Apple announced that they are relaxing their NDA on iPhone development for released software. This is great news for anyone who is interested in developing applications for the iPhone. The NDA frustrated many developers including myself. In fact I was working on some ideas for an application with some colleagues when we read the NDA carefully and realized that we could not even email each other about our progress. How silly! So we nixed the entire application idea out of frustration so we could stay in compliance with the NDA.

Kudos to Apple for coming to their senses!

I copied this form the iPhone web site, which contains the details of their release:

We have decided to drop the non-disclosure agreement (NDA) for released iPhone software.

We put the NDA in place because the iPhone OS includes many Apple inventions and innovations that we would like to protect, so that others don’t steal our work. It has happened before. While we have filed for hundreds of patents on iPhone technology, the NDA added yet another level of protection. We put it in place as one more way to help protect the iPhone from being ripped off by others.

However, the NDA has created too much of a burden on developers, authors and others interested in helping further the iPhone’s success, so we are dropping it for released software. Developers will receive a new agreement without an NDA covering released software within a week or so. Please note that unreleased software and features will remain under NDA until they are released.

Thanks to everyone who provided us constructive feedback on this matter.