“A more serious issue is that Apple’s SDK license prohibits downloading code to interpret: this means that it would be impossible to load any games that were not bundled with the interpreter. I think this is probably a fatal problem: it seems doubtful that many IF authors will be willing to pay the $99 required to get their work onto the iPhone - plus it would mean no Zork, ever.”

If this is true, I’m really horrified. I’m one of the project members of a z-machine for Android (http://code.google.com/p/twisty), and now I’m starting to realize that maybe freedom really does matter. I’m sort of shocked that Apple is being this restrictive. I wonder if we can get some sort of exception from Apple for your one app. They’re clearly trying to prevent people from implementing generic JVM or CLR interpreters that ‘break’ the appstore distribution model by allowing a separate ecosystem of apps to run unchecked. But text-adventures seem pretty harmless.

If this is really a dead-end, I’d like to know. It makes me realize how important opensource OS’s like Android really are.

The reason is probably similar to the reason they ban plug-ins: they don’t want anyone creating an application that can be used to circumvent the App Store. The clause is in a section of the license where things seem to be up for negotiation, so there may be some leeway depending on what you’re doing - however, it doesn’t have the ‘without our permission’ wording that the other clauses in that section have.

I plan on asking them: however, I suspect the answer may be no: Apple may not consider IF important enough for an exemption, especially given that Sun and Adobe have both had to retract product announcements over this clause. I also suspect that Apple’s stance may change over time; they have probably chosen to be as stringent as possible with the initial clause, knowing that it would be harder to add new restrictions than it would be to remove old ones (certainly this is what happened with Palm, where the open source tools were initially frowned upon and gradually got more acceptance as time goes by).

iFrotz has been made available in the application store… so it would seem that Apple is allowing z-code interpretation and programs. It provides access to the IFDB so that additional games may be downloaded. Other applications (e.g. e-readers) provide the ability to specify a website using the browser and downloading eTexts that way. Perhaps you could provide the same capability. In this way (admittedly the worst case) a person could bring up a temporary ftp or http service on their computer and access the files using the browser to pull them onto the iPhone… voila… Zork on the iPhone.

Cheers,
Dwayne