Today’s “Why Apple is evil” entry deals with something that’s not quite news, but I wanted to cover it.
Apple is requiring that applications originally be developed in Objective-C, C++, C, or JavaScript (executed by Safari’s JS engine.)
This is intentionally used as a way to prevent certain companies from making tools for the iPhone platform.
Despite what you might think about Adobe (honestly, my opinion is that they’re the vile scum of the Internet, and Flash is worse than IE6, because at least there’s alternatives to IE6,) this is still rather troubling – the market should push Adobe out with superior solutions, not anticompetitive actions, especially when those anti-competitive actions have collateral damage, and severely negatively affect developers. Apple is now mandating the development process, not just what the program does.
Of course, in classic Apple fashion, they’re doing things horribly inconsistently – other development frameworks that clearly violate the agreement are being explicitly allowed, showing just how anticompetitive this is.
Waging a personal war is one thing. Waging a personal war using your developers and users as pawns is another.
Source: many, but I decided to post about this today because of The Register