"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 apps on iPhone from LiveCode. Then, in April 2010, Steve Jobs wrote this infamous article on Flash, which you can find at:

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

Adobe was also developing a way to publish apps on iPhone from Flash Professional, but as part of Apple's determination to not allow Flash-based apps 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 publishing. 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) as a publishing tool for iPhone, even promising to only publish apps on iPhone and to not pursue publishing on Android. Apple stood its ground and declined the offer.

For Adobe, this wasn't the end of the world and it started working on Android publishing. However, RunRev had already planned a conference around the idea of publishing apps to iOS, but that conference had to be postponed.

During the summer of 2010, Apple ran a survey for developers and several of the questions mentioned in it gave people like me a chance to beg Apple to allow developers to use their preferred development tools so that they don't have a compulsion to use Xcode. It's hard to be sure whether that's what made the difference, but on September 9, 2010, Apple changed its position on the subject. Here is the post that we woke up to that morning:

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

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

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

This got RunRev back on track to achieve its goal of developing a "Publish to iOS" feature; The iPhone OS was 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 it 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 an app on Android from LiveCode, you can thank Apple for being so stubborn!