The goofy thing about the iPhone developer NDA is that all the really awesome stuff came from the iPhone’s OS X roots. This is the “five year advantage” that everyone needs to catch up to, the fact that the iPhone is a Mac in your pocket.
So [competitor name here] wants to lift some kind of feature like multi-touch inputs? They won’t get anything useful from the source code. All the developers have is instructions for addressing the Cocoa APIs. Without Cocoa, it’s useless. Want to just emulate the way Cocoa development works? The OS X SDK certainly isn’t under NDA; make an Objective C interpreter, get to work writing all those libraries, and call us back in ten years and let us know how it went.
I didn’t believe Jobs when he originally said there would be no third-party apps and that all development would be via web apps. I figured it was a stalling tactic while they cleaned up the SDK. And I’m pretty sure that they never had any intention of keeping the NDA around forever, either; again, just a way to slow down the mainstreaming of the platform and let them iron out the problems.
Who else would want to slow down the spread of a platform, though? That’s a sign of how truly mammoth this is. It’s a friggn’ paradigm shift.
