grow the hell up.

So, complainers (and Flash devs), stop acting like you're owed something.

 

[pdjudd]

I would disagree. Apple has a monopoly in the mobile software market (similar percentage to IE share which they were forced to advertise competing browser for). Apple is using this to leverage the market into a direction which is not good for the consumers or competition.

No they don’t. They are in third place in terms of market share. Stella cites about 15% percent or so and that sounds right to me.

 

[jerome65]

And the main focus is not Adobe, only ignorant users that have no clue about programming are making it the main focus (at least we're lucky this thread hasn't devolved into a HTML5 is best rant... talk about not understanding the issue there...).

I may be an ignorant user but as I read the evolution of this it does seem to be focused on Adobe. The implications of it may reach further than Adobe but I seriously doubt that the reason for making the changes were to stop a few Fortran developers from being able to develop for the iPhone. In fact I would imagine, based on the timing of the announcement, that these changes are in a direct response to Adob's upcoming release of Flash 5 and if they did not add in iPhone development in that product then the restrictions would not have been put in place.

 

[pdjudd]

Oh please, and McDonald's has a monopoly on Bigmacs.

Well if you want to be literal about it, they do have a monopoly. Of course it is a monopoly that they are very much entitled to and legal to posses. Whenever people try to make statements like that I like to say “So?” or “And I am pretty happy that they do have it."

 

[kas23]

If that were to happen, there’s no lock-in advantage. If, say, a mobile Flash software platform — which encompassed multiple lower-level platforms, running on iPhone, Android, Windows Phone 7, and BlackBerry — were established, that app market would not give people a reason to prefer the iPhone.

I don't understand this quote. Not having Flash, as crappy as some may think, gives the advantage to other platforms that do. The iPhone is at the disadvantage here.

 

[KnightWRX]

So, complainers (and Flash devs), stop acting like you're owed something.

It's not about being owed something. It's about using other people's work to get your idea to market faster. Standing on the shoulders of giants so to say. If you have no clue about sub-pixel tesselation, but now how to write some good game logic, why should you be stuck writing some damn OpenGL ES, when all you want is .displayModel("FileName"); .MakeModelLookCool();.

The people behind things like the Flash packager provide the above. They do the hard work behind the scenes, so you can concentrate on doing the hard work on the scene.

This is essentially teamwork, but in a business relationship sort of way. Anyone trying to claim this is lazyness should ask their plumbers to smelt their own copper and make their pipes with raw materials instead of using pre-made pipes and solder.

Well if you want to be literal about it, they do have a monopoly. Of course it is a monopoly that they are very much entitled to and legal to posses. Whenever people try to make statements like that I like to say “So?” or “And I am pretty happy that they do have it."

They have a monopoly for a very weird definition of monopolies. Monopolies are on markets, not products. Apple doesn't have a monopoly and neither does McDonald's.