Keeping the Platform Nimble
Steve Cheney raises a good point regarding Apple's renewed push for App Store developers to use Apple's own iPhone SDK: … Adobe did not ship (non-beta) Intel-native versions of the Creative Suite apps until April 2007, 16 months after Apple began shipping Intel-based Macs …
Context & Ripple Effects
This lands nine days after Mike Chambers' 'Apple Slaps Developers In The Face' made Adobe's grievance public: Apple's new developer agreement pushes App Store developers onto Apple's own iPhone SDK, which would sideline tools like Flash CS5's iPhone packager. Steve Cheney's argument, which John Gruber endorses here, is that Apple isn't being petty — it is keeping its young platform nimble by refusing dependencies it doesn't control.
Gruber's evidence is historical: per the confirmed record, Adobe shipped non-beta Intel-native Creative Suite apps in April 2007, sixteen months after Apple began shipping Intel Macs — a porting lag that hurt Apple's transition. The SDK fight also rhymes with the corpus's older question of why Apple resisted a public SDK at all (Scripting News asked 'Why no iPhone SDK?' back in 2007): control over the toolchain has been the throughline since before the App Store existed.
First-order effects
- Developers building with non-Apple toolchains — most visibly Adobe's Flash CS5-to-iPhone pipeline — now risk App Store rejection, invalidating work already invested in that route.
- Adobe loses iOS as a distribution target at exactly the moment it is pitching Flash beyond the browser: it had already committed Flash to Android, WebOS and BlackBerry smartphones and tablets in 2H 2010.
Second-order effects
- Google, Palm and RIM become the default home for cross-platform Flash development, letting them court Adobe's creative-developer base against Apple with a concrete toolchain promise.
- Apple's own ad business sharpens the conflict: iAd, announced at the iPhone 4.0 Preview days earlier, gives Apple a revenue reason to keep iPhone apps built strictly its way rather than via Adobe-authored runtimes.
Third-order effects
- If the rule holds, app-store governance expands from reviewing what an app does to dictating how it is compiled — turning toolchain choice into a permanent lever of platform power.
- Developers respond by treating each platform as a separate native build rather than one portable codebase, raising the value of whichever single vendor controls the largest store — a structure Apple is positioning itself to dominate.
The trend: Mobile platform owners are converting developer-toolchain control from a technical preference into a strategic moat, with Apple setting the template other app stores must answer.