• Recent Tutorials

  • Apple Changes TOS

    Well it seems that the big wigs at Apple Computer do listen to their third party developers. This last spring they delivered what seemed to be a swift kick in the, we'll say linker, to all those third party developers who don't want to use Objective-C, JavaScript or C++ compilers in the form of a iPhone SDK Term Of Service (TOS for short.)

    The TOS featured this clause preventing say the Free Pascal compiler from being used to link and compile with XCode and the many API required to make an iPhone app. The clause in questions stated...

    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).
    On the 9th of September Apple released a statement about clause 3.3.1, 3.3.2 and 3.3.9 being changed to be less restrictive. The resulting 3.3.1 clause 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.
    I'm sure this is a much more appealing restriction to those that prefer other languages and compilers not in the Apple repertoire. Perhaps it's a step closer to those Object Pascal tools trying to gain some respect on the Apple OSes. You would suspect that the good folks at Embarcadero, with their more recent Linux and Mac OS X efforts would appreciate this renewed availability as well.

    You can read the full iOS SDK TOS at the Apple Developer site on PDF here or read further by checking our these other articles of interest here, here, here and here.

    Thanks to Stoney for bringing this to our attention.
    Comments 3 Comments
    1. WILL's Avatar
      WILL -
      I stumbled upon this article shortly after I published my post. If you are interested in using Delphi Prism to make iPhone/iPad apps, you may want to read this blog here! Thank you Andreano Lanusse.
    1. noeska's Avatar
      noeska -
      If you use delphi prism to make a iphone app does not that force you to distribute the mono runtime also? Or is that a thing that happens in the background?
    1. savage's Avatar
      savage -
      Please check out my News post about a recently approved game called HedgeWars, which was written using FreePascal and SDL.

      Re Delphi Prism : The MonoTouch runtime is compiled down to native machine code, because Apple were not to keep on having anything interpreted on their machine. My guess is that Delphi Prism on Mac will need to do something similar.