The story so far…

The long and winding road was the last single to be released by the Beatles, and it would make a good title for a book describing what it took to get LiveCode working on mobile devices! As soon as there were apps on iPhone, RunRev was developing a way to publish to iPhone from LiveCode. Then, in April 2010, Steve Jobs wrote this infamous article on Flash:

http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/

Adobe had also been developing a way to publish to iPhone from Flash Professional, but as part of Apple's determination to not allow anything Flash to be usable on iPhone, the App Store submission rules were changed, forbidding developers from using any tool other than Xcode to publish apps.

Some tools continued to be in a gray area, because they used Xcode to do the final publish. GameSalad and Unity apps continued to be published and did well in the App Store. RunRev tried to convince Apple to allow LiveCode (which was still called Runtime Revolution at the time) to be usable as a publishing tool for iPhone, even promising to only publish on iPhone, and not to pursue publishing on Android. Apple stood their ground, and declined the offer.

For Adobe, this wasn't the end of the world, and they started to work on Android publishing. But, RunRev had already planned a conference around the idea of publishing to iOS, and that conference had to be postponed.

During the summer of 2010, Apple ran a survey for developers, and several of the questions gave people like me a chance to beg Apple to allow us to use our preferred development tools, and not to have to use Xcode. It's hard to be sure if that's what made the difference, but on September 9th, 2010, Apple changed their position on the subject. Here is the post that I woke up to that morning:

http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2010/09/09Statement-by-Apple-on-App-Store-Review-Guidelines.html

I quickly posted a message to the Revolution e-mail list, titled how to totally make Kevin's day, "Kevin" being Kevin Miller, CEO of RunRev. It had the desired effect, and you can still read the follow up messages:

http://runtime-revolution.278305.n4.nabble.com/how-to-totally-make-Kevin-s-day-td2532866.html

This got RunRev back on to developing a "Publish to iOS" feature, iPhone OS having been renamed as iOS by that time. The delayed conference ended up taking place in San Jose, at the end of April 2011. By that time, RunRev had not only made the iOS feature work well, but they had also released the first version of the "Publish to Android" feature.

It's quite amusing in a way to think that if you intend to publish to Android from LiveCode, you can thank Apple for being so stubborn!