This one’s been burning through 5 seconds of my brain’s CPU a day. I keep thinking of what they are going to allow us to develop and what they won’t. 5 seconds is not much btw, its about 0.0057% of my day, but still, you gotta have high standards.
Here is the damn PDF telling you what you can and can’t do:
http://onemorething.nl/files/iphone_sdk_agt_608_final__wwdc08.pdf
Here’s the part that pisses me off the most:
3.3.3 Without Apple’s prior written approval, an Application may not provide, unlock or enable additional features or functionality through distribution mechanisms other than the iTunes Store.
This basically bars us from providing downloadable content for sale. lets say you have a level-based games and you want to give away the game for free with additional level packs for sale (aka the console’s way of making money). The current TOS won’t let you do this.
Sure you can pack your premium content as a new game alltogether and put it on their store, I don’t mind giving Apple their 30% cut of each level I sell, but give me a way to sell it with 1-click from within my game.
I’m sure they’ll fix this asap.
I really don’t understand the hype around apple’s products. This is a company that will do whatever it can to limit its users from unlocking the full potential of their products. They do all they can to maximize on their profit on the backs of their customers and developers.
What puzzles me most is that developers like you are playing along with this and continue developing for their platform.
i don’t appreciate some of their tactics either, but regardless (or sometimes due to) these tactics, they create amazing products with huge reach and huge potential.
compare the iphone to some windows-mobile device for example. on one side we have no application distribution channel whatsoever, and on the other we have a fully integrated one.
developers will not understand usually but this essentially makes the difference between a platform that will succeed with 3′rd party software and one that relies on 3′rd party sites for this.
i mean, its so huge that its barely even comparable. hold on a few months and count things like:
* 3′rd party software developers revenue from iphone applications.
* number of 3′rd party software apps, will surely surpass palm/wm/bb even though iphone market share is smaller.
* quality of apps.