Jonathan Stark

John Gruber over on Daring Fireball speculates that, with the release of iPhone OS 4 SDK, tools such as PhoneGap, MonoTouch, and Adobe’s Flash-to-iPhone compiler will be banned.

I don’t know about the others, but PhoneGap is clearly going to remain an approved development approach. Note the reference to “JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine” in Gruber’s post.

For those not familiar, PhoneGap is not a third party tool; it’s a user template for Xcode. In other words, PhoneGap is just like any other sample Xcode project you might download from the internet. If Apple were to ban apps built with PhoneGap, they’d essentially be saying that developers can’t share sample code for Xcode projects.

At it’s root, PhoneGap is really just a development approach. To truly ban it, Apple would have to ban the overall approach – i.e. reject all apps that have a UI based on HTML, CSS, and JavaScript embedded in a UIWebView.

UPDATE: Apple has re-confirmed that using PhoneGap is OK http://blogs.nitobi.com/jesse/2010/04/14/phonegap-and-the-apple-developer-license-agreement/