However, they shouldn't get undeserved praise for correcting something that was a bad decision in the first place and was undermining their own platform.
Agreed. I think I am going to announce that I have stopped eating babies and then enjoy all the good publicity.
Apple are the marketing masters, however, and this is just one more way to market the iPhone to developers. It's apparently working, judging from the 99 upmods so far.
However, the NDA has created too much of a burden on developers, authors and others interested in helping further the iPhone’s success, so we are dropping it for released software.
They've acknowledged that it was causing a problem for their developers, so to the extent that they want to help out their developers, that counts as admitting a mistake. Though yes, they do mention their other priorities, so technically it isn't a full admission.
He has a point, it's like gas prices. They jack them up in the summer and then come fall the small decreases seem like a screaming deal. Rinse, repeat each year.
Apple is just doing this with control over their mobile OS, albeit in a much shorter time frame.
That's the price of oil, not the price of gasoline. While increasing oil prices will cause gasoline prices to rise, the effect in question - that gasoline prices in the US historically go up in the spring and summer - is related to the gasoline supply tightening up because of the switch from winter to summer gasoline specifications and increasing demand because of summer vacations, not because of a reduction in the crude oil supply. OPEC production increased about 3% from January to August this year.
Do you think they made a lot of money by having an NDA in place?
I'd say they just tried to keep control of as much as possible, as any company would, then relented when the whining from developers became too much to take.
Not "any company" certainly. Microsoft doesn't require an NDA for their mobile platform's SDK. Symbian doesn't require an NDA for their mobile platform's SDK. Palm doesn't require an NDA for their mobile platform's SDK. Nokia doesn't require an NDA for their mobile platforms' SDK. And, finally and most importantly, Google doesn't require an NDA for access to their mobile platform's SDK.
So basically, Apple was out alone here. No one else is remotely as "evil" in this aspect. It's OK that you like the platform, there's lots to recommend it. But don't sugarcoat things. Apple were being repressive and obnoxious, and only relented because they were forced to by a competing platform.
The new 3G iPhone will probably increase the market share significantly this quarter, but it still has a long way to go. But it is impressive that the iPhone alone has that kind of market share. If you compare model for model, the market share for iPhone would look much better
Furthermore, the claim behind developing for the Mac platform is the average Mac user is far more likely to want to spend money on extra little utilities that marginally improve their experience. Which is why it's allegedly viable to be a Mac developer when their market share is a fraction of Windows'.
Ummm, maybe I'm reading between the lines too much but I see "for released iPhone software." Does that mean people still can't talk about rejection letters?
Edit, from MacRumors.com
However, the NDA has created too much of a burden on developers, authors and others interested in helping further the iPhone’s success, so we are dropping it for released software. Developers will receive a new agreement without an NDA covering released software within a week or so. Please note that unreleased software and features will remain under NDA until they are released.
I don't know about rejection letters, but if I understand correctly when they talk about released iPhone software they mean the iPhone OS/firmware. Some developers get prerelease builds and it makes sense to keep prerelease software under an NDA (standard for all other Apple software).
Well I want to see what you have to do to get the prerelease builds. 2.1 messed a few of my things up and I did not get access to it until the day it was released. I paid my $99, why do some people who paid the same $99 get more access than I?
The rejection letters were claimed to be under "the NDA". So I think that "the NDA" is gone, so they are open too.
I suspect that very shortly (within the week, maybe?) we'll see a very detailed policy announcement about what criterion Apple uses to approve apps for the App store.
I also wouldn't be terribly surprised to see a way for private developers to distribute apps without that janky beta-release dance.
Honestly, I'm glad they did this, but the NDA was the least of my iPhone worries. App developers are still at the mercy of Apple for what apps they can develop and the public app store is still the only real way to distribute apps. Adhock mode is not enough.
Couldn't agree more,
I still don't trust them, Android forced them to change, it wasn't of good will, or even consumer pressure. Apple will still try to keep control over their products as a company policy
Glad to see this is being changed. If Apple's rejection policy remains unclear, at least the lifted NDA restriction will allow the community to learn from the experiences of others.
"We put the NDA in place because the iPhone OS includes many Apple inventions and innovations that we would like to protect, so that others don’t steal our work. It has happened before."
I think Apple was being naive if they expected an NDA to give them any sort protection for their technology. Am I missing something? Is there any reason to try to keep their documentation secret when anyone can buy an iPhone and take it apart?
Yes, it gives them more patent protection--if something's under NDA then it's considered a trade secret and thus can't trigger the "publicly-available" patent problem.
This should have been done when the App Store was launched. I guess it's better late than never though. I look forward to the online discussion and books that are certain to quickly emerge!
I agree, but I can't help wonder why they didn't drop the NDA on launch. It was clearly an big issue for many people and actively hurting the platform, so it's not merely a matter of laziness or oversight. And I don't buy their "protecting trade secrets" argument at all; with the developer program opened as wide as it was, it would be trivial for a competitor to get wind of the "secret", which as far as I can tell is the Objective C API -- hardly something a competitor would be in a rush to implement, and likely similar to the existing non-NDA Mac OSX dev tools.
There are only two reasons I can see for not dropping the NDA. One is that they didn't feel they needed to, believing that they owned the market, that dropping the NDA was an unnecessary concession of power, and that developer protests were largely symbolic.
The other reason is that they were perhaps getting so many applications that their quality control system was inundated, so they were doing everything they could to impose barriers to development. In this case, perhaps we may see the $99 fee vanish in the next year, as well?
Let me quote one of Gruber's correspondents, who had the take that made the most sense to me: It's a lawyer thing, which we m wouldn't understand.
At my company, our lawyers advised us to keep what we considered more-or-less public software under NDA for a very long time because demoing software to someone under NDA, no matter how many people it is, avoids “publishing” the software and any inventions contained therein. We know Apple’s been building up a patent strategy around multi-touch; maybe their lawyers believe there are patentable inventions described in the iPhone SDK and they are telling Apple to keep everything under NDA until they know provisional patents can be filed within a reasonable amount of time (you get a year after publishing in the US, but in the EU, I think you forfeit any patent claims once your invention is “published”).
It’s like, it doesn’t matter at all how broad/leaky the NDA process is, in the eyes of the USPTO, every invention in the iPhone SDK is a non-published invention and will continue to be so until the NDA is lifted.
This take makes sense, because I agree that the NDA thing was otherwise completely self-defeating. It didn't actually protect any secrets and it certainly handicapped the developer community.
Someone should check Apple's patent filings and see if the NDA is disappearing today because the lawyers finally finished up their provisional-patent work last week.
Finally! The only people impeded by the NDA were Apple developers. Could Apple seriously believe that anything in the SDK was unknown to their competitors?
However, I think this highlights the mistake Google made in positioning Android as the 'open' alternative. The liabilities of Apple's strategy are all easily addressed by policy changes if being closed becomes a competitive disadvantage.
The value of Android's positioning isn't "open relative to Apple", although that's certainly a nice selling point as long as it lasts, but rather "open on an absolute basis" in that the platform can be picked up by hardware vendors, modified, and used in their devices. Likewise individual technical users can suggest changes to things they don't like.
We don't know yet how it's all going to play out with regard to vendor cooperation (will HTC let us recompile the code for their phones? somehow I kind of doubt it, but we'll see), but in an ideal case it would be a platform for ongoing improvement and maintenance, changing the device upgrade landscape treadmill, possibly quite substantially.
Android is no more open for handset manufacturers than Symbian, which has been around for years and is also open-source now. Even Windows Mobile phones have been seeing extensive customization lately - take the HTC TouchFLO phones, for example.
Honestly, it could be argued that Android is less 'open' than its predecessors, since there's an assumption that handset manufacturers will take advantage of the UI Android provides instead of rolling their own from scratch. I suspect we'll see much more UI consistency with Android than has been the case with the older operating systems.
As for users customizing their phones, there's nothing novel about that either. Palm and Windows Mobile phones have always let users install applications. In fact, you can easily run tethering applications on many Windows Mobile and Palm-based phones - just don't try it on the G1.
Does this mean open source apps are allowed now? I believe the NDA was the only thing preventing people from say putting the source on Google code. Of course it still couldn't be covered by a GPL I'd imagine?
FWIW, one could now open-source such an implementation that registered developers could build/install on their own (and at their own risk of breaking AT&T's restriction).
However, they shouldn't get undeserved praise for correcting something that was a bad decision in the first place and was undermining their own platform.