Flagged for being misleading. Apple has given no indication they are targeting Unity3D apps for removal. As this list points out, it would be very foolish to. Their SDK EULA only applies to the SDK software, not to any other compilers, and using it as a "heuristic" for what will or won't be accepted to the AppStore is completely at their discretion. Ouside of the Hacker News top stories, this is pretty common knowledge, see:
We've heard directly from Unity Technologies themselves, and the company's CEO, David Helgason, has been in contact with Apple over the matter. Helgason says that so far Unity has "no indication from Apple that things are going to change." This is consistent with John Gruber's viewpoint on the new iPhone OS 4.0 dev agreement. Gruber originally thought that Unity3D would be a prime candidate for banning under the new rules, but given that Unity3D is, in Gruber's words, "a pre-processor than a cross-compiler," it's nowhere near as certain that Unity will fall on what Gruber calls "the wrong side of the line" per the new dev agreement.
From what I know their TOS applies to everything which is posted to the Appstore. As hundreds of people already pointed out by the wording of the TOS, both Unity3d and Flash are in violation of it. It doesn't matter if Unity is a pre-processor or cross-compiler or whatever, the apps are not _originally_ written in objective-c, c++ or c.
This is the official response regarding their contact with apple:
"We haven’t heard anything from Apple about this affecting us, and we believe that with hundreds of titles (or probably over a thousand by now), including a significant proportion of the best selling ones, we’re adding so much value to the iPhone ecosystem that Apple can’t possibly want to shut that down.
Our current best guess is that we’ll be fine. But it would obviously be irresponsible to guarantee that. What I can guarantee is that we’ll continue to do everything in our power to make this work, and that we will be here to inform you when we know more – as soon as we know more."
I guess it'll only take time to see which one of us is right. Still, I assert that anyone with half a brain will realize that Unity3D will be unaffected by this move.
They are already affected. People will be afraid to use Unity for new projects because it's fully against the rules. You can't expect that your app will be approved. You can't expect that your app won't get pulled in the future. Now Apple may not actually do these things, but they've announced they can, so the fear is justified.
I spent the last six weeks learning the Unity system, which is a powerful, full featured engine, the best I have worked with. Now I genuinely wonder if that time is wasted and whether I should look at other alternatives. I'm sure I'm not alone.
If Apple wanted Unity3D to be unaffected by this change, why didn't they word their license in a way that makes it clear that Unity3D would be unaffected? Right now, going purely by the letter of the license, there is no way Unity3D is allowed. If Apple starts to selectively not enforces their license for favoured developers (as you imply and I suspect they will) then that will create even more uncertainty in the developer community.
We've heard directly from Unity Technologies themselves, and the company's CEO, David Helgason, has been in contact with Apple over the matter. Helgason says that so far Unity has "no indication from Apple that things are going to change." This is consistent with John Gruber's viewpoint on the new iPhone OS 4.0 dev agreement. Gruber originally thought that Unity3D would be a prime candidate for banning under the new rules, but given that Unity3D is, in Gruber's words, "a pre-processor than a cross-compiler," it's nowhere near as certain that Unity will fall on what Gruber calls "the wrong side of the line" per the new dev agreement.
Source: http://www.tuaw.com/2010/04/08/iphone-os-4-0-dev-agreement-b...