When the iPhone SDK came out early this year, I was one of the first to sign up for the beta program. I was excited by the possibility to develop on the platform and quickly started reading through the documentation and watching developer videos as I began development of what was to be my first iPhone app. Unfortunately, Apple put one too many roadblocks in place, making the iPhone an undesirable platform for me to work on:
- Apple prevented all discussion of iPhone APIs by developers. I tried to ask a simple API question on an Apple developer board, and although a nice explanation why no one could answer me was sent to the board (see the mailing list archive), I actually received obscene emails attacking me for having the audacity to break the SDK's non-disclosure agreement. The draconian NDA clause was removed a few weeks ago, but even then was long after the beta period was over.
- Apple charged a fee just to get the developer kit working on an actual device, but then never gave many developers, including me, the unlocking codes to do so until long after the beta period ended.
- Apple is still playing games with developers by occasionally pulling legitimate applications off the App Store.
In the end, I gave up and decided to work on
Google's Android instead. First of all, Google got Android right by making the tools free and the restrictions few. Another nice benefit was the rich tools available to Android developers due to the Android SDK's use of Java (which has the added bonus of letting me use Scala for Android development!). So far, developing for the Android has been great-- straight-forward APIs, good tools, good documentation. Maybe someone got mobile OS development right.
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