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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.'"
Right. So Sprint's network is going down every day because of some poorly written application on my Treo? This kind of absurd argument merely clouds the issues. This is about Jobs' control issues, not anything technical. I would be fine if they just released an sdk saying, essentially, anyone who wants to install 3rd party applications is on their own. The best, most stable programs developed could be accepted into Apple's Special Developer Program, which would make "official" releases. I have a problem with the status quo as described by Jobs (i.e., where only "approved" applications make it onto the iPhone) because it leaves the fate of potentially very useful applications to the political realities of Apple's relationship with Cingular (this means no VoIP). On my Treo, however, (if it supported WiFi, that is) there would be no way for Sprint or any carrier to stop me from installing a VoIP application; or, more dangerously, an application that allows me to convert an mp3 into a ringtone with out shelling out something ridiculous for the cell phone company's ringtones. It's these sort of applications that are made completely impossible through Jobs' program, and the biggest flaw with it. Another major flaw is that this sort of thing usually cuts out the small timers. PDA programs do not take an enormous amount development effort, therefore making them perfect for small developers; it's one of the few environments left where big development studios don't have a huge advantage. However, any sort of program (which likely would have a closed, expensive development platform as opposed to the cheap, open PalmOS and Windows Mobile SDKs) would almost certainly be prohibitively priced to anyone but these large development houses. In any case, much of the glamor of the iPhone has worn off since it has become clear that third-party applications were out. The device itself is beautiful, but it is the unexpected uses that make these devices so powerful and useful. On my Treo, I control my IR utilities using universal remote software, I have an instant-messaging client, a voice-activated launcher. All applications developed by third-parties and probably uses of the phone unexpected by Palm. I can only hope that Jobs realizes that he does not see perfectly into the minds of all consumers and does not know what we all want or need.
In the beginning the universe was created. This made a lot of people very angry and is widely considered as a bad move.
And AT&T didn't want to see their network go down because someone connected an evil non-AT&T phone to it.
The proper translation of this statement of course is "We don't want anybody do be able to do anything on our network unless we're making money from it apart from the fee we charge for the bandwidth."
Stupid telecom companies will never learn. They don't want to create a free market of any kind. Anytime they make any protest involving having a free market, they're being rank hypocrites.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
The word "irony" is way overused, but these words, coming from a guy who started his company with money earned by selling blue boxes to defraud the phone company, belong in irony's fucking dictionary entry.
I won't buy your phone if I can't write code for it, Steve. I'm sure you're heartbroken. Me and Woz will just be over here in the corner, crying in our beards.
yeah, sure, that's bad and all, but what about 3rd party widgets? i mean, are they *completely* shooting themselves in the foot?
That argument makes no sense. If a poorly written application running on one mobile phone has the potential to bring down the west coast network then logically a malicous hacker should be able to bring down that same network. Anything a malfunctioning application can do a mean nasty coder can do much more reliably. If there is the possiblity that an application can do that by -accident- then it should be relatively easy for a skilled engineer to do it deliberately.
It sounds to me like he was just fishing for excuses about why hes not allowing third party apps. It isnt necessarily a bad thing that they arent allowed but that excuse is bogus.
Granted I'm not the prototypical candidate for one of these:
- I'm from South Africa and
- I'm a Geek,
but added to the fact that it doesn't have 3G (which all of it's competitors at this price-point does have) this becomes a no-show for me at least.Part Time Philosopher, Oft Times Romantic, Full Time Unix Geek
This is a critical issue for me. There's no way I'm spending $600 for a piece of hardware with that many capabilities if I can't run any software I want on it and develop for it myself. This COULD HAVE been a revolution in computing, but instead, it'll just be another phone, and a crippled one at that. While it might be a fantastic phone, I don't spend $600 for a phone. I do, however, spend $600 for a general purpose portable computing device that happens to feature cell phone capabilities, with beautiful design, all the hardware I need, and running a great OS.
Jobs brings up the issue of running apps that will interfere with the phone capabilities, but I'm sure a bright engineer over at Apple (or maybe two if that's what it takes) could figure out how to give priority to the phone process, and make sure it gets attention when it needs to. This is just BS. I guess I'm getting myself a "free" S-E w800i for a couple more years until Jobs comes to his senses. iPhone, we hardly knew ye...
"I like systems, their application excepted", George Sand (French)
OK. As the information about the iPhone has started to come in after the announcement, I am decidedly off the bandwagon at this point.
This is stupid. Why do people put up with Apple and these games? If MSFT or Sony pulled this crap, the entire Slashdot universe would reign fury on these companies. But Apple? I'll read 1000 posts about "wait and see" and about how Steve Jobs is protecting us from ourselves.
Apple needs to get over it and open this up. At $600, if you can't even get the geeks excited, this product has 0 chance of succeeding.
Arrogant bastard
If you had to pick one single aspect that separates a "smart phone" from a "phone", the best indicator would probably be the ability to run arbitary software. Smart phones can do it: Treo, Symbian, WindowsCEPocketLiteWhatever, and various Japanese ones can all run user-installed software. Dumb phones can't; they just run a closed OS and usually just run that same software until the user throws away the phone and gets a new one.
The iPhone does appear to be a dazzling reinvention of the dumb phone. It does the same things my RAZR does: pictures, email, sorta browse the web, SMS, etc. I don't use, or just barely use, any of these features on my RAZR because the RAZR sucks at all of them. I junked my Treo 650 and got the RAZR because I wanted something that just made calls. So, in a limited way, it is cool that Apple is apparently going to best crappy phones like my RAZR, and make such features work reasonably. It even adds like 3 more features, such as google maps. So I'm sure they would dominate the dumbphone market with the iPhone, if it weren't for the fact that it has that smart phone price tag.
But, despite what anybody (e.g., Jobs) might say, smart phones are a hell of a lot more like computers than they are like iPods. After reading (ahem!) the article, I think we are kind of getting a glimpse of the hubris of the old Steve Jobs who wanted to see trucks full of sand coming in one side of the factory, where Apple would make its own silicon and assemble 100% Apple computers. Closed, proprietary systems can work for something like the iPod, but the reason is that iPods are only for doing one thing: playing media, mostly music.
A "smart phone", on the other hand, does many things. It is able to not only browse the web, but also, on a case-by-case basis, SSH into remote machines, view PDF content, view Flash content, run flash-card software for studying, run English-to-Japanese-Chinese-Arabic-Whatever dictionary software, count calories, time events, serve as a podium-top teleprompter for making speeches, record bibliographic data while researching in the library, play retro Missile Command and Dig-Diug clones, play MahJong, display recipes and cocktail how-tos, track ovulation, and so on, and so on.
Apple might be cool, but there is no way in hell that any single company can fill the software needs of a diverse user base.
So there are only three real potential outcomes here:
a.) Apple keeps it locked tight and is content to sell a very expensive but very elegant dumb phone.
b.) Lobbying by users, developers, and corporate purchases convince Apple that they need to offer a way to load third-party software... third party developers will certainly fill the void, and quickly if the iPhone's OS is really anything remotely like the developer-friendly Mac OS X.
c.) Some kind of middle ground is reached whereby developers pay Apple for the privilege of compatibility--like what they've managed to do with the iPod dock connector.
As a potential customer, I can say that I was 100% ready to buy some of these initially, until I heard about this very surprising position taken by Apple. Now, I don't know. It's possible I would buy one, but $600 is a lot to spend for what is an admittedly elegant but extremely limited feature set.
Although I do have a dollar here that says hackers will figure it out whatever Apple does...
But the executive summary is that this is a bummer for users and has legitimately dissipated the bulk of the excitement that surrounded the iPhone launch. I think most users naturally assumed it would run a diverse set of applications, so at first it seemed like an ultra-portable mini-Mac. Now, it's more like an ultra-portable mini-Mac that only runs iLife. The former is a lot more exciting than the latter.
What they probably mean is "no applications unless you pay through the nose to Cingular or Apple for them." And they probably painted themselves in that corner with the price.
Let's face it, the fact that cell phones so far did less is _not_ because Nokia and others are stupid. Psion alone has quite a lot of experience in making stuff that goes from phones to good PDAs (including some decent office tools, for a PDA) to a sort of a micro-laptop. They figured out by now what the users want, and believe me, the thought of using a touch-screen _did_ occur to them before too. (The Psion 5 did a great job of using both touch screen and keyboard, for example.) Anyone who thinks it took Jobs to show everyone how to scroll a map on a touch screen, needs a bit of a reality check.
The reason why cell phones were limited devices has to do with cost, power consumption and "how much do we think the market would pay for it" issues. Most of the market wants to get their phone almost for free, and in fact often get some other stuff with it too. Then the contract recoups most of that, but then it means the phone itself can't cost thousands, because even with the contract and fleecing them for ringtones and SMS, there's only so much money you'll have to pay for phones _and_ the telco infrastructure _and_ other operating costs _and_ hopefully make a small profit, or at least not make a big loss.
So the more money you want a telco to pay to subsidize your phone, the more hope you must give them that they'll actually get that money back one way or another. E.g., you pack an IRC client on it to give them some hope that some idiot kid will rake up a huge phone bill while spending hours on IRC with a crap number pad as a keyboard. Or you give them an exclusivity contract, in which they practically pay you advertising money for a reason for people to switch to their network. That's worth more money, but even that has a limited upper limit. Or you try to lock it down and give them a "see, but they'll have to buy this and that only from you" hope. Which is obviously what Apple is doing here.
So at the end of the day, that's about how much a traditional phone can cost. That's why you can only pack so much CPU, RAM and everything in it.
Why the iPhone does more is probably because it costs an arm and a leg to produce. Being launched with an exclusive contract and still be left with a huge price tag anyway already hinted at that, but it's details like these that hint at exactly how huge the price must be. Cingular probably ends up paying a heck of a lot to subsidize Apple's gizmo, and they needed a heck of a reason to do that. Enter the "what if we completely locked it down, so people have to buy _everything_ from you?" factor.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
If Mac OS X is truly the foundation of the iPhone, buggy apps shouldn't be able to do the things you and Steve are warning against. Stability of the phone or network shouldn't be jeopardized by renegade user-installed applications because the OS and the networking protocol should lock them down to acceptable behavior.
I was fully going to switch to this phone in June. No joke. But this statement by Jobs has certainly installed boundaries for my imagination running wild with this device's potential. Specifically, I'm betting Apple will restrict 3rd-party-apps to prevent skype-like apps from being installed. Don't want to give the consumer TOO good of a deal.
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Thank Heaven these people only have 5% share of PC market. If they had the power, they would be worse than MS!
The carriers that you're thinking of that restrict all that stuff are Verizon and Sprint (at least the Sprint phone I had), but the GSM providers here like T-Mobile and Cingular seem to be much more open about what you can do with your phones, which is why this iPhone restriction is so strikingly odd IMHO. It just seems natural that you could use third party apps on your horribly expensive iPhone, but they've really reduced the reasons I'd even be interested in it because I saw no instant messaging application for instance.
What if I want to use Jabber to my private Jabber server? What if I want to view and edit Microsoft Office documents? I saw no way to even view Word docs or Excel spreadsheets on this unlike the Blackberry. This is an overpriced toy, nothing more. Paris Hilton will have one and so will the other materialistic bubbleheads, but until it supports third party apps it couldn't lick a Blackberry or Treo's taint, much less be years ahead of it in functionality.