Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Flash for iPhone? Apple says no!

A million people have already blogged about this, but I would still like to chime in on the matter. As most of you are aware Apple updated their already pretty strict License Agreement for the SDK to read:

3.3.1 — Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs. 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).


This could potentially mean that use of 3rd party tools such as Flash CS5, Unity 3D, MonoTouch and PhoneGap to create iPhone/iPad application would be a breach of the license agreement. ArsTechnica have wrapped it up pretty well, and I agree that the real reason for this is to target both Adobe (Flash) and Google (Android). We know for a fact that Steve Jobs doesn't have any nice things to say about Flash and it is pretty obvious that the biggest competitor to the iPhone is handsets running Android OS.

Additional reading:

http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/10/steve-jobs-responds-to-iphone-sdk-complaints-intermediate-layers-produce-sub-standard-apps/

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