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Steve Jobs Offers Explanation About iPhone SDK Changes Restricting Adobe and Other Cross Compilers

Saturday April 10, 2010 8:48 pm PDT by Arnold Kim
In a series of emails reportedly between Steve Jobs and Greg Slepak, Jobs responds to questions about Apple's recent move to ban tools that allow cross-compilation from other languages into iPhone OS native code. The change in terms effectively blocks Adobe's Flash-to-iPhone compiler and could affect other similar developer tools.

Jobs reportedly points to John Gruber's analysis of why Apple might have implemented this. Gruber argues that Apple wants control over native iPhone OS development and cross platform solutions would dilute iPhone-exclusive and iPhone native apps.

If that were to happen, there's no lock-in advantage. If, say, a mobile Flash software platform -- which encompassed multiple lower-level platforms, running on iPhone, Android, Windows Phone 7, and BlackBerry -- were established, that app market would not give people a reason to prefer the iPhone.
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And, obviously, such a meta-platform would be out of Apple's control. Consider a world where some other company's cross-platform toolkit proved wildly popular. Then Apple releases major new features to iPhone OS, and that other company's toolkit is slow to adopt them. At that point, it's the other company that controls when third-party apps can make use of these features.

Gruber also believes that these cross platform compilers rarely produce high quality native apps. Steve Jobs reiterated this point in a followup email:

We've been there before, and intermediate layers between the platform and the developer ultimately produces sub-standard apps and hinders the progress of the platform.

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allendsmeet
24 months ago
Adobe just needs to suck it up and adapt. If they don't, Apple might as well acquire them later on.
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doug in albq
24 months ago
Steve Jobs, it is high time for Apple to make a standards-based, "creatives'-friendly" set of web authoring tools. if this is not in your back pocket I am not sure where we are supposed to go from here...wait for Adobe to make some html5 and JS Authoring tools with a GUI that designers can appreciate...?
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alent1234
24 months ago
Sorry adobe, it's nothing personal. It's only business.
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jo0
24 months ago
just let it go adobe.... you're too bloated to keep moving forward.
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Kesuke
24 months ago
I'm suprised so few people have mentioned the apple exclusion of 3rd party cross compilers means developers are still locked into owning apple macs in order to develop products for the iphone. The flash compiler would finally have enabled PC based production of apps.

Steves latest comments do little to placate my growing sense of unease with apples stratergy. Never the less, this looks set to be a big show down in the mid to long term and like all good shown-downs there are two sides to this story, both of them probably in the wrong if we're being honest with ourselves -

Adobe are charging extortionate amounts for products that have hardly changed in 5 years (photoshop), and in the case of flash are probably acting more as an anchor to progress than a driving force. They just want to keep riding the gravy train.
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dagamer34
24 months ago

just let it go adobe.... you're too bloated to keep moving forward.


You seem to think this affects only Adobe, which shows how little you know. =/

And Slepak said it best, "Crappy apps come from crappy developers" and not crappy tools.
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alent1234
24 months ago
I usually think sj is full of crap, but he does have a point. I bought my 3gs at launch and i still see almost no games taking advantage of it's graphical hardware. If he can push developers to make software that tAkes advantage of new hardware as soon as it ships, more power to him. Better for me
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cmaier
24 months ago
Yawn. Can we get a few more threads talking about this issue?
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snoopjonny
24 months ago

And Slepak said it best, "Crappy apps come from crappy developers" and not crappy tools.


Crappy Tools allow crappy developers to create crappy apps. The current set of tools weed out the developers too weak to learn how to use them.
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AustinZ
24 months ago
Well, I guess it's Apple's right to do whatever they want with their software (within certain legal bounds, of course). But I wonder what this means for other third-party authoring tools, especially Torque for iPhone and Unity's iPhone product, which would also fall into this 'prohibited' zone.

If Apple is going to enforce these revised TOS/conditions, I hope they at least apply them uniformly, in concordance with their stated arguments as to why blocking third-party tools would be advantageous.
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