After thursday’s announcement of the 4th revision of the iPhone OS some people at Adobe must have been a bit confused while sipping their coffees. Apple tightens its requirements for developers interested in publishing application on Apple’s App Store once more:

Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited).

Maybe without the alphabet soup: the change puts new restrictions on iPhone developers, who won’t be allowed to use third-party software and tools to create iPhone applications.

After the app store waiting for approval stories, the necessary spending of $99 on a developer account to be able to distribute an app to my own phone or to download a beta version of the iPad simulator, I am now kind of lost. And I downloaded Eclipse and the Android 2.1 SDK.

That Mountain View announced the Flash integration with Chrome’s developer build and that it plans to offer similar integration with its shipping browser as quickly as possible, makes Apple’s move more understandable. But why can’t they leave developers free?

So since thursday I fell out of love with the iPhone and I am pretty much sure that Android is going to be the winner in this game. It’s simple: the open-source method just works.

That’s mostly public domain content, which you should technically be able to get on your device anyway, but it’s a great deal easier to access, namely via the iBookstore.

The free books will be provided via Project Gutenberg , which has set about archiving digital editions of public domain books using the Internet.

By the way, the average price for an iPad ebook is going to be something like $9.99, which is about the same pricepoint as the Amazon’s Kindle. Let the war commence!