So the internets are abuzz with the news that the new iphone os 4.0 developer agreement prohibits using any non apple endorsed programming language, framework for iphone/ipad development. This is hardly any thing surprising, given the way apple has been acting ever since jobs came back in control. When they were irrelevant they didn’t have the power to make any rules, now that they have a good market share, they are showing it. It almost feels like a kid who lost a game in his teens taking revenge in his 50′s.
Some people are comparing this with the Window Phone 7 Series and how its limited to .NET and C#, well that’s not exactly the same thing, Windows Phone 7 has no market share as of now, it will be coming to market in the late 2010. Microsoft sets this standard before they have any kind of market share, and besides any language ( php, vb, python ) can be used to create CLR code and that can be used for making apps on wp7 ( yet ).
But I believe apple has every right to do what it is doing. It might be good for the company, but sad for most of the developers. I myself was looking at monotouch as a tool for doing apps for iphone, but I went with objective c instead, it was not that difficult to learn and I think if you are a good c++ programmer objective c would be a piece of cake to learn, in two or three days. Monothouch is also just too expensive in my opinion.
However, like google has said earlier and I believe it myself that webapps are the future way of doing apps. Phonegap for example is an awesome project and it has a lot of potential, what we need now is standardization of web apps / javascripts apis. W3C for example has now standardized the Geolocation api, I think we need similar standard apis for example to access the phone book, sensors etc ….
