Google admits to violating iPhone development terms

by admin November 26, 2008 at 10:56 pm

Google’s voice search function on the latest version of its Google Mobile search app is pretty slickly implemented: it knows when you put it up to your ear, prompts you to speak, and then searches when you move it away from your ear. No other application has leveraged that same functionality yet, and—as it turns out—for good reason: the part of the iPhone’s code that controls that capability is undocumented by Apple.

Using undocumented Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) is not just frowned upon—it’s against the terms that iPhone developers agree to when they download the SDK. The reason for this isn’t particularly nefarious: undocumented APIs are often in active development and subject to change, which could lead to third-party applications that rely on them to break or crash.

Read more: macworld.com