Section 3.3.1: Fuck off, devs

Well, if you haven’t heard about section 3.3.1 by now, you probably lived on another planet for the past 24 hours. Yesterday Apple gave a developer preview of what they’ve been working on for the next generation iPhone OS. It was a pretty great preview at first: They announced multitasking, folders, iAd, Game Center, etc. All pretty great stuff. Everything well executed as far as we could see.
As expected: Apple still says no to Flash, but nobody really expected something new on that subject.

After the keynote, developers were enabled to get their hands on the iPhone OS 4 SDK. That’s when they had to agree to the new PLA (programming license agreement) which stated the following at some point:

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’re not into reading legal stuff or long and very boring statements, let me translate and summarize it for you.

Hey you non-Objective-C writing prick: Fuck off. Go play somewhere else.

What Apple did here is not to make sure the apps on the app store are of a good quality. They literally told every creative Flash/Unity3D/etc developer to either learn Objective-C or to sod off and create apps for Android.

I don’t really know why Apple is doing this, other than to piss off Adobe (in particular) and make sure every developer thinks twice before even considering building apps for the iPhone platform.

Some people on Twitter suggested for Adobe to postpone the Adobe CS5 Mac release.
I’m sorry: What?
What good would that be? Nothing. Seriously: the only thing Adobe would do, is to kick their own community when their already down. The only ones ending up being hurt would be the very people that are still awaiting CS5 in order to create great new content for platforms where developers and designers are still wanted and welcomed with a warm cup of hot chocolate.

If anything: I think this is the ultimate opportunity for Adobe to kick Apple directly in the nuts. Apple says no Flash devs using their known tools to create content? Well Adobe is just been given a challenge. They’ve only got a few days, so I kinda doubt they’ll make it…
But what if Adobe is to launch CS5 in a few days with a counter-attack?
What if Adobe would be able to launch CS5 with an updated Flash CS5, able to comply with the new agreement? How much of a comeback would that be?

I’m sure the people at Adobe are hard at work to somehow figure something out. And I’m sure that, sooner or later, they will come up with a solution. I know that because Adobe actually cares about their developers.

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