Some of you may have heard the news that the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission are currently involved in discussions to determine which agency will begin an antitrust inquiry into Apple and a new policy that has been implemented. When I first saw the article from the New York Post discussing the DoJ/FTC inquiry, I immediately thought I was going to read an article about how government regulators were going to be looking into how Apple maintains an almost Orwellian control over the application ecosystem that is the App Store. An awful lot of “experts” in the industry spend a good amount of time debating whether or not Apple’s policy of restricting or approving applications for publication and use on the iPhone/iPad is acceptable. I have several opinions on that particular subject, but I’m only going to ask one question and then I’ll get to what is actually going on with Apple and the DoJ/FTC:

Let’s assume for a second that Apple were to decide to open the App Store for open development with no approval process (I know, it’s crazy, right?). Who are all of the talking heads and analysts going to go to when it gets overrun by malware? Will they blame Apple or the will they blame the developers who are creating the malicious apps? Think about that for a second…

As I read through the article, an entirely different case began to take shape…and it may have some merit. In the final months of 2009, Adobe announced that its Flash Professional CS5 would include the Packager for iPhone when it ships. From Adobe’s website, Flash Professional CS5 will benefit iPhone developers in the following ways:

“The Packager for iPhone allows developers to use Flash technologies to develop content for iPhone and iPod touch, devices that were previously closed to them. Developers can write new code or reuse existing web content to build applications for iPhone. Because the source code and assets are reusable across the Flash Platform runtimes,—Adobe AIR and Flash Player—it also gives developers a way to more easily target other mobile and desktop environments.”

Just like me, you may be wondering how this differs from the Adobe Flash Player 10 coming to the iPhone. Here is what Adobe has to say:

“The new support for iPhone applications included in Flash Professional CS5 will not allow iPhone users to browse web content built with Flash technology on iPhone, but it may allow developers to repackage existing web content as applications for iPhone if they choose to do so.Flash Player uses a just-in-time compiler and virtual machine within a browser plug-in to play back content on websites. Those technologies are not allowed on the iPhone at this time, so a Flash Player for iPhone is not being made available today.

I essence, Adobe has attempted to make an end-run around Apple’s policies that denied the ability to brows for Flash content on the web from an iPhone by creating a framework that would allow developers to first find that same existing content and then spit out a native iPhone application that uses the content. All is well and good and pretty darn ingenious, if you ask me. But, there’s one little problem.

Whether it be related to Steve Jobs’ well publicized dislike for anything related to Adobe, or that Apple decided that now was a good time to take a hardline stance by adding a new segment to the iPhone Developer Program License Agreement, section 3.3.1 of the developer’s agreement states that, “Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs”. This one little line prohibits the use of unauthorized code or using tools to act as an intermediary translation or compatibility tools.

In essence, Apple has stated that they will not allow applications to be published to the App Store that have been developed with any tool other than the Apple Software Development Kit (SDK), effectively pushing Adobe’s Flash Professional CS5 right out of the playing field for developing applications for the iPhone/iPad…Again! Whether we’re talking about Adobe or any other rapid-development application, Apple is saying to developers that they need to make a decision: either they can continue to try to use framework-like tools that can develop applications that are platform independent and use the translation capabilities to produce platform specific apps; OR they can develop applications for Apple products.

In the real world, developers are paid for their time by selling their apps. For a developer to be able to create a platform independent application and then be able to translate and compile it into multiple platforms is huge. Apple just told them they can’t do it on their platform. Thus, the decision that is necessary from developers and the decision from the DoJ/FTC.