I know that Steve Ballmer gets a lot of flack for his “Developer, developer, developer” ranting and more than one article has been written about the horrors of coding against the Win32 API but for all that the one thing Microsoft has done is promote the developer. Whether it be giving away Express versions of the developer tools to publishing top notch developer books under its Microsoft Press division the company has done a decent job of supporting Windows developers.
On the flip side of the developer world we have the devoted Apple developers creating cool stuff for the Mac and now the iPhone – or at least trying to because Apple appears to being doing everything it can to make that an extremely difficult proposition. First we hear that developers have to apply for the iPhone SDK and part of that process is agreeing to a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) that restricts them from saying anything about the SDK.
If I am wrong about this part please correct me in the comments. This is followed by public acknowledgement that Apple has built in a kill switch in the iPhone that lets Apple delete any installed application on the iPhone that they want to. Then we hear that they are banning any applications from the iPhone App Store that either competes against existing Apple software or any future Apple software.
However – almost like icing on top of the cake – Dan Frommer from Silicon Alley Insider posts about how the iPhone Developer NDA has the publishing company Pragmatic Programmers pulling their plans on publishing an iPhone Developer book. As quoted by Dan in his post
We’ve had the iPhone book ready to go beta for some months, but were prevented from publishing it because of the iPhone SDK’s Non-Disclosure Agreement (which affects all publishers regarding this material, regardless of whether the reader is a member of the ADC or not).
Normally, pre-release NDA’s such as this one are lifted when the product finally ships. We expected that thisNDA would be lifted when the iPhone 2.0 software shipped, but it was’t. The September announcement came and went, and still the NDA remains in place.
It now appears that Apple does not intend to lift the NDA any time soon. Regrettably, this means we are pulling our iPhone book out of production. But all is not lost: we are actively looking at alternative ways of getting this content to you. It probably won’t happen anytime soon, but know that we are doing what we can.
This all follows on the heels of an excellent post on Mac World by Jason Snell where he writes about the growing dissatisfaction among Apple developers and how many are reluctant to undertake any iPhone development at all
If you don’t want to sympathize with developers, let me rephrase it to describe how this will affect users: If developers are afraid to write programs for the iPhone that aren’t games, to-do lists, and tip calculators, for fear that all their hard work will be wasted by a malicious or capricious Apple rejection notice, they will stop writing programs for the platform. And the well of innovative, interesting iPhone software will dry up.
But that’s not all. Some of them will turn to more open platforms, such as Google’s Android, and start taking their good ideas there. Which could transform phones running Android into full-featured devices that simply do more cool stuff than the iPhone, no matter how hard Apple tries to write its own software to catch up. Which could, in time, lead to the iPhone becoming a marginalized and limited product, all of its potential exhausted by the idiocy of Apple’s tight-fisted control of the App Store.
People might like to give Microsoft a hard time but you can be sure of one thing – this type of thing would never have happened with the Windows platform. Even an inkling of this type of thing would have had the company being called into the DoJ offices and the courts to explain itself.
I wonder what other shoe is going to have to drop before both developers and users of Apple products call the company on its actions with something more than mutterings in blog posts.
