EFF Publishes iPhone Developer Agreement; Reveals Interesting Details

EFF Publishes iPhone Developer Agreement; Reveals Interesting Details


The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has published the "iPhone Developer Program License Agreement", which is the contract that developers need to accept to develop iPhone apps.

The EFF has managed to make the license agreement public for the first time since the App Store was launched by petitioning NASA NASA, a U.S. government agency and developer of an official NASA iPhone application, under a Freedom of Information Act request.


NASA were obliged to provide EFF a copy of the 28-page March 2009 version of the agreement. According to EFF:

Overall, the Agreement is a very one-sided contract, favoring Apple at every turn. That's not unusual where end-user license agreements are concerned (and not all the terms may ultimately be enforceable), but it's a bit of a surprise as applied to the more than 100,000 developers for the iPhone, including many large public companies. How can Apple get away with it? Because it is the sole gateway to the more than 40 million iPhones that have been sold. In other words, it's only because Apple still "owns" the customer, long after each iPhone (and soon, iPad) is sold, that it is able to push these contractual terms on the entire universe of software developers for the platform.

The license agreement reveals some interesting details:

App Developers are prohibited from making public statements about the terms of the agreement. It is the primary reason why the license agreement hasn’t been made public for such a long time.

Applications developed using iPhone SDK should be publicly distributed using through the App Store. This also applies to rejected iPhone app and developers of such apps are also prohibited to release it on Cydia or Rock Your Phone, the App Store for jailbreak iPhone apps.

Reverse engineering of the iPhone OS or SDK is banned.

Developers are prohibited from "disabling, hacking, or otherwise interfering" with security provisions on any Apple technology, which is essentially a provision to prohibit developers from jailbreaking their iPhones.

Apple can disable an iPhone app remotely using the kill-switch, which had resulted in a lot of controversy.

Apple's will not be liable to any developers for more than $50 in damages.

You might remember that for the 2009 rulemaking, Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) had filed an exemption request with the U.S. Copyright Office to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) related to iPhone jailbreaking, which allows iPhone owners to install iPhone apps that have not been approved on the App Store (due to various reasons). However, Apple had informed the Copyright Office that the exception request by Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) was not acceptable as the very act of jailbreaking the iPhone results in copyright infringement.

You can read the full iPhone Developer Program License Agreement on EFF’s blog.

And don’t forget to let us know what you have to say about it in the comments.