Apple Caves Under Developer Pressure.

Apple’s policies for the App Store have always been a bit vague and uneven, leading to quite a few good headlines over what apps got rejected and which ones got in. I put it down to the human element in the review process as one reviewer’s biases need not line up with another. Still though the developers worked out the inputs and outputs of the application review process and if your app was useful, family friendly and didn’t go rampaging through private APIs you were golden. Apple, not content with the amount of control it was already exerting over its developers, then decided to up the ante by banning all cross platform frameworks putting a big question mark over some of their most successful applications and developers.

The whole thing can be traced back to Apple’s public flamewar with Adobe. I’m not really sure what triggered this decision in the first place (although it smacks of Jobs’ idealism) but they did it with precise timing, just a few days before Adobe was to announce their Flash to iPhone app packager for CS5. Perhaps the idea of a torrent of applications hastily converted from flash onto the iPhone was a bit too much for them to bear but in casting their net so wide they caused many people to become hesitant about developing on the platform, especially those who found great success using such 3rd party frameworks.

Apple began doing some damage control in order to ensure that they wouldn’t lose some of their biggest money earners. They gave unofficial word that frameworks such as Unity3D were safe since they generated an actual iPhone application and didn’t require use of an intermediate interpreter. Still since coding in Unity3D is done in C# this ran up against yet another draconian rule that all iPhone applications must be written in one of the sanctioned C based languages. With Android starting to pick up at a phenomenal pace there’s no doubt that Apple began to rethink their stance on many of these matters with hopes of winning back the developers they had once scorned.

Last week saw Apple release what amounts to their set of principles and guidelines that are applied when reviewing apps that will make it onto their app store. You can get the full pdf of all the guidelines here and it makes for some interesting reading. Most of them are just formalisation of the rules that most developers knew about but couldn’t get solid verification from Apple that it was a hard and fast rule. Probably the biggest coup in this whole document is they abandoned their previous stance on not allowing any cross platform libraries, allowing such applications through as long as they didn’t download any code:

The black box that is the Applereview process is creaking open. In a very brief release, Apple has essentially relaxed the requirement that developers use Apple’s own development tools “as long as the resulting apps do not download any code.” They’ve also published some review guidelines, allowing programmers to understand just what will go on behind the curtains in Cupertino.What does this mean? Well, in the updated SDK license, circa April of this year, a number of paragraphs essentially bannedoutside development tools including systems that ported Flash, Silverlight, Java, and other platforms to the iPhone. Now, presumably, any app that runs on the iPhone, regardless of source, will be considered. The language is so mushy that it’s still unclear what this means.

On the surface it would appear that Apple has backpeddled on their previous stance. Indeed the news was enough for Adobe to state that they were going to restart developing their Flash to iPhone packager which had been shelved after Apple hamstrung it earlier this year. The not downloading any code exclusion is quite understandable as this could easily be exploited as an attack vector by a malicious third party. Still most attackers wouldn’t bother with an app (that leaves a paper trail) since the browser on the phone will happily download code and run it. But I’m sure Apple knows that already.

For what its worth it seems like Apple is finally caving into the developers who helped them make their products so successful and rightly so. Developing something for an Apple product has always been about the end user, much to the detriment of those creating for those users. This is in stark contrast to Google who’s always been about the developers, favouring their freedom to develop however they want with almost no thought to the user experience. Both approaches have their pluses and pitfalls but in the end if you don’t have developers you’re going to have a hard time attracting users to your platform.

Will this lead to a flood of low quality applications on the app store and the fiery death of the user experience on the iPhone? Most likely not as there’s already enough crap on the app store to make sure that any poorly ported Flash app will be lost amongst the noise. Realistically anyone looking to publish on the iOS platform knows what they’re getting into and will redesign the app as such, lest they get bad reviews that ultimately bury their app completely. In the end I think it’s just Apple realising that the road they were going down wasn’t going to do them any favours and the rising star of Android is beginning to look attractive enough for some to make the switch.

The question now is though, will they keep their hard line on Flash? Time will tell.