So Steve Jobs did indeed announce the iPhone SDK this morning. Things are better, and at the same time worse, than I feared. You can sign up for the developer programme for only US$99, the bad news, you have to be running Leopard on an Intel Mac for the SDK to run. My problem, I've got a Mac running Leopard, but it's PPC. I've got an Intel Mac, but it's running Tiger. I really don't want to upgrade the machine running Tiger right now.
However, it doesn't look like it's going to be a problem, because I'm the wrong type of developer anyway. In a totally insane move Apple have restricted the programme to developers in the US only. What's going on here? What happened to globalisation?
Unlike the licensing restrictions which lead to the iTunes divide, there is absolutely no legal reason that I can think of that would prevent Apple rolling out the SDK to 'the rest of us'... so why restrict it to the US?
Update: So things turn out to be at the same time better and at the same time worse that I initially thought...
Well, it seems you can download the SDK from anywhere in the world… It's the participation in the paid developer program, the one that gives you a signed key for deployment and the ability to distribute software from the AppStore that's restricted to the US by now.
ReplyDeleteI guess they're trying to restrict worldwide access to the store until they have sorted out how many requests they're having from US developers…