The context of this story

People: Steve Jobs
Products: iPhone

Why Air was cut off

All changes to Apple’s App Store submission guidelines are closely monitored, and in this case, there was a double outcry, both in favor and against. Unsurprisingly, the opposition was led by statements from Adobe employees and evangelists, most notably Lee Brimelow on TheFlashBlog in an article titled Apple Slaps Developers In The Face, which ends with an impassioned “Go screw yourself Apple[.]{dir=”rtl”}” Comments on the article are disabled. On the other hand, John Gruber’s very sober and analytical response on Daring Fireball is worth noting.

And why did Apple take this step?

Officially, all that has been said is that such compilers cause more problems and less optimization for a specific platform, and Apple wants to avoid problems that would be introduced into the platform, such as poor user response or lower security. Steve Jobs commented on the situation in an email to developers: “We’ve been in this situation before, and the middle layers between the platform and developers create sub-standard applications and hinder the development of the platform.”

The truth is that everything Apple does with its mobile platform focuses on speed and user response. For example, multitasking, which is native to the iPhone platform, cannot be used by applications, and only in iPhone OS 4 will this change so that they will be able to use one of seven types of multitasking services. This is not about bullying developers, but an effort to maintain good battery life for mobile phones and consistent application responsiveness so that it doesn’t become “slow” when dozens of applications are running in the background. Apple has no other benefit from limiting multitasking.

By cutting off crosskits, it is heading in the same direction: faster code optimized for a detailed API adapted to the hardware platform. This does not restrict existing iPhone developers in any way, as they develop using tools that Apple has provided and continues to provide free of charge. The only disadvantage is for Flash programmers who expected to quickly recompile their programs, put them in the App Store, and make a quick buck. That’s not going to happen.

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