The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is going to investigate into Apple’s iOS SDK rules. Recently the FTC has received a complaint, along with a documentation of nearly 200 pages, from Adobe against Apple for banning the iPhone app developers from using the authoring tools of Adobe. Adobe says it is against the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
However the officials of FTC exempted the Adobe’s 189-page documentation from the openness demand by Wired as the publication of the same could “reasonably be expected to interfere” with other ongoing cases. FTC neither directly acknowledged the case nor provided the details.
Apple claimed that they don’t want any dependence on outside tools and that’s why Adobe’s tools are not accepted. Apple also believes that such outsider’s tools may lead to developers waiting for a third-party’s updates irrespective of how much Apple develops the platform on their own. Apple has also pointed out earlier that Adobe’s dependency on third-party tools, not only delayed the arrival of Creative Suite for Intel but moved it to just produce a Cocoa-based code with CS5 only.
Adobe, on the other hand, has alleged that Apple’s SDK rules have made cross-platform development only more difficult. iPhone developers can’t create an app using Flash CS5 and have to wait for the iOS devices to reach, which leads in to spending extra money and time on separate development tools. They have referred the case of Wired. Wired had to use a workaround to launch its iPad magazine, after Adobe’s tools for tablet magazine were declined by the sudden change in iOS SDK.
