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It was totally open and free. One needed to just sign up on the website and turn up.

Which is probably the most damning thing about the platform: when such effort is spent at luring developers in, one wonders.

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Pretty much everyone is trying to lure developers with cash/devices. Except Apple, which don't need to do that.

I'm not so sure. I tried to get a free Android device to see if Android is an interesting platform to develop for, but couldn't find anyone that could get one for me (and I'm not ready to sign a 2-year contract just for an experiment :)).

Seems a reasonable strategy to me if you have plenty of money but are short on time. Probably the largest barrier to having university students play with the platform is the cost of the hardware.

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