I guess it was bound to happen.
Apple released a statement today saying that there are some changes coming to the Developer Agreement for iOS Developers. Back in April, Apple had changed the agreement to only allow certain kinds of programming languages to be used for the creation of apps using the official Apple iOS APIs. Apple removed the extra words it had added to section 3.3.1 of the license that had blocked the Flash-derived apps. The verbage from the April change was as follows: “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 [application programming interfaces] through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited).” That urked a bunch of developers, but really tweaked Adobe. That turned into the squabble that we all saw over the last few month. WIth the announcement today, it seems that most (if not all) of that is now over. Now we’ll see if Adobe’s AIR® Packager for iPhone project gets resurrected.
As someone that’s looking to go into iOS app development at some point in the (hopefully) near future, this is mostly a good thing. Now, I firmly believe that Flash is not something that should be used for things like websites and video. If you haven’t read Steve Jobs’ “Thoughts on Flash” piece, it’s a good read. Steve makes some good, exceptionally valid points in there. Flash hasn’t proved to be a viable solution in the mobile space. If Adobe were to fix the problems with Flash, it would be a different story, but we’re still waiting there. There are much better ways to do things like web navigation and video on the Internet. Sure, Flash is an easy solutions for things like that, but just because it’s easy doesn’t make it right. Now, apps and multimedia stuff though? Yeah, Flash is a good thing there. The only downfall I can see there is that the user experience on the various iDevices can be lost with poorly planned Flash apps. Apple takes great pride in the fact that they user experience is very important. Apple’s customers expect certain things and a great user experience is one of them. I hope that people that will use Flash to develop iOS apps will take the time to do them right.
Now if you can just get clients and customers to believe that Flash development isn’t just “click, click, done!” Ah, the pain goes ever on.
In semi-related news, Apple also announced that it was going to publish the criteria that it uses for approving apps for the App Store. When that gets online, that should be an interesting read. For more info on all this, take a look at the press release from Apple.