iPhone To Allow 3rd-Party Development

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."

Comments

A much better link

[Raindance]

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.

Re:A much better link

[John Whitley]

The reason a sdk isn't available is because they'd never planned for one originally. Yes, you're a troll. But let me be clear about the kind: you have identified yourself as a gum-flapping moron who's never shipped code worth a damn in your life, especially an SDK for external developers. (And before anyone asks, yes, I have done both. In the same product, even.)

It's VERY hard to ship a new embedded platform in a timely manner with an SDK that supports arbitrary third-party development for a new product. So hard, that it's almost never the right answer to hold off ship to wait for an SDK. An organization is much better off shipping the working, robust 1.0 product into customer's hands and use that experience to build a quality SDK and toolchain. The platform itself is a sea of unknown problem domains ("arr, here be dragons!") for a "version 1.0" product like the iPhone.

Re:A much better link

[Achromatic1978]

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

Bullshit. Utter crap. Why is there this paranoia about the iPhone, when Symbian, Windows CE/Mobile have allowed this for years? There is no way an application on a device should or could bring down a base station, let alone a cell network.

Oh, and as for this gem:

bringing Cingular's network down' actually makes some sense (some mobile phone applications have more-or-less done this in the past)

Cite. Go on. I would so so love to see a citation of any evidence of this. Any, whatsoever.

One approach

[SuperKendall]

One thing Apple could do is allow software development, but only allow HTTP calls out of said apps - that way it would allow Cingular to shape traffic and not risk wonkiness from raw TCP handling by applications.

I'd be happy enough with an API that let me develop a simple interface that could store some data locally and sync with a computer, so even no network access for applications at all would be of some use (though obviously as the device is very network centric it would not be nearly as fun).

One Word:

[Penguinisto]

Skype.

If this critter has WiFi, and someone ports Skype to it, a damned fine radical shift in cell communications is very possible. While it wouldn't work outside of large metro areas (ones with lots of free WiFi, anyway), it would make phone companies, contracts, and all the BS that goes with 'em rather obsolete, methinks.

(then again, we'd likely see folks like Verizon et al start lobbying city councils to stop putting in free wifi, like Qwest and Comcast did when Utah began it's UTOPIA project of multiple city-funded fiber-to-the-doorstep projects all linked together).

Either way, it'd be damned cool, IMHO.

/P

Two words:

[MacEnvy]

802.11 sniffer
That's what I've been waiting for in iPhone news. Sure, there's the Oqo and some Axim-type devices that work for this, but very few that can harness the power of a terminal window, which I've been told (by an Apple higher ed employee) we'll be able to do on the iPhone.

Re:The big question..

[cowscows]

More importantly, once it's running vista, can you run a virtualized instance of linux on that, on which you run an emulator of a 6 year old version of palm OS. That way you can play DopeWars in all of it's 4 shades of gray glory. Of course, that's still worthless unless you can do all of the above from a terminal window on your powerbook, ssh'd into the iphone while it's still sitting in your pocket.

Dashboard, duh!

[dr.badass]

Has anyone seriously believed that there wouldn't be third-party development for the iPhone? I was under the impression that the answer to that question was pretty obvious. The only question has been what form it would take, and even that is pretty obvious if you just look at the thing: Dashboard!

For starters, the interface has a lot of the same visual elements as Dashboard. The grille/tray, rounded-glass squares, identical icons. Hell, identical set of apps as the default set of Dashboard widgets. Dead giveaway. And why shouldn't it be the same set of apps? Apart from email, the main reason to have an internet-connected phone is for quickly fetching bite-sized chunks of information: exactly the sort of thing that widgets are good for.

Consider also that typical widgets take up very little memory and about the same amount of screen real estate as is available on the iPhone. On a Mac, this is because it is expected that you'll be looking at a bunch at the same time, but on the iPhone it's a perfect fit. For existing widgets, it's trivial to either modify the interface to fit the iPhone's screen or load a different interface depending on the platform.

There's no reason why every existing widget couldn't easily be made to run on iPhone, something that isn't true for existing desktop applications. That means thousands of applications available as soon as Apple allows it. Hell, developers don't even need to own or have access to an iPhone to be able to write applications for it. And before anyone screams "JavaScript Sucks", remember that Dashboard widgets can work with Cocoa, too. Off hand I can't think of much that you can't do in a widget. (For a good time, open up the Quartz Composer template included with Dashcode and ask yourself how much fun it would be if you could touch the cube.)

I know there a lot of doubters, but I think that iPhone is going to become the easiest mobile platform to develop third-party apps for.