To any of you who get tired of incessant griping, remember: sometimes, people listen — especially if the griping is well-reasoned and constructive. Such seems to be the case with Apple’s NDA on mobile application development. Apple announced today:
…the NDA has created too much of a burden on developers, authors and others interested in helping further the iPhone’s success, so we are dropping it for released software. Developers will receive a new agreement without an NDA covering released software within a week or so. Please note that unreleased software and features will remain under NDA until they are released.
I would be remiss if I didn’t give Apple some credit for making this move. This is what really matters: being responsive to criticism. We’re seeing some tremendous innovation in development for the iPhone and iPod touch, and in the mobile arena in general, from new kinds of synths and music making applications to Star Trek-like controllers. It’ll make a big difference to those developers to be able to talk.
And, speaking of which, this now means we can have all of those developer discussions that were crippled by the NDA. So, developers, we’d love to hear from you.