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.'"

Comments

I call BS

[Telephone Sanitizer]

The story that was cited neither states nor implies that 3rd party applications will not be permitted on the iPhone.

The relevant quote...

But it's not like the walled garden has gone away. "You don't want your phone to be an open platform," meaning that anyone can write applications for it and potentially gum up the provider's network, says Jobs. "You need it to work when you need it to work. Cingular doesn't want to see their West Coast network go down because some application messed up."

Still, since the iPhone runs a full version of OS X, the operating system of the Macintosh computer, it's reasonable to expect the device to take advantage of that power by running lots of applications, even if Apple has to vet them to make sure they won't compromise the integrity of the network. In the version we saw last week, there aren't a whole lot--the notable ones include SMS text messaging, the Safari Web browser, e-mail, iPhoto, Google maps and two mini-applications (known as widgets) for weather and stock prices. Jobs says we can expect more apps on the phone by the time it ships in June. (For instance, one might expect the iPhone to allow users to view Word documents, something that the prototype doesn't do today.)

In other words, the reporter doesn't know squat about the actual circumstances regarding third-party apps and is blowing farts in the wind, making speculative and general statements in the hope that someone will imagine that he's right when something he says turns out to vaguely resemble the truth.

Re:Right...

[MojoRilla]

Cingular already features the BlackBerry on their Edge network, and that allows installable apps.

Nope, this is about Jobs' control issues.

Re:Right...

[Mr2001]

The summary is fine. It's a closed platform, unlike every other smartphone and most other cell phones.

You see, real smartphones let you install whatever software you want onto your phone. Hell, even many (most?) non-smart phones can run Java apps. That's certainly the kind of functionality Cingular customers are used to.

What Apple's doing with the iPhone, OTOH, is what Verizon customers are used to: the carrier tells you what you can do with your phone. You buy it, but you don't really own it. They say it's about quality assurance, and to some degree it might even be, but what it's really about is making sure you pay for extra features, instead of downloading freeware or writing your own. They think that if you're getting extra value out of their service, you owe them for it. But even Verizon doesn't go that far with their smartphones!

There might be apps written by third parties on the iPhone, but who writes them is pretty much irrelevant, because you can't write or install them without going through Cingular and/or Apple. They'll charge for the SDK, for testing apps, and for making apps available to users, and those costs will be passed onto the end user in the form of (1) paying to download apps and (2) limited selection because amateurs can't afford to develop.

rtfa people

[akuzi]

The title of this story is BS.

Jobs is explicit quoted as saying:

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.

Nowhere does it say there will be no third party apps available.

Re:Right...

[Anonymous Coward]

Links: OpenMoko; pics and details. It will be out soon, at $350. Basically it's a GTK+-based smartphone (as opposed to the Greenphone which is Qt).

2007 looks like an interesting year for smartphones: the iPhone on the one hand, and OpenMoko and Greenphone for open Linux-based platforms on the other.

Re:Right...

[TheRaven64]

OPENSTEP, from which OS X is directly descended, ran quite happily on a 25MHz Motorola 68K. The kernel has had a few tweaks since then, but isn't actually all that different. The GUI has actually been replaced by one that's easier (CPU-wise) to render; Quartz instead of Display Postscript (which was a Turing-complete language used for drawing view objects). Much of the resource cost of OS X comes from double-buffering on every window, which isn't needed on the iPhone because it uses a Maemo-style GUI where only one application is visible at a time (thus, no overlapping windows and no partial redraws).