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Comment by swilliams | Hacker News Reader

Is there a legitimate reason for this, or is Apple just thumbing their noses at Adobe (and everyone else)?

Is Apple primarily annoyed that Adobe's app and MonoTouch aren't doing it the "Apple" way? Or do they not like that those frameworks present non-standard UI's (I haven't used MonoTouch, so I don't even know if that's the case here)?

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If stuff gets compiled to ARM code and is linked to Apple's frameworks, which I think both Flash-to-app and MonoTouch do, it should be all the same to Apple. Therefore I'd go with thumbing their noses at Adobe. And I'd even say it is because of Adobe's we've-already-sneaked-in-a-bunch-of-apps stunt. In other words, this is not entirely about the betterment of the iPhone platform, it's at least partly personal.

I think that they see cross platform development platforms as a threat. They prefer if apps are written only and specifically for iPhone.

I think it's stupid to ban different languages but I can see that writing apps specifically for a platform can make the application better on that platform, rather than having the lowest common denominator between iPhone, Android and Blackberry powered by a scripting language.

Apple might say the rationale is to allow easier inspection of apps for policy compliance. (Even though other languages compiled-to-approved-languages will be the same for automated analysis, it's more likely the code will be inscrutable to human reviewers.)

You don't submit your source code to Apple. Why should this matter?

You raise an interesting question. Perhaps they'll require source-code to be submitted in the future?

It would greatly surprise me if they did so, not least because every new piece of Apple software might get hit with speculative IP lawsuits if they had any features that bore even the most remote similarity to an iPhone app for which the developer had submitted code...even a company as wealthy as Apple would weep at the compliance costs.

But the indirect effect would be to shut people up. Rather than spending much or any effort on peeking inside iPhone apps looking for signature traces of cross-compilation, Apple would benefit because people would stop talking in public about which 3rd-party development platforms they had used for their cool new app, out of fear that mentioning anything besides C, C++ or Obj. C might result in their app being taken off sale - so without Apple doing a single thing different at the technical level, this license provision would have a chilling effect on discussion about competitors' development tools.

MonoTouch uses Cocoa bindings, so the interface is using native components.

"Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript"

MonoTouch apps are written in C#.

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