Ahh, handhelds. I friggin' hate developing for handhelds.

I'm more or less officially between projects, and I'm getting pestered to move some of my games to handhelds, specifically iPhone. While it appears that iPhone and Android and Blackberry and Windows Mobile are about 90% the same and it should be logical that I ought to be able to make some kind of cross-platform effort, it's simply not the case.

First off, Apple doesn't want it. Apple's finally the 800 pound gorilla of a platform, and they're taking advantage of it in a big way. When your market share is 5%, you can't really dictate terms for what's gonna appear on your platform, so no matter how much the term "port" makes you cringe you live with it.

When your market share is much larger (although in the grand scheme of cellphones the iPhone's market share isn't all that huge, but it does dominate in the "phones that people actually download stuff to", demographic, thanks mostly to their well thought-out "app store", but I digress), you're in a better position to dictate terms.

And their terms are "we get to content police our stuff however we want". And right now that pretty much boils down to "no ports". Apple's got a really weirdly-worded "no third party API's" clause in their content-policing terms. It was apparently written by marketers because it doesn't actually mean that. It basically means "your app must be written in Objective C and if we get a whiff that something's being interpreted, even if it's being interpreted by an interpreter we included in our phone, then you're out". This is happening right now with a gizmo called PhoneGap that allows you to write apps using Safari as the presentation layer and &#106avascript as the back-end, but with all the appearance of being a native app (ala Adobe AIR minus Flash). Some nice stuff has been written with it, but Apple's content-police suddenly started giving the thumbs-down to PhoneGap developed stuff.<br><br>There's also <a href="http://titaniumapp.com/">Appcelerator Titanium</a>, which is a similar AIR-esque effort that's being helped along by my good pal Don Thorp. While mobile devices are also in its roadmap, unless I see something from Papa Bear Apple that they're not gonna dump Titanium-written apps on general principle, I can't invest the effort.<br><blockquote>Mind you, iPhone has a conspicuous exception to this rule in Unity3D, which is a &#106avascript-Driven 3D engine. In this case, it's one of those "well, we'll make an exception for coolness", as there are some very cool Unity3D games.</blockquote>There's also the probability of genuine according-to-Hoyle Flash appearing on an iPhone. It's no secret that Flash will appear on iPhones as well as Android phones. And if it did appear, it would make my porting efforts trivial, but there's still the question of app support. There's the distinct possibility that Apple will deploy Flash only as a plugin for their browser and not as a generalized runtime engine. While Adobe AIR on an iPhone would usher in a big rush of applications, it does bring up the whole "port" thing that's made Apple cringe since the 1980's. <a href="http://www.twhirl.org/">Twhirl</a> on an iPhone may be a terrific thing, but if I can also install the same Twhirl to an Android/Blackberry/WindowsMobile, then Apple's magic of exclusively-written apps is gone.<br><br>So right now I'm working on the assumption that Flash may appear on the iPhone, but they're gonna hobble it in the same way they're hobbling Safari's &#106avascript interpreter - it's useful for showing stuff in their web-browser, but don't plan to see your app in the app-store if you try to use it anywhere else.<br><br>Bottom line seems to be that if you want any chance with the content cops, you need to write your app in native Objective-C or in Unity3D. And, unlike OpenGL, Unity3D isn't a 3D technology that can also do 2D stuff if you set it up nicely. And my stuff's all 2D. So I'm thinking Objective-C it is. And an Apple-only codebase. Just the way Apple wants it.<br><br>Although I'm still thinking hard about Unity3D because I haven't written any C in a LONG time and the thought of learning a C-based OO language that's not portable to anything and has no garbage collection makes me throw up in my mouth a little. At least with Unity3D, I could recycle a little of my code. Although the thought of having to make 3D models of everything makes me weary.<br><br>Thoughts?<div> </div>