Apple recently announced OS 4.0 with some major functionality changes. I have covered in high level the functionality additions in my previous post.
One other interesting addition is the change to the licensing agreement. Apple now prohibits any of the cross platform toolkits in its platform. Example would be the Adobe toolkit, there may be several others too who fall under that bucket. Let us analyse the same:
Earlier, any third party vendor with a cross platform toolkit would have been able to develop iphone native apps. With this change, iphone native apps can only be developed by iphone SDK and native objective C through the Cocoa API's provided by Apple.
Why this change ?
- Apple does not want to loose control
- Apple wants to maintain the quality of applications
- Apple does not want the third party vendors( like Adobe ) to benefit at the cost of Apple.
- Apple Appstore is growing and has close to 180000 applications as of now and it will only grow based on the growth in the industry. With this change, Apple would be the sole beneficiary and will not let any other companies take advantage and create another monopoly appstore that could potentially also have iphone apps.
What is in it for the Developers ?
- No change for the iphone developers.
What is in it for the cross platform toolkit providers ?
- They cant have iphone apps as a part of the toolkits. They will have the ability to build other apps from other platforms, if they do so.
- They will loose on the investments that they would have done so far.
What is in it for the other OEMs ?
- Some of the other platform providers may take cue and prohibit cross platform toolkits on their platforms.
On a general note, what might possibly happen is that we may only end up having only a fewer application stores from bigger vendors ( Apple, Microsoft, RIM etc ) that will become popular.
While we can continue to argue on Apple's strategy and what it does for the ecosystem, it certainly seems to be a well thought of strategy by apple considering the longer term growth that this industry provides.
