When iPhone OS 4 was announced on 8th April, it came with new iPhone Developer Program License Agreement. The now famous section 3.3.1 states:

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).

If you want to read a good article on why Apple did this, I recommend Daring Fireball. And for a more light-hearted look at the issue, try The Macalope.

For me personally, it's a pain. I am a long time user of Revolution for rapid application development, so I was thrilled when they announced revMobile which would allow me to use the same programming language for iPhone & iPad development.

Now I am stuck in limbo waiting to see if the Revolution people can do some sort of deal with Apple to get revMobile listed as an acceptable programming language in one way or another.

I've done some Xcode programming for iPhone, but I am so much more productive in Revolution. And as a good programmer, I am lazy and want to be able to do things quicker and more easily.

With my Apple supporter's hat on, I can see exactly why Apple is doing what they are doing. They have introduced a new type of computer with the iPad and they want developers to produce apps that are designed from scratch to work in this new environment. They do not want ported apps that look like they were designed to run on Windows and have been quickly hacked to run to the iPad. I think they also want to increase the standard of software development so that people no longer have to expect that their computers will crash at any moment. But this isn't really helping me right now, so I can only wait and hope.

Meanwhile, has anyone else noticed how Microsoft seems to have become completely marginalised? The blogosphere used to be filled with Microsoft vs. Apple debates, but now the battle has moved off the desktop and into the mobile devices. Google has taken over as the competitor to Apple and Microsoft isn't even playing the same game at the moment. Apple needs to start a new series of ads: "Hi, I'm an iPad", "And I'm an Android". Could be some funny stuff there.

Update: 11th May 2010
RunRev has just announced that there will be no further work on revMobile for iPhone and iPad. Check out the RunRev Blog for all the details.

turn away from the dark side and embrace Android :-)

by mark w. matthews on September 03 2010