What does Apple think of AppCode?

As a long time Idea user and fan, I'm really happy to see AppCode and I hope it can make iOS development almost as easy as Java development with Idea.

However, many aspects of AppCode seem to involve integration with closed parts of the Apple tool chain. At first glance, it seems you must be reverse-engineering a lot of Apple tech and we all know Apple has a long history of shutting down anyone doing something like this.

Is Apple cooperating in any way in AppCode? Or are they at least aware of it and turning a blind eye? Or are you using public APIs that I'm unaware of?

As much as I'd love to have an Idea-like IDE for iOS, it would be really painful to get addicted to AppCode and then see Apple take action, either legal just changing XCode so it won't interoperate.

- Willis Morse

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The way I see it (but I could be wrong, as I have not developed appCode), appCode doesn't do anything that could be considered "illegal" or use closed parts of the tool chain (if there are such).

First of all, appCode uses the source files (and project files etc.), which are in a plain text (or semi plain text) format - Apple can't do anything about that - yes they could go ahead and some of the files into a proprietary binary format. I hope they don't, because then it would be absolutely horrible to use with a source control system - binary files can't be merged automatically if two people changed them -> conflict -> manual merge -> dispair.

Regarding the tool chain, it is my understanding, that most of the process regarding building and signing can be done using command line tools that are provided with Xcode - so as long as they are here appCode can use them. The final step is the AppStore submission, which happens from within Xcode - I don't know exactly how that works, but apparently other tools developers (like Titanium) offer the sign and upload service too, så it must be possible (and feasable).

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