

IPhone NDA officially dropped - KirinDave
http://developer.apple.com/iphone/program/

======
halo
Good.

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.

~~~
axod
Some people are never happy.

~~~
josefresco
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.

~~~
axod
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.

~~~
ajross
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.

~~~
axod
Is someone outselling the iPhone I'm not aware of? Are you from some weird
other dimension?

When you lead a market, you get to set the rules somewhat.

~~~
ks
iPhone is not a leader in the smartphone market:

Numbers from:
[http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/09/09/gartner_q22008_smart...](http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/09/09/gartner_q22008_smartphone/)

    
    
      Q2 2008:
      ------------------------
      Symbian:        57.1%
      RIM:            17.4%
      Windows Mobile: 12.0%
      Linux:           7.3% (!)
      iPhone:          2.8%
    

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

~~~
comatose_kid
I'm more interested in the derivative - how fast are each of these growing?

~~~
henning
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'.

~~~
acgourley
But will they txt hotrimz to 28845 now for a FREE* wallpaper?

------
pxlpshr
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._

~~~
cstejerean
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).

~~~
ROFISH
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?

~~~
cstejerean
As far as I know it's usually the same group that got access to the original
SDK before it was officially released.

------
enomar
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.

------
slackerIII
Isn't competition nice? Hopefully Android will make them open things up even
more.

~~~
shimi
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

------
chaostheory
The title is a little misleading (since Apple didn't completely drop its NDA)
and it should be changed to:

IPhone NDA officially dropped for released IPhone software

------
jrockway
Let me know when I can write Free Software for the iPhone. Until then, it's
just a toy.

~~~
Tichy
You can not do that now?

~~~
Herring
He may have meant this - <http://www.linux.com/feature/131752>

------
TrevorJ
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.

------
erik
"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?

~~~
cpr
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.

------
bigthboy
Somehow this doesn't make me feel any less like Apple is a controlling
monopolistic beast. Their release about it seems somewhat condescending.

------
bprater
Don't forget to go out and grab Prag's iPhone SDK book! Just snagged mine!

<http://pragprog.com/titles/amiphd/iphone-sdk-development>

------
kylec
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!

~~~
jcl
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?

~~~
mechanical_fish
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._

<http://daringfireball.net/2008/08/iphone_nda_patents>

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.

~~~
jcl
Thanks, that explanation makes the most sense of any I've heard or been able
to come up with.

It's a disappointing, though; the world really doesn't need more UI/software
patents.

------
gamble
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.

~~~
iigs
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.

~~~
gamble
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.

------
froo
Cool, Apple do something that most other software developers out there do
(albeit with a much stranger timeline) and get the upmost of praise!

I wish I knew how to spin PR like this.

(Full Disclosure: Poor attempt at sarcasm, I'm not an Apple hater)

------
yan
I'll be waiting for word on this from the developers directly affected by the
NDA to get a better feel for what this means.

This specifically states that unreleased software is still covered. I guess
we'll be waiting for the new terms to be released.

~~~
vlad
Apple makes available pre-release versions of their iPhone operating system to
developers. I believe this is what they will still cover under NDA.

------
tocomment
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?

------
speek
YES! The NDA has been a PITA, I'm glad its finally gone.

RIP iPhone NDA, You will not be missed.

------
jgrahamc
Now if they'll just allow data-tethering I'll buy one.

~~~
liscio
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).

------
symptic
It's about time.

