Here is a good look at the apple view: http://www.macworld.com/article/150539/2010/04/apple_world.html?lsrc=twt_jsnell
I think this guy nails why Apple is doing what they are doing. I disagree with Apple's policy, but it does make sense. To me, make people use public APIs and how they get the code together is their business. "Apple doesn’t want Flash-created apps on the App Store for a simple reason: It reduces the iPhone to a lowest-common denominator platform, and at that point Apple loses all control over the iPhone OS experience. Once developers can create an app in one development environment— Adobe’s—and compile it to run on every smartphone known to humankind, many developers will decide to save themselves a boatload of money and stop developing native apps for the iPhone, Android, and other platforms. They’ll just develop once, for Flash, and let it run anywhere. Sounds good, but the develop-once-run-anywhere philosophy is something that makes more sense to bean counters and development-environment vendors than it does to platform owners and discriminating users. In the ’90s we were told that Java apps would be the future of software, because you could write them once and deploy them anywhere. As someone who used to use a Java-based Mac app on an almost daily basis, let me tell you: it was a disaster. Java apps didn’t behave like Mac apps. They were ugly and awful and weird, but hey, at least they ran on the Mac. It’s the same way I feel about Adobe’s AIR environment today. It’s a Flash and/or HTML-based system that lets developers write cross- platform desktop apps. A good example of an Adobe AIR app is TweetDeck. A lot of people like TweetDeck for Mac, and bless ’em. I can only assume they like it because they like its feature set. It’s a horrible Mac app, though. It’s got no menu bar to speak of, a strange and limited preferences window, weird scroll bars... the list goes on. It feels, in short, like a Web app that’s been mashed into a window so that it can pretend to be a native Mac app. And—spoiler alert—that’s because it is. Apple doesn’t want apps that don’t feel like native iPhone apps on the iPhone. It doesn’t want Adobe to aid developers in creating a world where App X for iPhone and App X for Android are indistinguishable from one another. Apple doesn’t want to introduce new iPhone features and then watch as nobody takes advantage of them because Adobe hasn’t updated its development system yet. Or, worse, watches as Adobe refuses to adopt them because the other operating systems don’t support those features. If iPhone apps are one of Apple’s greatest assets, a lowest-common- demoninator app world is Apple’s greatest nightmare. Apple wants the iPhone app experience to be created using Apple’s native tools by developers who are engaged with the platform and falling over themselves to support Apple’s latest features. These are the developers who were downloading and installing iPhone OS 4.0 on Thursday and poring over the documentation, getting ready to dig in and start updating their apps for this summer’s release." -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to javapo...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to javaposse+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
