Barriers to iPhone development

topbanana said:
Either that, or they want to make some money. :D
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It's both I reckon. They obviously want a piece of the pie, but they also want it to be more open (to allow more apps to be developed and published, and to allow those apps to be on more phones == bigger slice of pie.)
 
I don't think there is a barrier

For about £600 you can be up and running with a 1 year developer subscription which allows you to publish and sell applications or to test them on your own iPhone, you can get a Mac Mini which will plug in to your exsiting hardware and then your ready to go.

If you can't justify that then fair enough but you can't complain when its about £500 for the MS equivilent?
 
There is a free equivilent to the iPhone SDK. It's just that the phone has a secure environment which requires a certificate and most companies charge for a secure certificate.
 
NathanE said:
When the alternative is Objective C ... ?

I don't think asking for C# is much of a stretch.

Agreed though it's not Apple's problem. It's Novell's and Microsoft's. But still, it is a barrier to entry for me.
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Registered developer also with a free app on the store, and I only used a small amount of obj-c, at the initialization of the app and to process the basics touch commands, the rest was developed in C++, I had absolute no issues with it.

As for the review process, it only took a week for me.
 
I never been a big fan of apple as they always seem to want to tie you in to ONLY their products. I would consider the cost of developing iPhone apps for people without a mac already a costly en devour. Especially for someone who is a hobbyist and not too sure if they will receive a return on their investment. But if you are a HUGE apple fan and just love their products then i guess coding an app and realizing it will sell only £50 away.

But I personally would prefer to develop for the android platform (if only the market was as lucrative) You can use Java and an amazing IDE that is Eclipse and you can run it on any operating system really plus its free.

But if its from a pure return on investment then maybe iPhone apps is the best market to compete in although everyone and their mums in on the action now!
 
Dj_Jestar said:
It is a pain.. as clearly indicated by this thread and the article :/
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The article is from a group of operators though an industry body.

You have to remember that the operators don't want to be relegated to being bit pipes for mobile IP networks. Traditionally they have 'owned' the subscriber and they don't want that to change however the iPhone has broken their stranglehold. Other phones will now also make that move the subscriber relationship is now between the phone UI and the Apple/Google/MS/non-operator company.

It's a market that I have been involved with for 12 years globally.

You'll also note that Adobe being mentioned - so you can see that Apple's withdrawal of Flash support vs Adobe pushing flash in AIR.

In short it's all the vendors that are feeling left out pushing their products together to make a competitor. The thing that will kill it is that they're all attempting to control it commercially. The result will be big, bulky and not do anything useful unless they put side their differences.
 
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Yup. Adobe want everyone to continue using Flash, so they've approached the operators and offered them a silver bullet. Making Flash into an application platform that operators can run. Woo flash games that you pay for - I can see that doing well.
So Adobe is attempting to give their existing Flash developers a new market to play in. The only thing is that operators will want their Air platform on their phones subtly different from other operators so that the subscriber can't move from them. Or they'll insist on exclusivity with the developer - again to keep subscribers.
A big world of hurt for the subscribers.

The next problem is simply that people seem to expect everything for free - a business case that doesn't work (show me a successful linux phone). I've not seen business applications available using Flash Air. I doubt that Adobe will product a particularly good platform if Flash and Digital Editions is anything to go by. In fact I would be very surprised if AIR required the applications to be bought from an Adobe service that the operators contracted to use..
 
I would be very wary of MonoTouch though you still need to know Obj-C because it can't do everything so there is times when you need to drop back into Obj-C and it produces some interesting code that is far from optimal so you will have the need to rewrite bits.

If it's just the [] notation in Obj-C you don't like then in Coca 2 (I think that's what it called) you can use dot notation but it's not very common. Also, Coca 2 on the iPhone has a giant WTF in it, on the Mac side it has a GC but on the iPhone for whatever reason it doesn't. But it still watches the memory but doesn't clean it up.

Compared with VS, XCode is not a nice experience.

I don't link the fact you have to buy a Mac to do dev work but at the end of the day, it's Apple and they like to lock you in and control your experience so it's not surprising.

My biggest barrier to entry, is that I could spend months working on an app then have Apple reject it for reasons it doesn't have to explain.

Moredhel said:
Visual Studio 2008 Professional on the other hand is £500.
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Expression editions that don't have any restrictions on go live are free.
 
Ignore.

The difference is in the paradigm of the platform. A mac can spend time cleaning up after programmers. An iPhone can't - it has very limited CPU power and every instruction is reducing the phone's battery life.

I don't think it's far levelling the lock in argument against Apple - it's the same for Google and for Microsoft. I do agree with the Apple business rejecting applications because of business rivalry. If you're using APIs or sending personal information (ie the phone number as some free apps have been caught doing)
then I don't see the problem for them to be rejected. Apple is about buying apple rather than a phone or computer.. they'd prefer to think of a service rather than just a device.
 
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^ You're in luck then!

I've just found this which is an add on for VS which lets you create and test iPhone apps using C++!

Just having a look at the SDK now to see if it's actually any good.
 
NickK said:
Ignore.

The difference is in the paradigm of the platform. A mac can spend time cleaning up after programmers. An iPhone can't - it has very limited CPU power and every instruction is reducing the phone's battery life.

I don't think it's far levelling the lock in argument against Apple - it's the same for Google and for Microsoft. I do agree with the Apple business rejecting applications because of business rivalry. If you're using APIs or sending personal information (ie the phone number as some free apps have been caught doing)
then I don't see the problem for them to be rejected. Apple is about buying apple rather than a phone or computer.. they'd prefer to think of a service rather than just a device.
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Sorry about the poor English in my original post, it was before 9am and my brain wasn't functioning too well.

Over the GC, on the iPhone it still has the background process that watches memory pressures and marks objects for collection but it doesn't do anything about it. I'm well aware of the lower processor power and power management concerns but .NET CF on WinMo devices does this without any problems. You could argue, I suppose, that the force quitting of applications when you switch would be enough to stop any significant memory leak problems but in that case why not go the whole hog and take it all out not just the collecting?

I wasn't complaining about the Apple lock in just saying it's expected and as for the app store approval I have a strong opinion that it's the wrong thing to do. I do agree that Apple is all about the experience but the app store is not about controlling quality (I've tried plenty of apps that just don't work) or making sure it fits with the overall experience, it's about controlling what is allowed on the device in a more draconian fashion.

If I looked at the iPad with its unique input abilities and had a great idea for a way to play and manage music, the first thing I would do is check the Apple T&Cs and discover I'm not allowed to compete with any built-in applications. Effectively killing innovation.
 
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