Scratch, a Story
for iPhone & iPad
Link to the Scratch Support Page
April 14th 2010,
Scratch is removed from the App Store.
That evening we write a letter to Steve Jobs.
Mr Jobs replies, more mail is exchanged and a process to examine our needs is started.
On April 20th, the media calls, both Wired and the NY times publish news articles.
The NY Times blogs in Gadgetwise
The Scratch Team at MIT comments
Wired writes best article so far
April 29th Steve Jobs writes about Flash
April 28th MITnews comments
Jun 7th: Apple changes the Programmer License Agreement to allow interpreted Languages with written permission in the App Store.
Jun 8th: At WWDC we hunt for someone in Apple management, and the folks in Apple’s App review team room says: Hi Mr. McIntosh we’ve been expecting you...
July-Aug: We discuss with Apple how to put Scratch.app back in the Store.
Sept 2010: Apple changes the Programmer License Agreement again, but sadly drops the clause with written permission for downloading scripts.
Oct 2010, We trade emails again with Steve Jobs and he tells me “Sorry”.
However we did get Apple to change their policy for interpreted languages on the iOS platform, and an extensive rewrite of the developer contract.
We have made the source code available at if you want to compile it yourself, there is no support. This does require purchasing Apple’s IOS developer kit
https://github.com/johnmci/Scratch.app.for.iOS
