I was looking at developing an app for the iPad, which as near as I can tell is big iPhone. The I/O is limited because there is no USB connection or any other. I then started working changing the concept to using Bluetooth when I discovered yet another quirk in Apple's approach. In order to use Bluetooth, the target hardware also requires an Apple chip to embed in the target, obtainable only from Apple. I don't quite know whether it encodes the communication or does some extra processing (I am told it is a Renesas micro). Some manufacturers of Bluetooth coms modules (at least one: connectBlue) does provide the facility to insert the device, but as near as I can tell, we have to buy the chip from Apple and ship it to connectBlue.

Also Apple's licensing agreement seems to favour individuals. For corporations it requires documents on the incoporation and/or the name of your legal council and acknowledgment that they (the legal council) have seen the agreement. They don't believe in making it easy.

Also software developed for testing cannot be downloaded directly to the iPad/iPhone, but has to go through specialised corridors provided on the Apple network. Distribution can only be done via iTunes. I don't know that this is really problematic, but worth mentioning. Also you can only develop apps using an iMac (with an Intel processor) although the develoment environment and compiler is free and I am told the support is good.

As a result we have shifted our development effort into Android, where this nonsense doesn't exist.


As an aside, I also read the iTunes licensing agreement where you agree to only download apps/video/music from your country of registration. I haven't gone deeply into it, but it seems silly- if I travel from Canada to the US taking my iPad with me, surely there would be some time when I would want to download a new book or movie, and I am precluded simply because I didn't do this in advance. Maybe I am misunderstanding this, but all this lefgal interaction doesn't endear.