No, they aren't. But it's fair to say that last week's SDK announcement has caused a fair amount of confusion around the likelihood of Java games and applications coming to Apple's handset, thanks to comments made by Java firm Sun Microsystems.
It started this weekend with an interview with Eric Klein, who's the VP of Java marketing at Sun. He said that Sun plans to release an iPhone and iPod touch-friendly Java Virtual Machine (JVM) as soon as possible, now the SDK is available.
"With more than 4 million iPhones already sold, there is a large market that developers are anxious to access," he said. In theory, this would mean that mobile game developers would be able to quickly and cheaply port their existing games to iPhone.
However, as these comments percolated through the blogosphere, people started pointing out that Apple's terms and conditions for the SDK might not actually allow developers to install their games on an iPhone via a JVM.
The Register quotes the relevant section of the document:
"An Application may not itself install or launch other executable code by any means, including without limitation through the use of a plug-in architecture, calling other frameworks, other APIs or otherwise ( ) No interpreted code may be downloaded and used in an Application except for code that is interpreted and run by Apple's Published APIs and built-in interpreter(s)."
That seems to pretty clearly rule out official sanctioning of iPhone Java games, then. The Register managed to follow this up with Klein, and got a statement in response:
"If there are clauses in the iPhone beta SDK license agreement that potentially limit third party application distribution, then these are items that we want to have a positive discussion with Apple about ( ) Sun definitely plans to deliver a JVM for iPhone and iTouch if at all possible!"
Good luck with that. Hopefully that positive discussion won't be dampened by Apple boss Steve Jobs' reported comments last year, that "Java's not worth building in. Nobody uses Java anymore. It's this big heavyweight ball and chain."
In short, it's still clear as mud whether Java games will be coming to the iPhone.
And while the big publishers like EA Mobile, Gameloft and Glu will clearly prefer to develop full-fat iPhone apps through Apple's scheme, hundreds of small developers will be keen to follow the progress (or otherwise) of Sun's dream to put Java on the iPhone.
