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Apple relaxes rules on 3rd party developer tools

Jonathan Riggall

Jonathan Riggall

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Apple has changed a controversial clause in its iOS developer’s agreement, in a statement released today. It’s a pretty shocking move, as it was seen as an aggressive policy against its competitors when it was originally announced.

One of the biggest shots fired in the war between Apple and Adobe was when the former added a rule to its developer’s agreement stating, ‘Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs.’

This blocked Adobe’s new CS5 feature that included an iPhone compiler, so essentially apps could have been made in Flash, then converted into an iPhone ready format.  Today’s statement seems to reverse that decision, saying

we are relaxing all restrictions on the development tools used to create iOS apps, as long as the resulting apps do not download any code.

This doesn’t mean Flash games will be available in the App Store (thankfully), but does look like they could be developed using Adobe’s compiler. Has Apple made up with Adobe? That doesn’t seem likely, but alongside the other surprising announcement that the App Store review guidelines are being published finally, secretive Apple appears to be opening up a little. Or maybe it’s because, as they do say so themselves, the App Store is ‘is perhaps the most important milestone in the history of mobile software,’ and deserves some transparency.

Apple being Apple, I wouldn’t expect any straight answers any time soon.

Jonathan Riggall

Jonathan Riggall

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