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No Third-party Apps on iPhone Says Jobs
wyldeone writes "In an interview with the New York Times, Steve Jobs confirms reports that the recently-announced iPhone will not allow third party applications to be installed. According to Jobs, 'These are devices that need to work, and you can't do that if you load any software on them.' In a similar vein, Jobs said in a MSNBC article that, 'Cingular doesn't want to see their West Coast network go down because some application messed up.'"
-so it might not hurt Apple as much when the name trademark dispute shoves it right back where it belongs. A clunky overpriced palmtop computer masquerading as a phone that now can't even be made to work to a reasonably acceptable degree as a palmtop computer.
Uh, "if it looks roughly mouse-shaped according to my infra-red sensitive pit, eat it"? --Chris Burke 09-08-10
No, the summary is not fine. It seems everyone (developers) are not seeing the big picture. There are more statements made by Jobs on the NYT. He says: "That doesn't mean there's not going to be software to buy that you can load on them coming from us. It doesn't mean we have to write it all, but it means it has to be more of a controlled environment." _Controlled Environment_ See, Apple wants to ensure that the phone maintains a great user experience. Imagine the customer support nightmare for Apple and Cingular if third-party applications have problems. They do not want that! It's the same as opening and releasing Mac OS X to the masses of beige-boxes. They do not want to support your _extra_ problems caused by incompatible hardware and other junk you want to install. They will let independent developers make software for the iPhone, but they will control the install process, maybe through iTunes such as the games on the iPod. On another note, I think the open source community needs to take a page from this. Tighter control on APIs/platforms/interfaces. Maybe we could get something stable that "just works(tm)". Reference article: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/11/technology/11cnd -apple.html?_r=1&oref=slogin