Skip to content

iPhone SDK restrictions

I finally downloaded the iPhone SDK and I’ve been exploring it all day. However, the license has some serious restrictions which may affect our ability to develop our product for the iPhone. In particular:

3.3.1 Applications may only use Published APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any unpublished or private APIs.

3.3.2 An Application may not itself install or launch other executable code by any means, including without limitation through the use of a plug-in architecture, calling other frameworks, other APIs or otherwise. No interpreted code may be downloaded and used in an Application except for code that is interpreted and run by Apple’s Published APIs and built-in interpreter(s).

It also appears that we won’t be able to develop an invisible background application without violating the license.

This was written by mike. Posted on Friday, March 7, 2008, at 6:36 pm. Filed under Programming, iPhone. Bookmark the permalink. Follow comments here with the RSS feed. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.

One Comment

  1. Eugenia (1 comments.) wrote:

    I blogged about it too. Pretty problematic.

    Sunday, March 9, 2008 at 4:15 am | Permalink

3 Trackbacks/Pingbacks

  1. Mobile Phones on Saturday, March 8, 2008 at 12:12 am

    links from TechnoratiiPhone SDK restrictions March 7th, 2008 at 05:36pm Under UncategorizedTechLuver.comwrote an interesting post today on Here’s a quick excerpt iPhone SDK restrictions Friday, March 7, 2008 I finally downloaded the iPhone SDK and I’ve been exploring it all day. However, the license has some serious restrictions which may affect our

  2. Grumpy Gamer on Saturday, March 8, 2008 at 7:31 pm

    links from TechnoratiWe’ll see if more interesting games start to show up. If Apple truly doesn’t care what you sell, then this could be a very interesting platform for adventure games. Hell of a lot better than the developer economics of the DS/PSP.The iPhone SDK says”No interpreted code may be downloaded and used in an Application…”. I don’t know of any modern game that doesn’t use some kind of interpreted scripting language. I’m pretty sure this was not Apple’s intention, but we’ll see how they deal with it.Dear lord I will be so happy when Spore finally ships.

  3. Golem.de-Forum :: Java kommt aufs iPhone :: IPhone SDK Restrictions on Monday, March 10, 2008 at 5:48 am

    Kramer auto Pingback[...] for code that is interpreted and run by Apple’s Published APIs and built-in interpreter(s). [mcdevzone.com] Genau das macht aber die JVM, Java Bytecode interpretieren Neues Thema [...]