No. I really think we should file suit.

RE: Frets: "How do you know the apps on your phone were'nt designed by 12 yr olds?"

I think this really gets to the crux of the issue. Bad code can be written in any language. Anyone who blames Flash specifically for slowdowns has never written a line of code in his or her life. Not only that, but it would take a really good flash coder -- a 1-percenter -- to write an app that would handle memory and graphics in a way that delivered a superior iPhone experience once it was rendered into native code, and which would be accepted to the store. So what's the worry? Bad iphone apps already proliferate on the store. Since bad apps sink fast, there's no legitimate reason for Apple to prohibit development in other languages that can be compiled into native code. Who cares if they suck? Let the market decide. Let the hardware make the final call on what can't be run. I know that my very slim HTML5/js/canvas apps run at least 5x as heavy on the processor as an equivalent Flash app under AVM2, and I've optimized them to bounding boxes and never re-rendering a whole canvas on any iteration. No one with skin in the game wants to rewrite their site in HTML5, not because they're lazy, but because the current implementation blows; we will, but just to cater to Apple fanboys. I love Apple. I'm writing this on a Macbook Air. But I love portable code a lot more. Besides Apple fans, it's obvious to anyone who's made a serious effort to code a game using nothing but JS and HTML5 that fundamentally the browsers aren't up to the task yet, and probably won't be for some years. I'm sure if I optimized my AS3 games, I could get them fast enough when compiled down to C that they'd be indistinguishable from a native-written app. If they didn't, no one would buy them, and I'd suffer, but I doubt anyone would blame Apple for it. So why throttle innovation, other than over some internal gripe with Adobe? Because it would require more time on Apple's part to weed out those third party apps that failed to conform to their rigorous UI standards? Or because a system under tighter controls (like Facebook, vs. Myspace, as Jeff2A suggested) tends to be more user-friendly by limiting user experience? Isn't there a difference between running a free website with some, none, or all-user-generated content, versus selling a piece of hardware for a lot of money, and then prohibiting developers from developing and users from downloading and/or generally, you know, USING it to the best of its potential?

Right there is the basis for a lawsuit.

The app store is already loaded with plenty of garbage written in Objective C. There's no reason to mandate people write in an Apple-only language when we can cross-compile. As a developer, why shouldn't I hedge my bets and make sure my app can run on an Android, or in IE for that matter? My issue with this isn't only as a Flash developer, but also as a Java developer and someone who occasionally codes in HaXe and Unity3d -- all banned or threatened under the current Apple regime from running perfectly good code on one of their pieces of hardware. It's not like my ideal CMS platform is amfphp+flex because it's easy or I'm lazy; I choose that combination personally because it's a lot faster for transmitting large objects between client and server than are JSON or XML post/get methods, and more security-flexible than opening a socket is. I don't tell a client I'm going to use a particular CMS because it's easy to write a skin for; I roll my own if it won't do what I want it to do under the hood. I loathe adapting my Javascript to IE not because it's a pain in the a**, but because IE isn't standards-compliant. If it were, and firefox wasn't, then I'd hate porting my code the other way around instead.

But never in my life, since I wrote my first BASIC program in 1985 on the last OS that Bill Gates ever wrote (the internal OS for the Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 100...I learned BASIC reading the included manual cover to cover, at age six) have I ever seen a hardware manufacturer take these kinds of steps against developers trying to introduce new languages to their platform.

Remember SuperCard? It was a straight rip of Hypertalk, HyperCard stacks with color and a few extra transitions, packaged and sold as an expensive produce. You know what, it kicked ass. And in the end, it did nothing but help Apple. It was also the early inspiration for Macromedia to develop Director. Yes, watching the 1984 app now makes me sick.

I don't doubt that there's a case against Apple here. Apple's new usage language goes so far as to prohibit the porting of basically anything to an iPhone or iPad that they don't want to see ported, but in practice it will never be applied to apps ported from anything other than Flash or another ECMA-compliant VM (Silverlight?) that could undermine their grip on the devices' connectivity, or present an alternative path to the creation or downloading of competitive apps from their walled garden. Non-competitive ports written with some LISP or Python or whatever and ported to Obj C will probably not warrant intervention. And at this stage of the game, who other than a 12 year old is going to use Objective C to write a bunch of clones of existing libraries for one device, just so he or she can launch another substandard app in Apple's store? The next Apple ad campaign won't be aimed at users; it'll be trying to convince developers to bother with their dauntingly massive stack of BS.

Apple would be shooting itself in the foot but for the overwhelming adoption of these devices as, not computers, but appliances. The trouble is that an appliance which becomes household name, which inherently does nothing but run software written by third parties, has an obligation to be an equal opportunity provider to all comers, and to run third party software regardless of language of origin. Apple's language is so broad it could be interpreted as preventing the writing of code in human languages, and the porting of said code to Objective C. Beyond legal implications, what it says about their current corporate mindset is disgusting. But in real terms, their policy is directly aimed at undermining and ultimately depriving cross-platform coders, like many here, of our livelihoods. Based on that, I think we ought to hit back hard... harder than simply voting with our thumbs and buying an Android phone.