Steve Jobs Hating Again on Us c# Developers

I’ve got to be honest with you, nobody loves their iPhone more than I love mine (okay, maybe there is someone out their but you get the point). As a software engineer, it is important to me to be able to extend my own mobile device through using software languages that I already am familiar with whenever possible. That’s where my love for my iPhone gets tested on a regular basis given Apple’s insistence on keeping this platform closed. In a recent interview Steve Jobs mentioned an article by John Gruber. It’s a great article, but for me it misses some important points from a user’s perspective (at least this user).

I develop quite a bit in c# and that really is just due to the bulk of the work that I do happening to be for the .NET platform. So I was one of the many people that went out and purchased Novell’s MonoTouch software development environment for the iPhone. Why? Well of course, I wanted to be able to use the language I was most familiar with to be able to write some awesome applications for my iPhone. I actually can’t begin to tell you how excited I was about the potential to be able to take some of the great mobile applications I had written in the past and port them over to my iPhone. Enter Apple and Steve Jobs…

I saw the following comment on SlashDot today:

“Greg Slepak, founder of software company Tao Effect, wrote Apple CEO Steve Jobs to complain about Apple’s mandate that iPhone applications be originally written in C/C++/Objective-C. Job’s response was to endorse a post by John Gruber on the Daring Fireball blog. Jobs called it ‘very insightful,’ suggesting Gruber’s prediction that third-party iPhone development tools are out might be right. Jobs sent a second reply that also doesn’t bode well for third-party iPhone development tools: ‘We’ve been there before, and intermediate layers between the platform and the developer ultimately produces sub-standard apps and hinders the progress of the platform.’”

Well, that’s quite a drag for people like me that really love the platform but due to outside constraints are developing a lot in c# or other languages for a living.  I’m not sure I understand exactly how intermediate layers introduce inferior applications.  If you have a passion for the mobile platform and happen to code in another language I think you can work just as hard to write an awesome iPhone application whether you are  using Xcode, Objective-C, and WebKit or MonoTouch.  Granted, if Novell doesn’t keep the development environment updated with current releases of the iPhone OS, then you definitely do have a problem.  However, we are not talking about a small dev shop here, we are talking about Novell.  It seems like they would be able to keep up with the platform just fine.

In the end I agree with the assessment that it is not so much about Apple’s concern that MonoTouch developers are going to churn out poor quality applications as it is their desire to control the marketplace.  Now, that is entirely up to them (for as long as the public goes along and keeps buying their closed platform products).  It’s really just about their desire to control software development for the mobile platform to force developers to write applications specific to the iPhone to perpetuate its dominance of the mobile market.  That’s really unfortunate from a developers perspective.  Honestly, the ability to target multiple platforms actually would lead to better quality applications as the dev team can focus on features and functionality versus simple syntax differences and always having to keep multiple versions of the application in synch.

Okay, so what does this really mean to Apple and for that matter to me personally and my iPhone.  Honestly, not a whole heck of a lot.  I will still use my favorite mobile phone as will millions of others and I will just have to abandon my dream of using MonoTouch to port my mobile applications over to the iPhone.  Which leaves me with one option and yes at some point I’ll suck it up and go with Xcode, Objective-C, and WebKit.

In my case, Apple you win!  I get it and will play be your rules (but that doesn’t mean I agree with them).

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This entry was posted on Sunday, April 11th, 2010 at 6:49 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.