Apple Slaps Developers In The Face
[Adobe would like me to make it clear that the opinions below are not the official views of the company and are entirely my own.] — By now you have surely heard about the new iPhone 4. SDK language that appears to make creating applications …
Context & Ripple Effects
The arc here runs straight through Adobe's own roadmap. At Max in October 2009 the company announced Flash Professional CS5 would package stand-alone apps for the iPhone and iPod Touch, making cross-compilation a flagship feature of its next creative release. By January 2010 Adobe and Apple were already in open conflict over Flash being excluded from the iPad, and a February demo of Flash Player 10.1 on the Nexus One had handed critics a battery-performance talking point.
What changed today: the new iPhone 4.0 SDK agreement appears to bar applications built with exactly the kind of third-party toolchain CS5 ships — and the pushback came from inside Adobe, with platform evangelist Lee Brimelow's 'slap in the face' post carrying an explicit personal-opinion disclaimer. That a single developer blog post drew same-day pickups from Bloomberg, MediaMemo, VentureBeat and AppleInsider says the dispute has escaped the developer-blog circuit and become a mainstream business story about two companies with a long partnership history.
First-order effects
- Developers who bet on CS5's iPhone packaging feature now face shipping apps under terms that appear to prohibit their build method, putting Adobe's announced feature set in direct conflict with Apple's approval process.
Second-order effects
- The same language reportedly reaches analytics and service layers (per Eric Kerr's coverage of the developer agreement), so tool vendors beyond Adobe are exposed too — and rival platforms like Android gain a ready-made recruiting pitch for developers burned by arbitrary-seeming rules.
Third-order effects
- If SDK license terms become a competitive weapon rather than a technical contract, platform owners effectively pick winners among developer toolchains — a governance gap where one company's legal text, not the market, decides which frameworks survive on iOS.
The trend: Mobile platform owners are extending control from app distribution into the developer toolchain itself, turning SDK licensing language into a strategic lever against cross-platform rivals.