Apple Bans Use Of Adobe Flash To Create iPhone Apps

Apple has updated its iPhone Developer Program License Agreement to ban use of cross compilers, according to DaringFireball.

Prior to today section 3.3.1 of the agreement said:

3.3.1 — Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs.


In the new version section 3.3.1 now reads:

3.3.1 — Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs. Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited).

Gruber indicates that this makes cross-compilers, such as the Flash-to-iPhone compiler in Adobe’s upcoming Flash Professional CS5 release, prohibited.

It could also prohibit other tools such as MonoTouch, Titanium, PhoneGap, and Unity3D.


It could hardly be more clear if they singled out Flash CS5 by name. (Wonder what Adobe does now? CS5 is this close to release and the iPhone compiler is the flagship feature in this version of Flash. They’re pretty much royally fucked.)

Personally I am disappointed with this situation. Flash would probably have made an excellent development tool for those not familiar with objective-c. It also could have allowed developers to create applications for output to a variety of different platforms without having to recode their entire apps.

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