The release of the new iPhone that took place last week presented not only a bunch of highly efficient and innovative features that make million of potential customers itchy and salivating, but also delivered a slew of tools for iPhone developers who can start working on new apps to marvel the users at the very day of the launch. Apple has always been particularly concerned about its third-party developers spending lots of time and resources on fostering and cherishing a pool of skillful specialists all over the world, motivating them with a splendid monetization policy the App Store presents.

When the new OS 4 was released for the first time, all the iPhone community discussed the proposed alterations to the development agreement, especially the restriction of section 3.3.2. The mentioned paragraph forbade interpreted code, which in its turn led to banning Flash and other middleware platforms. The restriction initially required that iPhone apps must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++ or JavaScript, and presupposed that “no interpreted code may be downloaded or used in an Application except for code that is interpreted and run by Apple’s Documented APIs and built-in interpreter(s).”

Apple’s reasoning was quite clear. Instead of using some third-party platforms to develop iPhone apps, iPhone developers had now to stick to original set of tools submitted by the company such as Apple’s own Xcode development tools. It was a logic reaction to Adobe’s attempt to position its Flash Professional CS5 app as a central platform for cross-platform development. The policy chosen by the company was much elaborated but quite simple. Apps created using the “wrong” tools could not be submitted to the iTunes Store. Of course, Steve Jobs delivered a deep-felt speech on the necessity of the mentioned alterations, focusing on front-end users and their needs and benefits, personal CEO’s care for the quality of every app submitted to Apple’s stores as well as a strive to foster the further iPhone platform development.

The alterations to the agreement caused lots of fuss in the iPhone development community as well as numerous accusations of Apple being ultra-controlling. The major concern shared by developers was not an inability to use Flash platform to create iPhone apps but rather banning reusable code engines and libraries aimed at expediting development. Due to the rather misleading wording of the amendment, the mentioned tools could become the object of Apple’s scrutiny, while being used in a large number of games already approved by Apple. iPhone developers seemed to particularly care about popular games engines and libraries such as Unity 3D and Lua.

Though banning out all the third-party platforms could turn quite in line with Apple’s controlling policy there are rumors that modification to 3.3.2 section is to follow. The latest wording will allow using embedded interpreted code solely to provide minor features or functionality of the developed app. So, there is a difference between a cross-platform app and an app that uses some embedded code to optimize the app performance. The only concern is that sometimes Apple seems to regulate the approval process according to its own rules quite unclear for the rest of the world.

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