That clause is Apple's attempt to prevent a flood of low-quality ported apps. Therefore the argument would be that if languages don't matter, Apple's policy is misguided, and if languages do matter, Apple's policy actually makes sense. (Neither position has any connection with the evilness/goodness of said policy).

Personally I tend to believe that languages do matter, and therefore Apple's policy makes sense as a way to prevent crappy ported apps, but it's still evil. It's not impossible to produce a great ported app, just more difficult; plus, porting apps isn't the only reason why you might want to run non-Objective-C code.

>porting apps isn't the only reason why you might want to run non-Objective-C code.

The Objective-C language being one very good reason for wanting to run non-Objective-C code.

Frankly, I'd much rather they adopted a direct appstore policy to reject apps that don't feel native or performant enough, rather than coming up with a second level of indirection that assumes all apps not written in their approved language of choice has those qualities.

That's exactly the sort of ambiguity people have been complaining about with the app store since it started. Nobody wants to be left guessing about what they have to change to get an app approved.

Yes, I don't like that either. But its better than painting everyone with a broad stroke.

It's no different from saying 'the last 10 apps that were submitted from Podunk were all poor, so no developer from Podunk is allowed to write iPhone apps'