Updated: 10:00pm Pacific Apparently the issue was just a glitch or server error as the contentious agreement with sections 3.3.1 and 3.3.9 intact is back online now.

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Developers are reporting today that the recently revised developer agreement which restricted the development environments that could be used and the tracking of users that could be done has disappeared.

In the agreement, there were two revisions that had developers the most us in arms. The first, section 3.3.1 stated that applications for the iPhone had to be “originally written in C/C++/Objective-C.” This leaves out, obviously, the most recent revision of Flash CS5 from Adobe which allows export of Flash projects to iPhone application. But the bigger picture of this is that it also made unwelcome many of the top iPhone apps and games.

Following the announcement of the 3.3.1 revision, some developers did some digging and found that many of the top games use C for the display portion of their game and Lua, an interpreted scripting language, for the game logic. Some of the largest game developers are included in that list that was circulating. The update to the developer agreement would rule out the ability to sell these top selling apps in the App Store.

Section 3.3.9, which I previously reported on, restricted what information third parties could collect about application usage and how users used the applications. This revision set up the scenario where only Apple would be able to develop a targeted advertising system with it’s iAds platform.

The real issue with these changes were that Apple had apparently already started granting exclusions to the changes. But there is no way for Apple to publicly grant those exclusions. This left groups like PhoneGap in a bind. Apparently told by Apple that their system was fine and doesn’t violate 3.3.1, but telling them so off the record. No company will be willing to rely on that kind of off the record guarantee when investing time and money in developing for the iPhone platform. So they likely wouldn’t rely on PhoneGap or any other non-Apple sanctioned development environment for iPhone development as they still technically run afoul of the developer agreement.

If Apple has indeed pulled the revised developer agreement, it likely means is that they have had to make such a large change to the agreement that they have reverted to an older version and will be publishing a new version soon. We’ll keep an eye out and let you know.

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