Is MonoTouch now banned on the iPhone? [closed]

Answer 1

Unity is also based on Mono and with that being a sizable commercial product I imagine that this is an issue which we've not heard the end of yet.

Banning all apps that are not written in Obj-C/C++ would, in theory ban all Unity games also, of which there are a large number already in the app store.

This question has also been asked over on the Unity Answers site, and their official answer is:

"We just heard about the iPhone OS4.0 and the new Terms-Of-Service. While we believe we are fully compliant with these we are right now doing all we can to get this verified by Apple. As soon as we know precisely, we will of course share that info with everybody. Please hang tight while we get this sussed out."

Be interesting to see what they get told by Apple.

The thing is, surely saying that an app has to be written in a certain language is a bit of a misnomer, as once the app is compiled down, it's always a native binary regardless how it's been built. My guess is that all they can look for is some kind of signature in the binary to detect what tool it was built with. A flawed approach.

EDIT: There is an interesting overview of the situation on this blog: monotouch now dead in the water what does apples new iphone developer agreement mean

Answer 2

It's now months after the flash debacle and it's pretty obvious Monotouch and Unity are doing just fine.

As per "Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited"

Monotouch compiles code down to a native binary, there is no "layer". They're referring to somethign like a .NET runtime, Java JVM or Flash runtime.

Answer 3

The new license agreement is explicitly clear about that. So YES, it will be banned.

Advice, if you want to really develop for iPhone, try XCode. If you are already familiar with Java or C# or yet better C++, then learning Objective-C wont be that hard.

iPhone/iPad is Apples new successful business, and they will do anything to keep this business growing, maybe they will not ban Monotouch apps now, but who knows there next move? So if you are really really interested in iPhone dev, instead of having nightmares that your work might be just rejected. Just switch to XCode, at least that will lower your app reject percentage. Hence, my advice.

Answer 4

This google docs spreadsheet has a long list of apps that will be affected by the new agreement. Some noteable ones that have been #1 in the appstore for their category:

• Monopoly
• Lemonade Tycoon
• Skee ball
• The settlers
• Zombieville

One of the funny inclusions is Toy Story.

Answer 5

Short answer to all that blob in the agreement is YES.

Apple is basically shooting itself in the foot by limiting programs to a few languages:

• C - which is not really suited for application development these days, due to it's low-level nature. It's mostly a systems programming language today.
• C++ - which makes it harder to shoot your phone, but when it happens, it's with a bazooka. Apart from Qt, there aren't any complete application frameworks to use in C++ (and Qt doesn't support iPhone - yet).
• Objective-C - which was invented by Apple and of course will be supported.
• JavaScript running in WebKit - basically a web application.

They are deliberately limiting what tools you can use to develop for iPhone, which will almost certainly get them in serious trouble. I'm sure a good sized chunk of the community will just quit iPhone development and migrate to a different platform like Windows Mobile, Symbian, Android or Maemo, which are totally open - you are free to write your application in LOLCODE.

Apart from possibly making iPhone junk for developers, it also gives Adobe a nice kiss: Apple deliberately blocks Flash from iPad, and now they are also blocking it from iPhone. The nummer is Adobe Flash's CS5 biggest feature is deploying Flash applications to iPhone.

tl;dr: Apple is basically shooting itself in the foot with this move.

Answer 6

I think something to strongly consider is Apple's motivation.

I agree with other sentiments posted online that Apple is trying to prevent commoditization of applications - that is to say, having more and more applications written using frameworks that generate applications that can run across multiple devices.

But that's not what Monotouch is. Monotouch is all about using the Apple frameworks to write applications - but through Mono, not Objective-C. So from that standpoint what Monotouch is doing is not something that should really bother Apple.

I still hold that developers are better off writing in the native language of the platform they are using, as things are just generally smoother when you don't introduce system that can have abstraction impedance mismatch - the Cocoa frameworks were all built to be used from Objective-C, and they make the most sense when you are used to the philosophy of Objective-C. But I do hope that Apple comes down on the side of allowing MonoTouch to be used.