In my last post, I mentioned a small mistake made by Apple/Steve Jobs.

Here is a much bigger one, and one which has never been rectified properly.

The reason I don’t have an iPhone, and don’t ever plan to but one, is that it is too “closed”.

I have an Android phone and I can program it using “MIT App Inventor“. This simple tool (which I teach kids in CoderDojo) allows you to create apps, to transfer them to an Android phone, to debug them interactively, and to create apps which can be uploaded to the Google Store.

App Inventor is not available for iOS because Apple (and I believe this to be a Steve Job legacy) doesn’t want people developing code any way but the “right” way. And the right way involves Xcode, Objective-C or Swift, a Mac, possibly other tools, and registering as (and paying to be) an iOS Developer. And for the longest time they didn’t want you to do any kind of coding on an iPhone/iPad (this restriction has been eased more recently with things like Codea, ScratchJr, Pyonkee and “Swift Playgrounds“).

I mentioned this restriction previously in my old blog when I spoke about “Cargo-Bot“.

So until this is addressed, I’ll be sticking with Android.