Very close to 100% of iPhone developers are using Apple's tools.
Does that mean that all of these developers are either fanboys or willing to "bow down" to Apple, or is there even a smidgeon of a chance that they actually think it's a pretty decent platform to work with?
I've heard a lot of complaints about developing for the iPhone, but none about the quality of the development environment.
Dude, I'm not complaining or saying it's a bad platform. Just that if you're going to develop on it you're going to be guided by Apple's choices and platform. As opposed to being able to hack something that in the end runs on the iPhone. That's no longer the case as you're not even allowed to choose the language or tools.
Right, but since everybody (close to 100%) is already using Apple's platform by choice that means there's no difference from how they were developing apps before.
That doesn't suddenly make them "fanboys", or "willing to bow", it just means they like the platform.
> I've heard a lot of complaints about developing for the iPhone, but none about the quality of the development environment.
Consider this your first, then: the iPhone development environment sucks. People are using it despite the suckage or because they don't know any better. I do have an app in the app store, but the experience of making it was so painful - the cruftiness of Objective C, the gawdawful poorly-integrated mess of the Interface Builder, and various DRM issues - that I just couldn't take it anymore. I had a long list of apps I wanted to build next and features I wanted to add to the one I had, but programming for the iPhone turned out to be so unpleasant that I couldn't stand doing it.
The same sense of aesthetics that makes me really like using the iPhone makes me dislike using Objective C or the iPhone dev environment in general.
By way of reference, I really enjoyed programming for the Newton using the Newton Toolkit and NewtonScript, and I really enjoy using Ruby. Ruby and NTK were discoverable in ways that the iPhone toolchain is not.
My chief hope, if I ever wanted to develop more iPhone or iPad apps, was that third parties would jump in and fill the gap with more mac-like development tools that I could stand to use on a regular basis. Maybe something like Corona. I could even hope that competition from third party development environments might lead Apple to improve theirs. But no, these hopes have been dashed. So I guess I'll have to continue not developing iPhone apps.
Oh, and consider the posts on this blog your second-through-tenth complaints:
