There are more than 250,000 iOS apps in the iTunes App Store. Earlier this year, Apple insisted that it would only accept apps written in C , C++, and Objective-C and that the company would reject all apps built with third party tools. That was kind of a huge slap int he face to Adobe, which had built  tools into Flash CS5 that allowed developers to write Flash apps and export them as iOS apps — since iOS doesn’t officially support Flash.

Today Apple backtracked, by announcing that it’s “relaxing all restrictions on the development tools used to create iOS apps.” The only caveat is that apps built with those tools cannot download any code, for security reasons.

Hopefully this move will prompt Adobe to resume support for the Flash-to-iPhone feature in CS5. The company had pretty much abandoned it when Apple put the kibosh on third party tools earlier this year.

Apple has also started to publish its App Store Review Guidelines so there won’t be as much guesswork involved in figuring out whether that nifty new app developers just submitted to the App Store will be rejected.

Brad Linder

Brad Linder is editor of Liliputing and Mobiputing. He's been tinkering with mobile tech for decades and writing about it since...

4 replies on “Apple eases restrictions on 3rd party development tools for iOS apps”

  1. HAHAHAHAHAAAHHAHA! Too funny. Jobs is just now waking from his denial that my Droids are going to rule the galaxy. After his Flash rant, 3rd party app developers should leave him twisting in the wind.
    Droids rule!

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