So, is XBox Live a monopoly too? Or was it only a monopoly until PS3 came out with PSN?

Microsoft doesn't have private APIs they use for their own indie games to compete directly with other indie developers (the indie developer area of XBL is the only thing that's comparable to the app store).

Yeah, and MS doesn't care what third party tools/languages/whatever you used to produce an Xbox Live Indie game.

Visual C++ and /clr:safe is confirmed to work, so any comparable assembly produced by a compiler should too (mono/*mcs.) You'll probably need to reference it from a C# project in Game Studio to deploy to your 360, but the final deploy is done at creators.xna.com.

It'd be a lot of extra work, and it wouldn't be supported (obviously,) but there's no reason you can't do it.

Well, yeah, I mean it has to work with the platform, and it's not supported, but they don't specifically say "You can't write a program in X language and cross compile it to work with the XNA platform. You must originally write everything in C#."

There are a lot of things that piss me off about how Apple treats developers for the iPhone/iPad, but private APIs isn't one of them. They could be lying of course, but the reasoning they've given seems fair - an API becomes public once it's been used for several versions of 1st party apps without change. It's pitched as a maintenance issue.

A maintenance issue that conveniently gives their apps a leg up over the third-party apps they're competing with in the app store. That's the issue people have.

What Darth said. It wouldn't be much of an issue if it only applied to freely-available apps that come with the phone. But they make use of private APIs in apps that they are selling, thus competing with other apps in the catalog. It results in an uneven playing field, with Apple able to do essentially anything they want with their paid apps, but other developers being screwed over.

If they want to test an API, they should at least release the software for free until other developers can make use of the APIs.

Did anyone see this? Bad apps will be a bad app regardless of the language its written in. Unless you're steve jobs, then just blame someone else.

http://www.engadget.com/2010/04/10/steve-jobs-responds-to-complaint-about-new-development-tool-rest/

Steve only responded to that guy for PR. He's not changing his ways at all. His iPhone is widespread and large corporations have made apps for it and is bringing mad loot for Apple. Not unless you're Facebook, MLB, NBA, Weather Channel, etc, will your pleas be heard.

Adobe should stop selling Photoshop for Macs.

I would really like it if Adobe stopped making Mac software. I hate how they remove aspects of the programs that don't work well in OSX for the PC version as well. Premiere CS4 was raped badly in this regard.

They removed something?

It's more that they're molding it more and more to be identical to FCP, which isn't really a bad thing. Although cineform is strangely absent from CS4, which upsets me, because that's an awesome tool. It pisses me off even further that from what I understand, Adobe had bought cineform to bundle it with Premiere, and since cineform is PC only, Apple told them to **** off with it. So now you can't get it anymore.

Or maybe you can and I just can't find it available anywhere now, and the old versions don't work with CS4. Maybe I should have continued to use Vegas and its horrible interface.

CS4's UI in general was a step down. They switched to an annoying non-native UI which made it look consistent across platforms but also made it consistently bad across platforms.

All of CS4 seems to eat resources like crazy. I only ever messed with Premiere CS3 and it was the same way. CS2 wasn't nearly this bad.

It took me forever to figure out how to get CS4 to show the menu on the top bar instead of its own... (it wraps to a new line if there isn't enough room, you have to make the window bigger). Not that I use CS4, but I have it at work.

I believe there are a grand total of EIGHT applications made by Apple in the app store. 2 of them are related to MobileMe Gallerys, three are the iWork for iPad, and the other 3 are Remote, Texas Hold'Em, and Keynote Remote. That's it. Do a search in the iTunes for the developers, and you will come up with a grand total of eight Apple apps. Of those, there are tons of third party substitutes that perform more than admirably. There are way better Texas Hold Em Games, there are way better remote applications (Air Mouse anybody) that work with ANY application on your computer, and there is even better office suites (Quickoffice which integrates with Dropbox, MobileMe etc).

I highly doubt that these programs, representing .00003% of the app store, results in an uneven playing field where Apple is DOING WHATEVER THEY WANT

And without even looking I would bet that the iWork apps are probably one of the highest selling apps in the store right now.

Also, it doesn't matter if it was a SINGLE APP, it's still an app that has a distinct advantage over every other app in the store. It's like having a Nascar race but saying all but the Apple car must drive with three instead of four wheels. Just because it's only 1 out of ~50 cars doesn't mean its suddenly fair!

So what was your point again?

My point is that there are 3rd party applications that are better than iWork and the Apple apps. So how is their use of private APIs helping them and creating an "uneven playing field" ACROSS the entire app store, of which there are more than 185,000 apps. It's clear that Apple hardly has any interest in creating a bunch of apps, since the only ones that cost anything are iWork and Texas Hold Em I believe. And re: iWork, I bet Quickoffice has a lot more downloads on the iPhone, unfortunately we cannot see and compare.

Clearly the apps that Apple has released are taking absolutely NO advantage of any superior APIs, I would argue, since there are other apps that are BETTER across the board that apparently don't have access to those APIs. The iPad still has to go through a stupidly inefficient way of file access, just like Quickoffice, so even iWork isn't taking advantage of anything superior to Quickoffice in that regard.

You can't be serious when you are claiming that these two apps are destroying somehow the integrity (or whatever it is you are arguing that these behaviors are "destroying) of the App Store when there existence is so trivial anyways since there are clearly other apps on the App Store that are superior in almost every way. Arguing about Apple's selection/approval process for things that might replace Safari,Mail, and iPod and other built in apps, THAT is a different argument and in that case I'd agree with you WHOLEHEARTEDLY. But this argument about other apps not having access to these awesome APIs I find trivial, because these apps have proved time and time again to be BETTER than Apple apps.

A. Your definition of "superior" apps is purely opinion.
B. Superior or not, using my Nascar analogy, it doesn't matter if someone else still wins with 3 wheels, it's still unfair to all the other racers. It means they have to work significantly harder, and get significantly more creative just to compete.
C. Again, number of apps they have in the store are irrelevant. People are only going to buy so many apps. You have to look at it as a market whole, not at each type of application.

All in all, B is by far the most important thing here. If you think that this IS fair to developers, you are insane. Period. This is near anti-competitive levels, buck.

Also, iWork has probably outsold nearly everything else on the App Store since its release a few weeks ago. Obviously it probably hasn't hit the same download count as that quickoffice suite, but that's because it's only been out for... 2 weeks?

I believe the legal term for what apple has done with this new clause in their developers contract is "a dick move."

I think developers would be even more pissed off if thousands of apps suddenly didn't work after an OS update because Apple decided that an API method needed improvement.

Like I said, there are plenty of serious issues with Apple's policies regarding apps, but private API methods are not one of them. They are following a series of steps that any sane developer would follow.

If I was developing an API for a website I was building, I'd follow exactly the same process, in fact I already do. The websites we develop at work have a few webservices that only we know about, despite them technically being available to the whole world. Given that we have an affiliate scheme, someone knowing about these services could build a much more powerful affiliate site and get more money, but just because these services exist it doesn't mean they're ready for widespread usage - even though we use them in production all the time.

I'm not saying they don't have legit reasons for this API change. I just think their reasoning for the change isn't completely based around improvement.

Just because you say it isn't an issue doesn't make it so.

Releasing the app as a paid app is anti-competitive, regardless of the production-readiness of the API. If the API is not ready for developer use, they shouldn't be using it in a paid app. End of story. Either do far more testing privately, or at least make the app free. Just because Apple needs to test an API doesn't mean they should be allowed to just use it in front of developers.

Oh, and this isn't some small 10-man development team working on the iPhone here. Apple should MORE than enough resources to properly test an API on their own. After all, it developed a whole flippin' OS, or did they just throw iPhone OS 1.0 out to the crowd and hoped it worked?

PS, it looks like Adobe is going through with it and releasing flash with the iphone app compiler in CS5

Go Adobe! Basically this can't go wrong. Two things can result:

A. Apple lets it happen, doesn't do anything. Adobe and developers win.
B. Apple blocks it, and it creates a massive stinkstorm in the news. All the other phone developers make a point to show their support. More developers give up on the iPhone.

It's gonna be awesome

Hopefully MonoTouch and Unity keep getting updated too. Dunno how many developers would continue to pay for them though when it's unclear if apps written with them would make it through. At least with CS5 you're getting a lot more than just the iPhone compiler.

Welp, thats going to be interesting.

stripped down an os

which is the whole flippin' os from a different project

which they bought from another company

who based it on a bsd distribution

which was based on a different bsd distribution

apple does not innovate. they are not good at software development. they have the most insecure os, insecure web browser and the worst performance. the only reason their systems are even superficially better than a crappy dell running windows is because they threw money at intel until they made the hard part of os programming go away (acpi.)

the only thing they developed on their own was an aesthetically god awful gui full of fake reflections, plastic and shadows going in 12 different directions

Regardless of what OS X was built off of, it wasn't a simple copy/paste to put on the iPhone, and they should be capable of independently testing an API fully.

You don't test that an API doesn't change over time by writing more unit tests, you test it by writing real world software that uses it and then seeing if you need to change the API over time. Once the API has proven stable (ie unchanging, as opposed to the non-crashing kind of stability), you make it public. APIs tend to stick around for a very long time, so changing the method signature with every version is a quick way to piss off everyone who uses it.

pfft, it's objective-c, the signature is the name of the method. application developers should write code expecting that their api calls will potentially do nothing.

Yes, because Apple is the type to worry about pissing people off.

Besides, nothing you stated requires them to sell an application using the API.

Finally, under your method of development, the first app catalog would have had no apps at all except Apple's, since all those app catalog APIs have to be tested publicly! (Note that releasing the iPhone without an app catalog at all was not applicable)

Heh, they approved Opera Mini. Just goes to show how arbitrary they are with what "duplication of core functionality" means. They'll probably change their mind on it tomorrow too.

The only reason Apple wouldn't allow third party browsers is because they didn't want to allow any third party means of executing code. The only reason they approved Opera Mini is because everything is handled on Opera's servers, including Javascript.

Right, but they've also denied plenty of apps in the past that don't technically violate any of their terms. They definitely do not follow their terms to the letter. My point, they probably chose to approve this to try and get a little bit of positive press in a week full of negative press...

It wouldn't surprise me.

This does not piss me off. What does piss me off is when Apple, and others, ***** about MS doing the same thing. ****ing hypocrites.