Apple's cult of secrecy has been much in the news in the past couple of weeks, but one area where it's being felt - and hard - is by developers trying to write for the iPhone. They're caught in a catch-22: if they want to program for it, they have to sign up for the Software Developers' Kit (SDK). But that comes with a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) that bans them from talking publicly about it.
Which means that when they hit a programming roadblock, they have no easy way of getting around it: they can't take the usual, modern shortcut that's been popular since the advent of search engines, and search for key words; they can't even join a mailing list to talk about it, because there isn't one.
That's led to some substantial annoyance among Apple developers. Craig Hockenberry of Iconfactory, makers of (among others) Twitterriffic (a client for Twitter) was, I think, the first to express his displeasure most publicly and coin the phrase that's now earned a website all of its own.
And it's not only developers: as Ars Technica reports, Addison-Wesley was going to have a book out on iPhone programming this month. Uh-uh, would-be author Erica Sadun: that would break the NDA.
But could this somehow be good for Apple, because it means people can't, I dunno, write hacks for the iPhone? No, says Brent Simmons, writer of the feed reader NetNewsWire: ""I don't know of any successful platform that developers can't actually talk about online."
Key word there: successful.
Chuq von Rospach, who used to run Apple's mailing lists, is scathing:
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.
In a later post, von Rospach notes that private lists are possible - but they're a hassle:
Apple has at times run private lists and forums for beta/NDA setups. I used to run them on lists.apple.com (and its predecessors) as lists, and back in the mid-90's I built a site around Web Crossing that ran private forums for various projects to support the nice Developer Support people.
The problem is that validation of NDAs and keeping the subscription up to list is somewhat labor intensive and honestly, a lot of project groups just weren't that into it. It was sometimes a challenge to convince them they actually needed people monitoring the public lists (yet another time I almost got my butt fired, and would have gone willingly over that issue...), and so over time, the folks who thought this stuff was important more or less lost a war of attrition and it all faded to black. But there was a time from about the mid-90's to the early 2000's where a bunch of this stuff was going on behind the scenes, and the technologies exist there today to support it, if there were people willing to do the non-technical aspects of it.
Long and short of it: Apple's keeping the NDA locked down so people can't hack the iPhone. (It wishes. It already is.) But with von Rospach gone, it seems to have lost the will to run private mailing lists to support its developers.
Perhaps it's forgotten the lesson from Microsoft: feed your developers, and everything works well. Consider that there's an estimate 1,000+ apps on the iPhone App Store - of which about 100 are reckoned to be even worth the disk space. How is Apple going to improve that ratio? Not via an NDA.
