Apple Dropped NDA for iPhone Developers after Hearing Complaints

Apple today announced that it is dropping the non-disclosure agreement (NDA) with its iPhone 3rd-party developers for applications that are released. It appears that any applications that are still in development stage still have to be in compliance with the NDA. The NDA thing seems trivial, but for the developer community, it restricts their ability to communicate and collaborate with one another to improve existing applications or build new applications to support and complement one another. Therefore the NDA gesture made by Apple today is really good news to developers.

Of course, the center issue is the timing. After Google announced its first Android design win last week and touted its platform’s openness and fairness to third-party developers, is Apple forced to make this change to please its developer community members? It appears that at least in the mobile space, the battle for brains has already heated up. What will Symbian, Palm, Research-In-Motion, and Microsoft do to pump up support for their respective application developer communities?