| To be fair, the license agreement to which Apple developers agree has the following clause (line breaks added by me): > Notwithstanding the foregoing, Apple Confidential Information will not include: > (i) information that is generally and legitimately available to the public through no fault or breach of Yours, > (ii) information that is generally made available to the public by Apple, > (iii) information that is independently developed by You without the use of any Apple Confidential Information, > (iv) information that was rightfully obtained from a third party who had the right to transfer or disclose it to You without limitation, or > (v) any FOSS included in the Apple Software and accompanied by licensing terms that do not impose confidentiality obligations on the use or disclosure of such FOSS. Because of (i), there are very few things that remain confidential for too long due to Apple fan/rumor sites breathlessly reporting every change in the DPs under the notion that it's in the public interest to know. I'm not a lawyer and this shouldn't be construed as legal advice, but a plain reading of (iii) seems like it might indicate DP-related bugs in 3rd party apps would not be considered confidential either. |
I imagine there has to be some provision for being allowed to tell other developers about bugs in their apps (does it have to be on Apple’s official forums?), but I think Apple makes developers agree to NDAs exactly to keep dumbass CS students from trying to impress their friends by telling them how many bugs they’ve found and how crappy the prerelease builds are. I’ve never had a paid developer account, but my impression is that people used to take the NDA a lot more seriously several years ago; I’m not sure if it’s because Apple dropped the price from $500 to $99 or because I spend a lot more time around CS students, or maybe because so many more people have iPhones now, but it seems like even a lot of non-developers are finding it worth $99 a year to get prerelease iOS builds, and everyone is wildly violating the NDA.