Raise thy hands to the firmament and party! Woop Woop!

1. Developer uses undocumented methods to add features to application.

2. OS update released, users insta

3. Developer's app stops working.

4. Developer throws toys out of pram, huffing and puffing and blaming everybody but him/herself.

Hey - I like Tudor anthems. Very relaxing when you're working. ;-)

Dave

Offbeat - I think this is an issue which has become confused - the allegation against Microsoft wasn't that they used private/undocumented APIs, but they did so to give MS Office a competitive advantage over rival software, with the intention of killing it.

There were similar allegations with the iPhone OS (where it was clear Apple's own apps had access to APIs third parties did not) but in some cases this can be explained - like with the video features - that the APIs themselves changed hugely between OS versions, before finally being exposed.

This is also a noticeable pattern with Cocoa development - often new developer frameworks have their origins in private frameworks created for Apple's own applications, that is later extracted out and exposed as a common framework.

While not politically sound (it's a good question as to whether OS vendors should be allowed to develop / ship any applications at all) it does have some strengths from an engineering point of view, in that it allows you to get things wrong and make adjustments before thousands of people start relying on, and locking you into, decisions made in advance of usage.

Note that some of this is down to the objective-C runtime working very differently from a C++ based one.

OffBeatMammal said:

"Imagine the uproar if it turned out there were undocumented calls in a Microsoft application these days. The EU and DoJ would probably hold a street party with the "fines" raised (and Apple and Google would provide the lemonade) yet Apple - with arguably a monopoly on the MP3 player market these days is free from critisicm because they're cool?!"

Yeah, I've often wondered this myself. Years ago, Andrew Schulman wrote a book called "Undocumented Windows" in which he discovered numerous secret API's which Microsoft freely used in their apps. Microsoft hotly denied the allegations, and muttered about a "chinese wall" between their OS and Office divisions, but the code was there for all to see. The alleged chinese wall was about as effective as the Maginot Line. ;-)

I think part of the reason for the difference in culture between Microsoft and Apple is because -- as you say -- Apple stuff is cool. Apple developers seem to be a lot more loyal to Apple than Microsoft developers ever were to Microsoft. When Apple took away my on-loan Developer Transition Kit (an early Intel-based Mac) and unexpectedly replaced it with a mine-for-ever Intel iMac, I started to understand why. :-)

Dave

Huge respect, as ever, to Mr Jewell.