After all the buzz about Apple and the changes to the section 3.3.1 of the iPhone Dev Agreement, many people feared tools like MonoTouch, PhoneGap and Adobe’s Flash to iPhone compiler may no longer exist. While this is true for Adobe and, perhaps, MonoTouch, PhoneGap’s developer has just received word from Apple that PhoneGap is ok and PhoneGap-based apps will be reviewed based on their own merits and not the framework.

Jesse Macfayden has indeed updated a post from November 2009 with the latest news he’s got from Apple:

“I have received word from Apple that the above is STILL true! If you were concerned by the recent changes to Apple’s iPhone developer agreement, this has ZERO impact on PhoneGap!

Apps built with PhoneGap will continue to be reviewed based on their own merits and NOT dismissed/rejected because they use PhoneGap.

So enough with the crazy speculative rumour mill. Let’s get back to making apps with HTML+CSS+JavaScript.”

PhoneGap lets you build applications using HTML, CSS and Javascript and that’s why Apple has approved the framework, in my opinion. Apple is up for web standards, iAd itself is based on the same technologies, and a framework based on them is ok for the App Store.

As Gruber pointed out:

“So what Apple does not want is for some other company to establish a de facto standard software platform on top of Cocoa Touch. Not Adobe’s Flash. Not .NET (through MonoTouch). If that were to happen, there’s no lock-in advantage.”

With PhoneGap we’re not talking about a software company: we’re talking about a cross-platform tool built on top of modern web standards, open source and easy to understand for web developers. As you can read on PhoneGap’s website: “We’re all about open web and open standards”. In the very end, there’s no platform vendor for the web.

Same doesn’t of course apply for Flash, and we know what Steve thinks about it. But developing iPhone apps using these languages is definitely ok.