According to BetaNews, a Google spokesperson has confirmed that the company’s new voice search for iPhone violates the terms of Apple’s SDK - the part of the iPhone’s code that controls the capability is undocumented by Apple.

Using undocumented Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) is against the terms that iPhone developers agree to when they download the SDK. These are often in active development and subject to change, which could lead to third-party applications that rely on them to break or crash.

The voice search feature itself was highly publicized before its release, and Google has now even admitted that it used undocumented APIs. However, it denied using private or dynamic frameworks, which could have been a more serious issue from a technological standpoint.

Specifically, the undocumented APIs are used to access the iPhone’s proximity sensor, a capability which ordinarily dims the screen when you hold the phone near your face. In discussions in online forums, developers have pointed out that the iPhone SDK does not include an API for the aforesaid capability added for the iPhone 3G. Nevertheless, under the terms of the iPhone SDK, developers are required to use only APIs supplied in the developers’ kit.

Apple’s App Store might have rejected some smaller developers’ applications for less, and so the central point of this issue is that somehow Google’s application made its way into the App Store anyway, despite violating the terms. Possibly, Google got away with flouting Apple’s rules since the reason revolved around getting an “innovative and useful application” out to users in a quick span of time.

[Thanks: http://topnews.us]