Google Voice iPhone app anyone?

<<According to a person familiar with the matter, the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission are locked in negotiations over which of the watchdogs will begin an antitrust inquiry into Apple's new policy of requiring software developers who devise applications for devices such as the iPhone and iPad to use only Apple's programming tools.>>

But...

<<An inquiry doesn't necessarily mean action will be taken against Apple (...). Typically, regulators initiate inquiries to determine whether a full-fledged investigation ought to be launched. If the inquiry escalates to an investigation, the agency handling the matter would issue Apple a subpoena seeking information about the policy.>>

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/business/an_antitrust_app_buvCWcJdjFoLD5vBSkguGO

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Actually, this "new policy of requiring software developers [...] to use only Apple's programming tools" is a colloquial, incorrect, and too-narrowly rephrased excerpt of Apple's recently changed section 3.3.1 of the Apple's iPhone SDK license agreement. The way I read it Apple doesn't care what code pre-processors are used as long as the actual code being compiled is written (or generated by third party software) as valid Cocoa Touch API files. Any developer wishing to use own, competitive Objective-C front-end/ IDE http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_development_environment –as long as the output be kosher by Apple's standards– would met no objections. Of course, nobody will want to go that route.

I have a theory that, apart from other considerations (both business- and future marketshare'y), a major reason for that new policy is to allow Apple to check submitted iPhone OS apps –over which they intend to exert control– by mechanical means for abuse of private APIs. With the number of apps submitted, they had no option but to develop such mechanical checkers, or else they'd never clear the backlog.

I *imagine* that the initial checker works against known object-code subroutine entry points, and, if no anomalies detected, passes it on to the next in line, and lastly to a final human "approver" (who checks it for inappropriate content; inappropriate for Steve Jobs's grown-up kids that is). An app developed outside Apples own IDE, even had it relied only on official APIs, would most certainly break those tools.