iPhone NDA: Doing more harm than good

iPhone NDA: Doing more harm than good:


To download and use the SDK, developers must accept a nondisclosure agreement that prohibits discussion of any of this “confidential information.” Since the platform targeted by the SDK—the iPhone OS 2.0—was released July 11, the NDA has become a source of frustration for the growing development community. Here’s why.

Dear Apple:

This is stupid.

I can only think of two reasons the NDA is still in place. Neither puts Apple in a good light:

1) the person responsible for dropping the NDA went on vacation and forgot their iPhone.

2) Apple is using this as a quiet hammer to limit developer’s ability to talk about problems with the new iPhone, MobileMe, the App store, etc, etc, until Apple fixes the worst of the problems.

It’s pretty clear that 2.0 was a subset of “the real 2.0″ and that stuff was left out and not really ready for prime time, and OS 2.1 seems to be adding most of the functionality that should have been in 2.1, and hopefully pushes all of this out of “you’re really beta testing our stuff, we just didn’t mention that” mode.

But really, either someone is asleep at the wheel, or someone’s trying to do damage control, and both are bad. In fact, they’re just creating a different problem, one maybe harder to fix later. And it serves very little useful purpose.

Mistake, time to fix. But they probably won’t.

Update. for more on this topic, see this second post by me:

Chuqui 3.0: More on the iPhone NDA:


In the interest of fairness and not burying this in an update to a posting people won’t see, I wanted to note that I heard from someone I trust on this with another perspective:

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