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iPhone To Allow 3rd-Party Development

Posted by kdawson on from the let-us-at-it dept.

Anarchysoft writes "In an exciting shift from previous statements, Apple CEO Steve Jobs revealed at the D Conference that 3rd-party development will be supported on the iPhone. Questions remain as to whether the opening of the platform, slated for later this year, will be through Dashboard-like widgets or a separate SDK."

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  1. A much better link by Raindance · · Score: 5, Informative
    This has been covered better and in more detail by Ars' John Siracusa. In short, Apple actually wants to allow third-party apps on the iPhone, and developers are salivating at the thought, since (beside it being sexy) it'd be much easier to develop for the "real OS X" that runs on the iPhone than some kludgy mobile phone OS. The problems are two-fold:

    1. Cellular networks are fragile. Much more fragile than the larger internet. They tend toward monoculture and proprietary systems, and haven't had the shakedown that standard internet network hardware and protocols have had. So Jobs' quote about him 'not wanting third-party apps bringing Cingular's network down' actually makes some sense (some mobile phone applications have more-or-less done this in the past). And

    2. Apple simply doesn't have the design tools, and more importantly, the user interface guidelines, ready for developers.

    So, third-party apps on the iPhone will happen. Just in a very measured way.

    Here's Siracusa:

    Not only does Apple have to figure out what makes a good iPhone application, it has to actually create the APIs to produce such a thing. Okay, so no scroll bars, but surely there will be some standard way of scrolling, some standard gesture recognition engine, and so on. Apple has to create all this, if only for its own internal sanity, before it can really get cranking on iPhone application development.

    And like the Mac GUI before it, there will be fits and starts, dead-ends, and bad ideas to shake out in the first few years. Also, an IDE would be nice. Xcode, sure, but some sort of simulator or remote debugger system would help. And, whoops, let's keep revising all those APIs and that IDE to match the best practices as they evolve. Oh, and by the way, we need to ship something that works by June 29th.

    Viewed in this context, the calls for third-party iPhone development, and Apple's reaction to them, start to make a bit more sense. It's the prototypical fanboy mistake to imagine that the mothership has infinite resources and skills, and any lack of satisfaction is malicious. The fact is, Apple could not provide a comprehensive third-party iPhone development environment on par with what Mac developers have come to expect by June 29th, even if it wanted to do such a thing--and there are many sound reasons not to. This stuff all needs time to cook.

    In the meantime, Mac developers will have to be happy with some simple, widget-like WebKit-base development at WWDC this year. That'll also be a nice gesture of good faith from Apple.