tequila bomb

Apple singles out AdMob in new clause 3.3.9

Last week, Steve Jobs promised that his iPhone and iPads would be open to outside ad networks. Yesterday, Apple made good on his promise, by changing the terms of its developer agreement. But the company may not have opened the door all the way.

3.3.9 You and Your Applications may not collect, use, or disclose to any third party, user or device data without prior user consent, and then only under the following conditions:

- The collection, use or disclosure is necessary in order to provide a service or function that is directly relevant to the use of the Application. For example, without Apple’s prior written consent, You may not use third party analytics software in Your Application to collect and send device data to a third party for aggregation, processing, or analysis.

- The collection, use or disclosure is for the purpose of serving advertising to Your Application; is provided to an independent advertising service provider whose primary business is serving mobile ads (for example, an advertising service provider owned by or affiliated with a developer or distributor of mobile devices, mobile operating systems or development environments other than Apple would not qualify as independent); and the disclosure is limited to UDID, user location data, and other data specifically designated by Apple as available for advertising purposes.

The bit in bold effectively singles out Google’s AdMob, and any future service from Microsoft, Palm (if they even exist in the future), HTC or Nokia etc.

But mainly it just singles out Google.

Admob’s CEO Omar Hamoui, who was in negotiations just months ago to be purchased by Apple had this to say :

Apple proposed new developer terms on Monday that, if enforced as written, would prohibit app developers from using AdMob and Google’s advertising solutions on the iPhone. These advertising related terms both target companies with competitive mobile technologies (such as Google), as well as any company whose primary business is not serving mobile ads. This change threatens to decrease – or even eliminate – revenue that helps to support tens of thousands of developers. The terms hurt both large and small developers by severely limiting their choice of how best to make money. And because advertising funds a huge number of free and low cost apps, these terms are bad for consumers as well.