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Comment by pg | Hacker News Reader

iPhone developers: No change. If you’re a developer and you’ve been following Apple’s advice, you will never even notice this rule.

This is where he goes wrong. Using multiple layers of abstraction has always been a win for programmers, and not just for compatibility across platforms.

This move by Apple is equivalent to IBM saying in 1970 that programmers couldn't use high level languages-- that they had to write programs only in IBM 360 machine language. The loss would not have been only in portability.

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> The loss would not have been only in portability.

I think their loss is about to be in the form of an exodus of developers.

Is that true? I sure hope it is, but I wouldn't count on it. The vast majority of developers have been working in straight Objective-C anyway.

Plus, they have so many apps, even if they lose a lot of their high-quality developers, that'll probably just be a tiny blip when it comes to total apps being submitted. It might take a long time to notice that the quality of apps has gone down, since it's so hard to quantify, and there no doubt will still be some quality apps. And them noticing quickly is what we need so that they'll reverse this rule.

I'm not sure that the "quality" of the majority of the apps in the app store is very high anyway. There are certainly high quality apps, and I'd bet dollars to donuts that they are written in one of the approved languages.

But the reason the iPhone became popular is not because there was a very high quality app version of wolfram alpha or a gold game, but because there were reasonably good quality apps (at a good price) that scratched relatively small, (dare I say it?) long tail, itches.

You can be relatively sure as a new iPhone owner that you'll be able to find your fishing lure guide app, or your app to order emergency socks or whatever. I'm willing to bet that lots of those apps were not written in one of the approved national languages of the Union of Soviet Apple Orchards.

"Plus, they have so many apps, even if they lose a lot of their high-quality developers, that'll probably just be a tiny blip when it comes to total apps being submitted. "

This was true when an exodus from Windows started. Windows still has a lot of committed talented developers, but it is also true that a lot of developers moved away from Windows and it hurt them long term.

"It might take a long time to notice that the quality of apps has gone down, since it's so hard to quantify, and there no doubt will still be some quality apps. And them noticing quickly is what we need so that they'll reverse this rule."

I personally would hope that Apple does not change this rule for years (and add more dickhead rules) till a more open/dev friendly competitor has sucked up all the devs who move away and achieves critical mass.

Don't distract your opponents (and evil people in general) when they are doing something stupid.

The highest quality apps in the App Store are being written using Xcode & C/Objective-C. The biggest app development shops working on the biggest and most popular iPhone apps are using Objective-C and Cocoa frameworks, not any kind of meta-platform. Users won't see any loss of quality, none whatsoever.

There are hundreds of games in the App Store built with Unity, including at least one in top 10.

You can be sure that if Unity games are taken out of the app store, people will notice.

Which just shows that some people go to great lengths to explain Apple's anti-competitive behavior ... "it's OK, it doesn't affect me" ... maybe not in the short term.

It's certainly true of one developer .. I'm a C# developer who was about to buy a Macbook Pro specifically so I could target/port an app to run on iPhone (was just waiting on the refresh). This is the last straw as far as I'm concerned...

So yes, one less developer for iPhone (except as a web platform, if they are lucky). Also one less MacBook pro sale for Apple (probably, because I'm so steamed about this.. though .. heh, maybe lets see how the refresh looks next week and then we'll see)

I think their loss will be in the mass of flash developers who will now be developing for android.

CS5 also targets android.

That's a nice pipe dream, but nope.

Checks yesterday's sales

Nope, we're good.

You're being overly dramatic. This has nothing to do with the normal use of layers of abstraction in your in architecture.

> This has nothing to do with the normal use of layers of abstraction in your in architecture.

What's your definition of 'normal'?

What if you abstract out your logic with a DSL that compiles down to iPhone native code? This is in violation of their terms of service.

What if your DSL just generates C code? That also looks like a terms of service violation.

Now what if that DSL is a yacc grammar for a network protocol or configuration file? Not an abnormal use anymore, is it?

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