Dear Apple,
One of the news to greet me this morning was the information that you're changing section 3.3.1 of your iPhone Developer Program License Agreement to exclude the use of other languages than Objective-C, C++ and Javascript for iPhone development. I have been planning to develop iPhone apps in Lua, but if this change stands, I will be using my $100 a year on other investments instead.
Banning all but these three languages would be a boneheaded move on your part, as it would extinguish in an instant a number of thriving development communities, most of whose members would probably go to a more liberal platform like Android. I fail to see how this change is beneficial to the future of the iPhone platform.<
If, as some have suggested, you are doing this to prevent systems like Adobe's Flash compiler from allowing cross-platform development that would it easy to have the same application on both iPhone and other mobile platforms, why not just say so? It would be easy enough to disallow applications in the App Store from also being made available on other platforms without excluding exciting new or existing technologies and the multitude of programmers who master them.
This change seems like a complex technological solution to a simple social problem, and will be harmful to the larger iPhone development community in the long run. It also saddens me that such onerous and arbitrary restrictions should be placed on a system I have grown so fond of. While I adore the care and thought that has gone into designing and developing the iPhone and most other Apple products, this and other policies of non-openness makes me question whether this is really a company I want to support with my time and money.
Yours in hope of a change for the better,
-Lars Clausen
