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Comment by lwhi | Hacker News Reader

Is there a union for iPhone developers too?

Pretty much every one of those points are applicable to Apple. However, I don't think it's a problem as long as most iOS developers are making a lot more money on iOS than Android.

Not like anything's going to come of this lame petition anyway. If you're not making money as an Android dev, stop developing on Android. Online petitions are great for making people feel like they've actually done something, without actually making them put in any more effort than a button click.

"Pretty much every one of those points are applicable to Apple. However, I don't think it's a problem as long as most iOS developers are making a lot more money on iOS than Android."

Even so, there's not a cat in hell's chance than Apple would ever submit to 'union' pressure. I don't think Google can realistically be expected behave differently.

Of course this is a silly statement. If 100% of Apple developers decided to join a union in an attempt to collectively bargain, of course Apple would negotiate. If 1% join, of course they won't. Where the tipping point lies is an open question. It's fairly unlikely that enough people would ever get on board to find out, though, given the way things have played out thus far and the existing community.

When the original iPhone came out, the only way to deliver apps was via the web. Developers wanted an iPhone SDK, and that's exactly what they got in subsequent versions, which led to the App Store's success.

When Apple came out with the "no non-Objective-C" clause aka section 3.3.1 lots of people demanded that it be changed. Apple eventually relented too.

So... Apple does respond to feedback.

The clause was not simply "no non-Objective-C". It allowed for C/C++/Obj-C development as long as Xcode was the tool used to produce the binary.

If they had banned C and C++, a lot of games would have had to disappear, considering how many games use external libraries. Not to mention a lot of non-game apps, like those that use the SQLite package (raw, not via Core Data).

A lot of games would have been banned either way e.g. use of Lua scripting or any 3rd party framework for cross-platform dev.

Right, but that was because of a kind of prohibition on embedded scripting runtimes in general, and has nothing to do with C or C++ specifically.

If there was, I expect its website would be nicer to look at...

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