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

[Bytor65]

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

How can some app that is available cross multiple platforms effect the sales of that platform!?

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.

I guarantee they aren't killing all development tools, not even close.

This is clearly all about maintaining control of their OWN platform and not ceding it to the likes of Adobe. If you think about it in that light, you can get a better handle on what will likely be blocked and what won't.

Tools that aid development for the iPhone platform will be allowed. (libraries used in Xcode projects)

Tools that attempt to be a meta platform on top won't. flash-to-app, or other write once compile many cross platform app generators.

The former offer benefits to the platform, the latter try to supplant it.

How the meta-platform, cross platform app generators damage the platform is clear if you think it through.

1: Lowest common denominator apps. No differentiation. No unique features used.
2: Less incentive to innovate the platform because of (1).
3: loss of control of platform because of (1) and (2)
4: For a platform with approvals, a Tidal wave of mediocre, lowest common denominator apps flooding the approval queues. Meaning longer approval times for all devs, harder time finding quality in a sea of drek.

I want to expand on #4. Because I have seen the ridiculous notion before that there are already mediocre apps using Xcode, so this doesn't matter. There are mediocre Xcode apps, but that doesn't make it sane to open the doors to a flood of more mediocre apps.

But those numbers will easily be TEN(maybe hundred) Times worse once the script kiddies can turn flash into apps.

Adobe proudly declared in one of their Flash-to-App videos that a small handful of pre release users had already dumped more than 100 shovel-ware apps in the appstore. It will be a nightmare for Apple if they didn't block this.

Apple won't lose developers with this move, they would lose more real developers if they allowed the script kiddies to crush the approval queue and flood the appstore with drek.

Apple doesn't need more mediocre apps in the appstore.

 

[McLarenTopTeam]

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.

I am not talking about hardware. Of all the mobile apps sold 60%+ are on the iphone. (this is the same as IE percentage, and yet MS was made to advertise other browsers as a punishment)

 

[cmaier]

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. A tiny percentage of mobile software is sold by Apple. They arent even the number one platform. And in antitrust law you can't just define some arbitrary market ("mobile app store sales").

And ms got in trouble for leveraging their OS market share to build IE market share, so your reference to 60% is irrelevant.

 

[huntercr]

steve is absolutely right! the last million times mobile safari crashed on my iPad nano is all because it was developed with 3rd party tools.



$100/year and a required Mac since 3rd party tools are no longer available doesn't equate to being free.

also, while Flash Professional CS4 or Flash Builder costs hundreds of dollars, they are OPTIONAL. the open source Flex SDK is free, and you can use any free open source IDE (Eclipse) to develop your work.

You don't have to pay any money to Apple to develop for OSX/iphone/ipad.
You can download xcode for free from Apple's site, fully supported.
If you want you App in the Apple Store, then you have to pay your $100/year

 

[KnightWRX]

No they don't. A tiny percentage of mobile software is sold by Apple. They arent even the number one platform. And in antitrust law you can't just define some arbitrary market ("mobile app store sales").

And ms got in trouble for leveraging their OS market share to build IE market share, so your reference to 60% is irrelevant.

Not to mention 60% is today's figure. IE got into the high 80%s and almost effectively destroyed the cross-platform nature of the web before starting its downward slide.

You don't have to pay any money to Apple to develop for OSX/iphone/ipad.
You can download xcode for free from Apple's site, fully supported.
If you want you App in the Apple Store, then you have to pay your $100/year

This is wrong. The 100$/year is also required to install the app on your own hardware.

 

[EagerDragon]

They were pretty fast, infact - a lot of users had to replace their 3-4 year old G5's because they were no longer supported by CS4.



Adobe CS was actually one of the first software packages to have 64 bit support. In the early days of 64 bit, CS was one of the few arguments for choosing 64 bit power over 32 bit compatability (driver support for older devices wasn't great back then).



Bear in mind, Flash is NOT originally an Adobe product. It was made by Macromedia until they were aquired by adobe in 2005. Flash is far from being perfect, but it has been (thus far) the only way of achieving truly rich content on the internet. A lot of the instability issues aren't adobes failure to address core problems but rather the intrinsic challenges of supporting 99.999% of operating systems and hardware. Don't get me wrong, I believe Flash ought to be buried in the 'thanks & goodbye' section of the internet hall of fame - but never the less it isn't all bad - the lack of a suitable alternative until now is testament to that.

Flash's simplistic timeframe approach is a conceptually logical starting point for many people learning to programme, its crude but you have to start somewhere and flash facilitates that. I bet more than a few of us on here followed the route of learning HTML, then Flash/Javascript and then branched out from there.

Maybe you do not remember some of this:

If I remember correctly, there was no Intel version of Adobe products for about two years, old code had to run in Roseta for that time. I could be wrong, but back then Adobe and Apple were in fairly good terms with the exeption of Adobe not wanting to switch to cocoa.

The Mac Pro sat collecting dust for a while while waiting for photoshop and other tools from Adobe to be ported over. Lots of pro's just sat on the sidelines until Adobe released the new version before purchasing a new Mac Pro.

Finaly Adobe came out with Intel versions, but they were still not cocoa based.

A lot of the Adobe products for windows had more features and were more advanced. Even Photoshop elements was more advanced on windows.

As to 64 bits .... If I recalll correctly 64 bit Adobe products were 1st supported in windows and Mac versions were only partialy supported.

CS5 to my knowledge is the first Adobe product for Mac that fully embraces 64 bit.

For a long time now, the Mac has been a second class citizent at Adobe, it is a good revenue, but I think they would stop all Mac development if they did not need the money.

It has been about 4 to 5 years since they acquired flash, that would have been plenty of time to produce a new version that took full advantage of the platform and that was well debuged.

IMHO Adobe does not plan to change their priorities and will just milk the Mac community in the hope that they move to the PC.

I have no inside info, but I do believe that Apple will be developing their own products to compete against Adobe in all other areas so as not to tie the release of hardware / software to Adobe's time table.

Adobe is part of the HTML5 team, but instead of trying to make it better, they are trying to remove Canvas from HTML5 as a way to keep Flash as the standard.

Heck several years ago, Adobe was trying to compete with Flash but since they now own it, they are trying to milk it to the max. Nothing wrong with that as a business decision, just don't tell us how other people are only interested in their domination while you do the same and work against what is best for the Internet media consumers.

 

[anthonylambert]

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.

Unity uses MonoTouch and is written in C#. This is banned.

 

[McLarenTopTeam]

No they don't. A tiny percentage of mobile software is sold by Apple. They arent even the number one platform. And in antitrust law you can't just define some arbitrary market ("mobile app store sales").

And ms got in trouble for leveraging their OS market share to build IE market share, so your reference to 60% is irrelevant.

erm here are the figures

http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/01/apple-responsible-for-994-of-mobile-app-sales-in-2009.ars

Apple responsible for 99.4% of mobile apps sales in 2009. That's not a tiny percentage by any means.


This whole issue also goes to show how bad the Apple developer tools are, if everyone prefers to develop using third party tools.

 

[jerome65]

I am not talking about hardware. Of all the mobile apps sold 60%+ are on the iphone. (this is the same as IE percentage, and yet MS was made to advertise other browsers as a punishment)

If Apple has 15% of the market on smart phones and 60% of the market of software sold for smart phones is purchased by iPhone users then that just means that iPhone users buy more software for their phones than the users of other platforms do. This does not give Apple a monopoly on smart phones or the software sold for smart phones since the bulk of the software available for the iPhone is not produced by Apple but 3rd party developers.

 

[pdjudd]

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.

It was very deliberate. I know that there is a distinction however there is a disctintion between legally correct and what the common vernacular usage. Of course using “monopoly” the way I did was incorrect - however people commonly extend it to other areas similar to the word “theory”. Marketwise of course no monopoly exists. I looked at the Apple Dictionary for Monopoly does have this to say:

the exclusive possession, control, or exercise of something

Which would fit my "literal" application. Of course they also point out that it applies to services not products in the rest of the definition.
But to be clear I was deliberately avoiding legal usage since cmaier covered it.

ETA:

This is wrong. The 100$/year is also required to install the app on your own hardware.

To be a bit fair, he never did say anything about installing, just development which is true.

ETA:

Apple responsible for 99.4% of mobile apps sales in 2009. That's not a tiny percentage by any means.

Which just proves that Apple is really really popular with Apps. Its totally irrelevant in the grand scheme of things when it concerns anti-trust and monopolies.

 

[pdjudd]

delete

 

[McLarenTopTeam]

If Apple has 15% of the market on smart phones and 60% of the market of software sold for smart phones is purchased by iPhone users then that just means that iPhone users buy more software for their phones than the users of other platforms do. This does not give Apple a monopoly on smart phones or the software sold for smart phones since the bulk of the software available for the iPhone is not produced by Apple but 3rd party developers.

It's actually 99.4% quoted from the article in my previous post. With such market share, what Apple is doing here is leveraging their monopoly to hur consumers and competition.

 

[cmaier]

erm here are the figures

http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/01/apple-responsible-for-994-of-mobile-app-sales-in-2009.ars

Apple responsible for 99.4% of mobile apps sales in 2009. That's not a tiny percentage by any means.


This whole issue also goes to show how bad the Apple developer tools are, if everyone prefers to develop using third party tools.

Wrong. They are the marketplace for that percentage, but they didn't write any o that software. My point is you don't get to draw a line around an arbitrary activity and call it a dominates market.

no antitrust regulator is going to say that apple selling other people's software is a monopolized market that can serve as the basis of an illegal tying charge.

Apple also has 100% of the market for tablets with apple logos on them. And that too is irrelevant under antitrust law.

 

[jerome65]

erm here are the figures

http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/01/apple-responsible-for-994-of-mobile-app-sales-in-2009.ars

Apple responsible for 99.4% of mobile apps sales in 2009. That's not a tiny percentage by any means.


This whole issue also goes to show how bad the Apple developer tools are, if everyone prefers to develop using third party tools.

Your figure is quoting the percentage of the mobile application sales the App Store had and not the percentage of Apple's applications, the OS, or the iPhone. Again this just means that iPhone users buy software when other smart phone users tend to use the built in applications.

 

[SactoGuy18]

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.

Given that Netscape was pretty much destroyed as a company once Internet Explorer was bundled with Windows from Windows 95 OSR 2 and later, was it small wonder why the Department of Justice had to step in?

Note the Toyota Corolla analogy I mentioned in my last post--sure, it may work if you're only allowed to drive from San Francisco to Los Angeles with only a Corolla, but we do like choice of driving other vehicles with anything from a freeway-legal motorcycle all the way up to an recreational vehicle.

As such, don't be surprised that Adobe either files its own suit against Apple or asks the FTC/Department of Justice to file a suit against Apple. After all, you can create apps running under iPhone OS 3.x and 4.0 with the upcoming Adobe Creative Suite 5, but Apple banning this method of write iPhone OS apps is the height of arrogance (and possibly a violation of antitrust laws). Is it small wonder why developers are increasingly interested in a tablet computer that runs Google's Android or Chrome OS operating systems? At least under Android or Chrome OS, you're not so subject to the whims of a "gatekeeper" for apps you can sell and can use your choice of tools to write apps for these two operating systems.

 

[KnightWRX]

To be a bit fair, he never did say anything about installing, just development which is true.

Yes, because writing something and then not being able to use it is a perfectly valid definition of Free.

The dev tools are only free if you don't mind never being able to use the resulting app.

As such, don't be surprised that Adobe either files its own suit against Apple or asks the FTC/Department of Justice to file a suit against Apple. After all, you can create apps running under iPhone OS 3.x and 4.0 with the upcoming Adobe Creative Suite 5, but Apple banning this method of write iPhone OS apps is the height of arrogance (and possibly a violation of antitrust laws).

No it's not. To violate anti-trust laws, you must first have a trust.

Geez you anti-trust people are dense.

 

[Darkroom]

You don't have to pay any money to Apple to develop for OSX/iphone/ipad.
You can download xcode for free from Apple's site, fully supported.
If you want you App in the Apple Store, then you have to pay your $100/year

better yet, why not entirely skip downloading the Xcode tools and run your program in your head as that's about as useful as writing an application soley for the iPhone simulator

 

[firewood]

Apple responsible for 99.4% of mobile apps sales in 2009. That's not a tiny percentage by any means.

Hey! Those aren't Apple's sales. Those are mine! (...well plus including Ngmoco, EA, plus maybe 100k other developers) I'd love to think I have a monopoly, but my apps, and Apple's branded apps, are only a tiny percentage to those total mobile app sales, onto the #3 in size smartphone platform.

I do try to sell apps to one of the other platforms. Whose fault is is that the majority of customers in the mobile market aren't buying apps? Not Apple's.

 

[TMay]

I think what he meant was that Androids market share has the potential (if not the inevitability) of taking over from iPhone OS simply because Anroid will be on hundreds of devices at all price points whilst iPhone OS is limited to just a few devices with a very high price point.

As a consequence new game development may shift towards android simply because its a way of selling more apps and making more money. Cross-compilers would have meant 1 developer makes 1 app which is then just compiled for multiple operating systems.

It's also true that the splintering of the Android market isn't going to be a picnic for developers. Apple basically will have 4 generations of devices by this summer, with the latest being a superset of the previous versions. By fall, it's probable that that the iPhone and iPad variants will have converged into a single version again.

Would you as a developer like to support all the variations of features and versions of Android, not to mention Chrome OS versions of phones, tablets, netbooks and media devices?

 

[jtara]

YES!!!

No more crappy application generators....

Now, any publicly-traded companies I can short that do nothing but iPhone application generation?

 

[pdjudd]

Yes, because writing something and then not being able to use it is a perfectly valid definition of Free.

The dev tools are only free if you don't mind never being able to use the resulting app.

True - but the cost of the tools themselves are free. That is all that matters. Developers have always had to pay the $100 developer fee no matter if they used Apple’s tools or not. That cost is not relevant at all in the grand scheme of things.

Lots of things are out there that are free initially and require costs to make them really useful.

 

[I WAS the one]

Why this is a big deal? When Apple eliminate the Floppy drive wasn't the end of the world. At the end they were right. And Please check your Mac now and realize that if it wasn't for Perian and VLC or even a QT plugin for enjoying Windows Media We all be hanging in our Macs with just Quicktime. Apple always force their standards but people work around to deliver what users needs without messing with Apple. That how Apple rolls. So, let's forget about Flash and let's enter this new era of HTML5 and let's see how it goes.

I remember long time ago when Steve Wozniak call Apple to tell them that the only problem that was making Mac OS 8 crash a lot was Microsoft Explorer, but Steve never listen to him because at that time Steve needed to have a Microsoft app running in a Mac to survive that crisis era. Sometimes Apple knows their flaws sometimes don't.

Today they figure out what was making their Mac OS sluggish and buggy: FLASH. Today they have the power to decide what technology use or not use, so be it. If I were Apple I will eliminate all the tech that slows me down.

For me the perfect solution is that Apple create a converter inside Safari components and every time a Flash video shows up Safari convert it on HTML5 instantly so the Flash code never enter the OS eco-system and all of us enjoy a full web experience. but I know thats 99.99% Fantasy development and we need to wait for all developers understand that every time in evolution we all need to make changes, only the strong will survive.

 

[KnightWRX]

True - but the cost of the tools themselves are free. That is all that matters. Developers have always had to pay the $100 developer fee no matter if they used Apple’s tools or not. That cost is not relevant at all in the grand scheme of things.

Lots of things are out there that are free initially and require costs to make them really useful.

Except he was quoting someone saying that others offered free tools that could be used to make usuable apps vs Apple that charged 100$ per year and he replied that Apple's tools that resulted in usuable apps were free, which is wrong. Apple's tools don't result in usuable apps unless you pay.

That's the only point, it's also way off-topic.

 

[pdjudd]

better yet, why not entirely skip downloading the Xcode tools and run your program in your head as that's about as useful as writing an application soley for the iPhone simulator

It’s not useful from a commercial side of things, but if you have no intentions of selling your apps, its better than nothing. Of course developers have to pay Apple irregardless of using X code.

Look at things from this perspective - I can get Microsofts XNA software for nothing. Of course if I want to use it to sell X-Box software it’s no good to me because to do that you have to go through Microsoft and their agreement process.

 

[KnightWRX]

It’s not useful from a commercial side of things, but if you have no intentions of selling your apps, its better than nothing. Of course developers have to pay Apple irregardless of using X code.

Look at things from this perspective - I can get Microsofts XNA software for nothing. Of course if I want to use it to sell X-Box software it’s no good to me because to do that you have to go through Microsoft and their agreement process.

No, it's not even a commercial thing. For your own personnal use, you need to pay 100$ to Apple, per year. We're not even at the step of selling or distributing your work to others, just you writing an app for yourself and wanting to use it on your own hardware.

So yes, nothing is better. Because at least with nothing, you didn't waste your time writing a useless app.