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The Pragmatic Bookshelf | iPhone News

Stefan Tilkov,

The Pragmatic Programmers pull their iPhone book:

We’ve had the iPhone book ready to go beta for some months, but were prevented from publishing it because of the iPhone SDK’s Non-Disclosure Agreement (which affects all publishers regarding this material, regardless of whether the reader is a member of the ADC or not).

Normally, pre-release NDA’s such as this one are lifted when the product finally ships. We expected that this NDA would be lifted when the iPhone 2.0 software shipped, but it wasn’t. The September announcement came and went, and still the NDA remains in place.

It now appears that Apple does not intend to lift the NDA any time soon. Regrettably, this means we are pulling our iPhone book out of production. But all is not lost: we are actively looking at alternative ways of getting this content to you. It probably won’t happen anytime soon, but know that we are doing what we can.

Apple is acting totally idiotically. The whole NDA business, the App store approach … As John Gruber points out:

Apple’s stewardship of the App Store, to date, can only be explained by malevolence or incompetence. Either way, they should change course.

What's especially sad is that if Apple just acted sanely – making the App Store the best instead of the only option to get apps onto your iPhone, similarly to iTunes/iPod, and lifting the stupid NDA restrictions – it's whole approach to iPhone development would be just perfect.

On September 25, 2008 9:30 AM, anonymous_coward said:

What’s especially sad is that if Apple just acted sanely – making the App Store the best instead of the only option …

But that’s perfectly sane from their point of view. As long as there are enough APple devotees out there it’s a good way for maximizing profit.

On September 25, 2008 10:51 AM, Stefan Tilkov Author Profile Page said:

How does preventing someone from selling their own mail application maximize Apple’s profit? They don’t make money selling the iPhone mail app, but they would make 30% off the sale of an alternative.

On September 26, 2008 10:10 AM, anonymous_coward said:

How does preventing someone from selling their own mail application maximize Apple’s profit? I think the Apple people are actually quite smart so there must be a reason why they are doing something that looks at first stupid. My guess is that software sales is just one “revenue stream”. Another one (and perhaps more important) is selling content and services with the iPhone as one and only access platform. And the more control they have over the software running on their gadget the more control they can exert on services and content that is accessible via the iPhone. Or I’m just a little paranoid :-)