Is MonoTouch now banned on the iPhone? [closed]

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Closed 7 years ago.

A recent post by John Gruber notes that the following legalese:

3.3.1 — Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs.

Has been revised as follows:

3.3.1 — Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs. Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited).

And makes the following observation:

My reading of this new language is that cross-compilers, such as the Flash-to-iPhone compiler in Adobe’s upcoming Flash Professional CS5 release, are prohibited. This also bans apps compiled using MonoTouch — a tool that compiles C# and .NET apps to the iPhone.

Does this in fact ban the use of Monotouch for the IPhone?

Answer 1

I think something to strongly consider is Apple's motivation.

I agree with other sentiments posted online that Apple is trying to prevent commoditization of applications - that is to say, having more and more applications written using frameworks that generate applications that can run across multiple devices.

But that's not what Monotouch is. Monotouch is all about using the Apple frameworks to write applications - but through Mono, not Objective-C. So from that standpoint what Monotouch is doing is not something that should really bother Apple.

I still hold that developers are better off writing in the native language of the platform they are using, as things are just generally smoother when you don't introduce system that can have abstraction impedance mismatch - the Cocoa frameworks were all built to be used from Objective-C, and they make the most sense when you are used to the philosophy of Objective-C. But I do hope that Apple comes down on the side of allowing MonoTouch to be used.

Answer 2

As of today, Section 3.3.1 of the Apple iOS Developer Program License has now been reverted to the old text:

3.3.1 Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs.

Apple has released an official statement on the license changes.

This would indicate that it is now permissible to use MonoTouch.

Answer 3

Mono applications would normally compile to bytecode which is and would require JIT (just in time) compilation to run them thus a .Net framework or Mono framework is required. However, in the case of iOS and Android, Mono application compile to native code. Therefore, in the eyes of Apple, there is no third layer, Apple will never ban Mono. So you can feel free to develop with MonoTouch and distribute your apps. To ensure you further, there are various of Mono applications (including games and applications) on the AppStore that have been around for a long time.

Answer 4

One goal of the Mono team is porting Silverlight to the iPhone by mean of MonoTouch/Moonlight for cross platform development. That's a bit like porting Flash to the iPhone. There is also Monodroid on the way to help us porting applications and, you know, Apple runs amonk every time someone says "Android" :-) IMHO, if Apple is targeting Adobe with the new agreement, they are targeting Novel too. We are probably speculating and there's a NDA but many of us invested a lot of time on this platform so we need to make the situation clear. We cannot wait next summer to discuss this matter. For example, I've been asked by a friend to help his company to prototype a MonoTouch application for a customer. Does the new agreement only affect the App Store distribution? What about in-house distribution?

Answer 5

From what the license agreement says MonoTouch apps will clearly not be allowed in the AppStore.

The more interesting question is though, against which framework / apps will they enforce it? They will also have to write automated tests to check if the apps were written natively or not, because the people who approve the apps won't have the time / skills to do it for every single app. These apps won't put a sticker there 'Using MonoTouch / Flash'.

Answer 6

Unity is also based on Mono and with that being a sizable commercial product I imagine that this is an issue which we've not heard the end of yet.

Banning all apps that are not written in Obj-C/C++ would, in theory ban all Unity games also, of which there are a large number already in the app store.

This question has also been asked over on the Unity Answers site, and their official answer is:

"We just heard about the iPhone OS4.0 and the new Terms-Of-Service. While we believe we are fully compliant with these we are right now doing all we can to get this verified by Apple. As soon as we know precisely, we will of course share that info with everybody. Please hang tight while we get this sussed out."

Be interesting to see what they get told by Apple.

The thing is, surely saying that an app has to be written in a certain language is a bit of a misnomer, as once the app is compiled down, it's always a native binary regardless how it's been built. My guess is that all they can look for is some kind of signature in the binary to detect what tool it was built with. A flawed approach.

EDIT: There is an interesting overview of the situation on this blog: monotouch now dead in the water what does apples new iphone developer agreement mean