~ Daring Fireball: Google Mobile Uses Private iPhone APIsIf you use something like the command-line strings utility to examine the UIKit framework, you can see that there’s an undocumented (and therefore private to Apple) method named proximityStateChanged. And if one were to strip the FairPlay DRM from the current Google Mobile application binary — which, of course, you wouldn’t do, because you’re not supposed to strip FairPlay DRM, but I’m just saying if one were to do this — a class dump of the application binary would show that Google Mobile does in fact implement proximityStateChanged. So, (a) Google Mobile is using a private API, and (b) to my knowledge, there is no way to duplicate the behavior of Google Mobile’s “just lift the phone to your ear to trigger the voice prompt” feature using only the public APIs in the iPhone SDK. Needless to say, using private APIs violates the iPhone SDK Guidelines. A developer that plays by the rules cannot do what Google is doing.
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Third-party iPhone development is purportedly a level playing field. If regular developers are forced to play by the rules, but Google is allowed to use private APIs just because they’re Google, the system is rigged.
