No more non-disclosure on the released OS and SDK. Excellent news that Apple has come to its senses on this issue.
Ultra fantastic news! Now I can write a book about iPhone development. Yay.
They have not dropped the NDA in general
The only dropped it on released applications
So while you have not released it, the NDA still applies!
Are you sure, I mean the new NDA isn’t up, but it sounded like Apple’s “To Our Developers” statement referred to their standard policy of their unreleased software being something that you can’t talk about, not your unreleased software.
Thats a possibility. We will have to see.
Thought I yet have to see Apple share any unreleased informations.
@dreamora: Nope, this is the real deal. The wording on the Apple message is a little tricky and I took it the same as you did at first read, but from what I can tell and other news stories as well, this is the lifting of the NDA on all but Apple’s unreleased software. Betas that developers are privy to, in other words, you can’t blab about.
Yea! Now I can buy a book on iPhone developement. Preferably one from Unity3D prespective.
As Mr. Burns says…
“Let them have their tartar sauce.”
It may be a small step in the right direction, but it doesn’t mean everything else is all good now. There’s still a long ways to go in the way Apple treats developers.
In that case its naturally great news 
Lets hope the other “we are god” attitudes towards the platform are lifted as well (beside those type of apps that are clearly forbidden by the NDA).
Especially the not accepting of applications that do stuff better than their own.
Really? Sounds cool.
Yeah, thanks. Publisher is already ultra hot on this topic, but was scared so far because of the NDA (and he was right :-)). But will probably take until sometime 2009 until we’re ready (writing the book with one other guy).
I tend to side with Apple on their iPhone decisions. Let’s see how well Android does with all its open freeness. What I predict: Crap apps that are always second guessing what features the phone has, and the eventual pandering to the lowest common denominator to make sure it works on every Android variation.
There are reasons for Apple’s decisions about controlling Apps on the iPhone and though I think there are serious problems with how they are handling platform denials, how can you blame them for protecting their platform from becoming like all other cell phones.
Look at it from a somewhat poor theological analogy. EVERYONE should be let in to Heaven, right? Well, then what’s the difference between Heaven and Earth? Oh.
Hehe, being a former Windows and now primary Mac OS user, I’d have to agree with that. You get lots and lots and lots of software for Windows. But while some of this software is pretty good (and some might even be better than Mac OS solutions), most of it just leads to me wasting time with comparing features, trying stuff and so on and so on.
For the Mac, I get significantly less options - but with a significantly better signal-to-noise-ratio. For me that’s a great time-saver. I’m even considering dropping Thunderbird and Firefox for Mac Mail and Safari (I’m really not happy with Firefox 3, but some sites I need to work with a lot simply don’t work properly in Safari … yet).
Honestly, from a user perspective, restrictive access for developers to a platform is clearly an advantage (as long as it’s not too restrictive).
Hmm…
I was personally talking from the iPhone perspective in the current market, just to be clear.
The Mac platform is different. I don’t think it’s restrictive controls that makes the interesting and often more pleasing apps appear on the Mac, I think it relates to the tastes and perspective of the customers that most commonly buy Macs. To be successful on the platform, you don’t make giant lists of features and show screens of 1000 options for customization. It’s not what many customers bought Macs for.
Just saying there are MANY reasons that things are the way they are. For some people it’s an advantage, for others it’s a disadvantage. 
Yeah, iPhone and Mac are probably two different stories (obviously, there are no restrictions on who can publish what for the Mac, except for maybe that they can’t use Visual Studio to build it 
).
I hadn’t thought of Mac users having different demands and Mac developers simply providing software that fulfils that demand, though - that’s a cool perspective.
But I guess the general point applies to both: Some users (like myself) prefer less quantity and more quality. And one way to achieve that is having an approval process (as in the case of the iPhone), the other one being “kind of in a niche market” (which I think one could say about the Mac … at least historically ).
One thing I found quite funny was doing a little research of this “iPhone app approval mess” via Google. What I found were a couple of nice tips, of what not to do. Then I joined the iPhone developer program and read the terms - and guess what: Everything I came across that was listed in those “how to make sure your app is approved” lists was also listed in a very readable manner in those terms.
So either Apple has changed those terms, or some of the people complaining simply didn’t read the terms under which they are participating in the developer program
Anyways, to be published in the Apple store still depend in Apple whim. Ok, its not so whim and random, for the case of unity3d :a realtime/online game can be a big nay because the “too much bandwidth usage”.
The bandwidth usage probably won’t be a problem, because playing a real-time game over a 3G network is mostly impossible (from what I’ve heard.) Apparently, it’s nor reliable enough to hold a game session. People play online games via wifi on which there are no bandwidth limitations.
Of course there are low bandwidth types of networked games that are worth a try. There’s the GPS rpgs that are coming, for instance.
There have been a few noteworthy app denials by Apple that raise eyebrows and none that I know of were games. Of course, people have used names like tris (part of tetris for a tetris rip off) and other name rip-offs and they’ve been sued (or threatened), but that has nothing to do with Apple.
There’s actually one game update I know of, where the developer said it was rejected. The initial game was accepted, but a bugfix/update wasn’t, for some unknown reason (well, unknown to us because of the NDA thing). Apparently they submitted the same thing again and it went through the second time. But still, that’s gotta be a bit annoying…
–Eric
If you are talking about Aurora Feint, it was apparently sending personal information from the iPhone to their server. It was a strangely high quality game offered for free. Once this apparent data mining was discovered, Apple took it down worried it was malicious. The developers cleared things up and it was put back up right away.
No, it was some other game, can’t remember off the top of my head…nothing about taking it down, just the update was rejected the first time.
–Eric