

Apple banning apps built with PhoneGap - geuis
http://blog.nachbaur.com/2009/05/open-letter-to-apple-iphone-developer.html

======
bad_user
Google's Android looks more attractive every day.

Although I do understand that Apple has to keep some level of quality in their
store (they're not doing a good job imho), clearly they haven't learned
anything from their own history ... a platform friendly to hackers wins in the
long run.

~~~
jasongullickson
That depends on what you mean by "win". If by winning you mean their platform
is adopted by hackers and becomes popular with the subculture, then yes I
agree with you.

On the other hand, they may be more interested in defining "winning" as
selling product to an audience that is not opposed to paying a premium price
for quality if that means sacrificing some flexibility.

Anyway, I'm not sure what's so "hacker un-friendly" about the current SDK. You
can write and use anything you want on your own phone by paying nothing more
than the $99 "anti-bozo tax", you just can't count on being able to distribute
it via iTunes. If you're serious about being "open and free", you can even
distribute your app without restriction in source code form.

...and for "serious" hackers, there's always the jailbreak option. Yes that
will void your warranty and such but when has that stopped a good hacker
before?

~~~
mcantelon
Hackers care about being able to work unfettered. Not being able to distribute
your application in a form that anyone with the hardware can use would qualify
as fettered.

The jailbreak option is not a viable option when jailbreaking requires extra
work on the user's part and carries the risk of impeding the upgrading of the
phone's operating system.

------
jrnkntl
As someone who has an iphone app live in the app store created with PhoneGap I
call BS on this one. I think the problem is consistency within the approval
process instead of lying the problem at PhoneGap.

~~~
mcantelon
How is it BS? Are they not disapproving iPhone apps on the grounds that they
use Phonegap?

------
davidw
In the short term, open and/or free might not be as attractive, but after
you've seen these things come and go, they become more attractive, even if
there are some initial deficiencies with regards to proprietary systems.

------
lethain
I think the developers of phone gap are at fault here for suggesting that
their platform/toolkit is usable on the iPhone. Whether or not developers
agree with the restriction against interpreted code, it has been very clear
since long before the public iphone developer kit that it was not allowable to
write code in an interpreted language.

The exception to this is websites running javascript when a browser visits
them (i.e. client side javascript for a webapp), and that is quite different
than packaging javascript into an application and deploying that application
to an iPhone.

~~~
mbrubeck
Here's the actual text from the iPhone SDK Agreement:

"No interpreted code may be downloaded and used in an Application except for
code that is interpreted and run by Apple’s Published APIs and built-in
interpreter(s)."

It only forbids applications from interpreting code that they download. The
JavaScript code for PhoneGap apps is installed on the phone. Also, it has an
explicit exception for using built-in, documented interpreters like
WebKit/JavaScriptCore. (Otherwise no applications that embedded a WebKit
control could legally view any web page that contained script elements.)

~~~
lethain
Although I understand the appeal of your argument, using a 3rd party
workaround to provide support for performing javascript interpretation outside
of the browser--whether or not they happen to be hijacking the system's
underlying javascript interpreter--is not an "Apple Published API".

~~~
mbrubeck
As far as I can tell from the PhoneGap source code, it just embeds a UIWebView
and hooks into its standard APIs and events. I didn't spot any unpublished
APIs in use. Can you give an example of what you mean by "hijacking"?

If I built a non-PhoneGap application that used a WebView to display pages I
built with HTML/CSS/JavaScript, do you think that would violate the SDK
agreement?

~~~
jasongullickson
PhoneGap doesn't appear to expose any of the Private API's however it does
expose parts of the SDK that are not normally available to web-based
applications when run via Safari. I have a post above that elaborates on why
Apple may find this objectionable.

------
ieatpaste
If this is merely based on platform, Apple is simply setting a precedent for
other frameworks. From a business perspective, they don't want to lose direct
control of the development of applications, especially since the Apple app
approval ;) process has been shown to have holes as of late.

------
tzury
software dictators!

------
themanual
I think the problem might be that Phonegap allows people to develop rich
internet applications. From there, it's only a hop and a skip to implementing
a web browser, which they do not want app developers to do. Look at these two
pages to see how I arrived at that theory:
[http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.dev.platforms.mobile/...](http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.dev.platforms.mobile/browse_thread/thread/ca8a7fe623451635/04b770306a55326b)
[http://gizmodo.com/5072333/opera-for-iphone-ready-to-go-
if-n...](http://gizmodo.com/5072333/opera-for-iphone-ready-to-go-if-not-for-
apples-app-store-policies)

~~~
Morn
I don't think this can be true - look at iCab Mobile, for example - it's
pretty upfront about being a web browser.

