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No iPhone SDK Means No iPhone Killer Apps
iPhoneLover/Hater writes "Gizmodo is running an article analyzing the potential failure of the iPhone as a truly revolutionary platform. The reason: no SDK to harness the true power of Mac OS X and the frameworks contained in Apple's smart cell. From the article: 'According to Apple, "no software developer kit is required for the iPhone." However, the truth is that the lack of an SDK means that there won't be a killer application for the iPhone. It also means the iPhone's potential as an amazing computing and communication platform will never be realized. And because of this and no matter how Apple tries to sell it, the iPhone won't make a revolution happen.'"
you say you want a revolution, well you know, we all want an SDK.
http://xkcd.com/386/
...not the Declaration of Independence. What "revolution" did you envision a phone making? Suddenly people stop talking while driving? That would be revolutionary.
"the lack of an SDK means that there won't be a killer application for the iPhone"
Who's to say that Apple can't/won't write that killer app?
In theory, theory always works in practice. In practice, theory rarely works. <><
With all the stories about the iPhone and it's universally uncanny ability to suck/rule (depending on who's talking), I think we can all agree on one thing.
It's not out yet.
We *are* using the Firehose responsibly, right?
More Twoson than Cupertino
Unless a programmer is good at Javascript, HTML...
And could write killer App with that.
I hate to sound like a Mac Fanboy but with some good Ajax codeing you could make a program that is as good as most other apps. Google shows that, and the fact you know the iPhone uses a more modern browser there is less multi-browser testing. And heck you iPhone Apps will run elsewhere too making them far more available.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Just because there's no SDK today doesn't mean there won't be one later this year.
Apple is trying to defuse outrage over their refusal to provide an SDK (for "security"...) by saying "people can use rich web apps, it's the same thing!" This is incredibly disingenuous and I hope I'm not the only one who won't be getting an iPhone because of it's closed nature.
"If you do something revolutionary like make an SDK unnecessary, you will fail." -- The Establishment
YouTube was written without an SDK, at least no more, or no less, of an SDK than the iPhone has, and yet I'd call it a killer app.
The notion that something has to be compiled into machine language to be a killer app is kind of wonky, if you ask me. Everyone out there already making clever web apps might have something to say about that.
Comment of the year
It's a phone, get a fucking life! I swear, mobile telephones just keep getting more and more annoying.
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
While I agree that the lack of an SDK will deter many developers, let's not get too ahead of ourselves here. There is still a way to make your own apps for the thing, and that ALWAYS leads to some pretty interesting things. Remember, using AJAX-style apps on the iPhone only restricts what the client can do - you could still create the next Facebook, Flikr, del.icio.us, or whatever using whatever webserver you want. Besides, isn't an iPod that's also a phone, web browser, etc a killer app on its own?
The biggest limitation I see is not the lack of a killer app(s), but the lack of free, easily accessible WiFi everywhere. You'll need a connection to something to use these apps, and with only a few cities and towns in US with decent WiFi blanketing, this may end up being a huge problem.
But hey - if enough people buy the thing, and enough developers show that you can make it a viable platform, then we'll see some real innovation. Personally, I would love to see someone build a rich web app that could run as well on EDGE as it does on WiFi - and then spread that data efficiency over to the rest of the web.
Right, 'cause it's impossible to develop software (and/or quality software) without an SDK. I guess we'll have to pull a MacGyver: get me Emacs, a compiler, some libraries, a pack of gum, some yarn, a can of WD-40 and some Hot Pockets...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
We know how terribly the iPod did without custom apps.
Did anyone watch WWDC? I did last night. The iPhone has the full WebKit framework which means any Web 2.0/Ajax app will run on it if it runs in Safari. You can do things through Ajax like make a phone call. They did a sweet demo where clicking on links would bring up the mail app, make a phone call through Safari, send an address to Google maps, etc.
This seems like a good way to go IMO. You don't need to learn yet another SDK. If you can program with Javascript, HTML, you can make apps for the iPhone. If there is a bug in your app, you don't have to create a new installer and get that new version out to millions of people. Just update the code on your server and now all users have the latest-and-greatest.
Through Safari, you will be able to do tons of things with the iPhone and web 2.0/Ajax stuff, all the core functions of the iPhone are available to you.
General, you are listening to a machine! Do the world a favor and don't act like one.
Seriously.
The way that mobile phone industry works is the network provider is the only innovator. Perhaps the most famous example of this is music download service on mobile phone networks.
Oh wait, what about all the java-enabled phones? Outside of games, there isn't much of an API to do anything else with it. And it's not like mobile java apps actually run everywhere.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Lame.
This is true and symptomatic of the whole mobile space. If you have experience in the mobile space, this will come as little surprise to you. All the carriers want to lock down and control every bit that flows on their networks so they can extract all the profit out of every bit. It's amazing that Apple has got as much enabled on the phone as it has.
This sort of thing is why mobile networking in the U.S. and many other countries is a total and unmitigated disaster. All of the networks have tried so hard to make sure they get all the profit potential out of the networks they have made it very unattractive for third party developers. As a result, the mobile networking space just rots waiting for a competitor or new form of getting data to mobile points that make the existing mobile networks obsolete (this is hard because of governmental regulation and selling of exclusive rights to frequency bands, so it is also a regulatory disaster). This is why all the services you hear prognosticators in Wired and other magazines rhapsodize about never materialize. It's also ironic in that the carriers would be making more money if they had opened up to the killer apps and therefore increased the overall demand for networking.
In short, through the regulatory processes and lack of fair trade enforcement, the U.S. has sold its mobile networking potential and commons into the hands of thieves, whose greed and hubris have essentially delayed progress in mobile networking for at least a decade. If I could make that statement in stronger terms, I would. The mobile space is essentially what happens when you have the complete antithesis of 'network neutrality' and, though network neutrality might not be a great regulatory strategy in the fixed-network space, the complete opposite of it is surely well-nigh catastrophic as can be seen from the mobile space.
The device looks very cool. It has all sorts of cool features for storing and listening to music, taking and showing photos, organizing a schedule, etc. Unfortunately, this is a 'convergence' product almost a decade late. Furthermore, it doesn't do the ONE thing I want and need: allow me to take eink notes or annotate over pdfs. Apple really missed the boat here. And I think here we see Jobs' bias against pen input really damaging the potential of this product. I don't need yet another calendar. I need a tool to manipulate divergent notes from a variety of projects. And being able to snap photos of text in a book or original source materials for batch OCR would be nice too.
Jobs made a very nice toy. Unfortunately, I need a tool - and the iPhone ain't it.
While some people on here despise flash, it could possibly take advantage of the multi-touch interface on the iPhone without leaving the Safari sandbox. Not to mention a lot of popular sites such as homestarrunner.com use it. $500 for a revolutionary smart phone whose browser isn't as good as the psps? No thanks.
Monstar L
My ears are bleeding. If you say, "but the ads look great," you're a fanboy. If you call a product that hasn't shipped yet an utter failure, that's sobriety? No it's not. Can't anybody wait to see what we're talking about here? Just why is it that a great phone experience requires third-party developers. Is a phone REALLY a computer? Can you make apps crash on it?
Nothing, I repeat, *nothing* that Apple has released up to this point has indicated that "Web 2.0" apps will be the only type of apps available to the iPhone. Get a clue already. How many clues does Apple have to give you before you see the trail of breadcrumbs?
First of all, go refer to the D5 discussion with SJ and BG. Pay special attention to the part where Steve talks about iPhone apps, particularly why it was felt that a native Google Maps app was more appropriate than a web app.
Second of all, "No SDK required" != "No SDK available". The SDK already exists, but is not required to develop apps targeted to the iPhone. It's called Mac OS X+XCode+Dashcode. Curious that the "Webclip" feature coming in Leopard was conspicously demo'd by Steve, and yet is missing from both versions of the Safari 3 Public Beta...hmm? Safari for Windows exists because of the iPhone, plain and simple.
The "Mystery 12th App"? Obviously the "Movies" widget that Steve demo'd. Just as that came on, I realized one of the most commonly accessed apps on my Palm phone, my Nokia 770, and my other cell phone (Samsung SPH-m610), is movie listings. Of course Apple, with the largest movie preview site on the Internet, would provide such a feature for the iPhone.
It's been obvious since the first intro of the iPhone to anyone with a modicum of intelligence that all the apps on the iPhone are the exact same things that run under Dashboard on Mac OS X. Why would anyone think that Apple would reimplement already existing code when they've already shown that the iPhone and AppleTV both run Mac OS X, especially given the extreme emphasis put on the fact that the iPhone runs the same WebKit engine as the regular desktop OS?
I going to laugh to see all the naysayers tripping over themselves to get ahold of an iPhone and a Mac in a few months once they realize they've missed the boat
The phone will live or die based on the fact that it costs $500 with a 2 year contract. You can make a really nice car that gets 100 mpg, but if the market can't afford it, you aren't going to revolutionize anything. Sure, it may end up like the Newton, with a rabid following; and yeah, some of that functionality will trickle down and affect the industry. But talking about the success of this phone is silly; it just costs too much.
-- Having a Creationist Museum is like having an Atheist place of worship
There's a reasonably good reason, and don't hold your breath waiting for the answer to change.
Whether or not the phone is "really" running OSX is debatable, but keep in mind that many of the CPUs used in embedded devices like phones don't have nearly (or sometimes any of) the memory protection offered on a desktop or laptop CPU. You're also dealing with a much lower-MHz device (for battery consumption reasons) and chances are 100% of the code on the phone runs in Ring 0 (assuming other rings exist) for performance reasons.
So for them to allow third parties to run binary apps would pretty much allow unlimited circumvention of their DRM for the iPod portions (which would violate their agreements with record and movie companies), and as Jobs mentioned publicly would allow any poorly-written or malicious application to completely destabilize the phone or potentially interact with the cellular network in some disruptive or destructive manner (probably violating their agreement with AT&T). I have a Treo with PalmOS on it, and I can attest to the validity of at least the phone stability concern.
So there are a few very legitimate reasons to sandbox third-party code. That being said, there are features sorely lacking on the phone that won't fit in a sandbox - the first of which (for me and my customers) is a VPN client. The last thing I want is a phone running POP3 or IMAP "transparently" connecting over insecure WiFi infrastructure. I'd also like an SSH client, a Terminal Services client, an X Client, and a unicorn - so the iPhone probably won't be for me (dammit).
I would imagine that down the road they will find a better way to provide said sandbox (maybe a Java or Ruby or Python runtime environment?) but in the mean time I respect their desire to provide a phone that emphasizes reliability, even if it means it won't work for me (at least in the first iteration). The wife will probably get one, though.
Help save the critically endangered Blue Iguana
If Web2.0 and AJAX were the end-all be-all of application development then why aren't all the other apps on the iPhone written that way? Heck even Google Maps, which was born as AJAX, has is a dedicated app on iPhone because there are things you can do with native code that you will never be able to do with an online app.
The most important being that you have to be online to use them. So no third party applications when you are on an airplane. And unless there is a WiFi hotspot nearby you'll be racking up AT&T data charges like crazy. Secondly, there are many situations where I neither need nor want my sensitive data to be stored online, where it is more vulnerable. Anything that processes this data should not be a webapp. Third, even with all the Web2.0 AJAXy goodness, webapps are still not as interactive as real applications, and nowhere near as efficient.
I think that the streamlined webapp capabilities are nice There are several classes of application that IMHO are best done as webapps, in particular any that are front end to some online data base or other content. Things like yellow pages, YouTube, photo album sharing, lookup up movie times, etc. I am glad that they made it possible and easy for these types of applications to integrate nicely into the iPhone.
I can also understand if they aren't willing to release a full 3rd party SDK at this time - they are rolling out an ambitious new product which is sure to have some problems, and the more variable they can remove at launch time the better. It makes sense to wait until things have settled down before releasing an SDK, not to mention the fact that they have probably been too busy to write and test one.
But trying to play it off as "Web2.0 is all the SDK you need" is just plain insulting. It's like saying that Dashboard Widgets are the only SDK that OS X needs.
A prize for repeating ignorant FUD?
AT&T and Cingular already sell smartphones running Windows Mobile, Palm OS, and Series 60, and BlackBerry, and those all provide SDKs for anyone who wants one.
So, either you're full of shit, or Apple is too incompetent too implement the security features that would make AT&T comfortable.
Apple read your comment, and that's the last straw.
They're canceling the iPhone, disbanding the dev team, and selling the entire production run at Overstock.com and everyone gets a free Clio while supplies last.
Oh, and you're invited to a party at John Dvorak's house.
You have to bring the Tostitos, Shaw Wu's bringing the Dr. Pepper.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
"the network provider is the only innovator"
BS.
Anything innovative in that market is almost always created by a third party and proposed a network provider. And network providers usually find a way to botch those things by turning them into restrictive billable services or features.
The only innovative things network providers create are fees shorty, fees.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
Right. I think the real problem is that the iPhone is targeted at a consumer audience, but it has a professionals price tag. If this thing manipulated text and raw source materials the way I need, I'd pay the price. Gladly. But who needs a $500 handheld toy?
You know the usage of the term "revolution" to describe a cell phone device just makes me sad as a 21st century man. The fact that this is what we apply the term to nowadays shows our supreme lack of imagination or want for something better. If we could have the type of revolution our forefathers had for silly import taxes for health coverage, worker's rights ,the ability for criminal corporations to poison our environment, politicians that adhere to big business's needs more than the will of the people, that'd be really doing something, but no, we'd rather have a phone "revolution." How far we've fallen.
Judges and senates have been bought for gold; Esteem and love were never to be sold.
Don't be surprised if the next major revision of X-Code supports iPhone development.
Don't forget the iPhone has 802.11 networking built in. People spend so much time in hot spots these days that the lackluster performance of the EDGE network will be an occasional nuisance, not a crippling defect in the product. The future of 3G HSDPA networks looks pretty bright, too.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
For all the talk about NO SDK=FAILURE that has been going on since day one, I haven't seen anyone make even the vaguest suggestions of what they think such a killer-app might be that is absolutely dependent on a direct SDK.
Next you'll be telling me the Mac is "just a computer"!
So, you'll be able to make a phone call from Javascript? I shudder to think of this. Imagine pornsite pop-ups that dial 1-900 numbers for you!
WinCE (Sorry, Windows Mobile). Treao. Blackberry.
These devices all allow custom programming. They have been out for some time. So then, what is the "Kller App" for those devices that has come from third parties?
When I owned a Palm, I did buy a few applications, but they were just nice utilities, never apps I could not live without (evidenced by my not owning a Palm anymore once it died). Even today I don't see what is so compelling about the third party market that I must have on my phone that could not also be served by a well-written web application.
The Palm itself was a killer app when it came along, because of the totality of the device. The same COULD be true of the iPhone, we don't know yet - but it would not be a third party application that would cause it to rise or fall, even if it would allow lower level development. With consumer devices its the package as a whole that makes or breaks it.
Heck even game consoles today rest firmly on a foundation of first party titles to help buoy them up. Why should a phone be any different? Remember it's not that NO developers will get lower level access, Apple had already talked about things like the games the iPod offers today. It's only the wider market that has to use AJAX for application development on the iPhone, a tired development model that still allows for truly custom iPhone applications - and thus the potential of the mythical "Killer App".
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Come on - It's an Apple product. That means looks over function. It means proprietary city. Is anyone really that surprised?
The bottom line cell phones are just expensive paperweights you can make phone calls on without an open platform (or at the very least, a common platform) to run software on. What is the point of spending money on games/apps for your phone with the next one you get probably won't be able to run them?
That is why I am anxiously waiting for the Neo1973 running OpenMoko. The OS runs on a Linux kernel with telephony services running on top of it. Apps run on GTK and so you can run and develop apps natively in your X11 session. The hardware itself works with GSM networks (quad band), and has integrated bluetooth, GPS, Wifi, and a 2.8" touchscreen. Since everything is open source on it, if it doesn't have all the software capabilities the iPhone does, it can be made to have them. And at half the cost. Not to mention it's not married to any cell network, unlike the iPhone.
If the Neo1973 is as awesome in the flesh as it looks on paper, it will revolutionize the cell phone industry.
-R
Twelfst?
+++ATH0
No, it's still a lame excuse.
Bob makes a computer for Mike.
John writes a program for that computer.
Mike loves his computer. As soon as he installs John's program on his computer, it starts crashing.
When he removes John's program, it stops crashing.
Why the Christ would Mike blame Bob for his computer crashing?
All Apple has to do is say from the outset, "we can only guarantee the stability of the iPhone with programs that have gone through our quality assurance process." "Stability" problem solved. Why would anyone blame Windows for crashing when you install any third party software? It's not logical, but it still happens. Users blame Microsoft for their troubles, even if the source of the problem is some third party software app. Users don't know the difference. Besides, it's sometimes difficult to tell which of the 10 programs running on a machine actually caused the problem.
My point is that while people like Slashdotters might understand what's happening on the device, a normal corporate iPhone user is going to blame Apple's POS iPhone when it crashes or doesn't work right. That's just the way the world works. So if iPhone owners go around complaining about how often their iPhone crashes, it hurts Apple even though it's not really Apple's fault. I think it's simply a practical business decision rather than a technical decision. Even a Java VM is still crippleware. Give us Cocoa ffs, Apple. I don't consider a Java VM crippleware. That's like saying that the Blackberry is crippleware because it's based on Java. As long as you can write applications, I don't see that it's really crippleware. It may not be the brilliant Apple SDK that you want, but it's far from crippleware. However, a real Apple SDK would be my preference as well.
Marnex Products
The word from a developer at WWDC is that Apple hasn't yet produced a sandbox for the phone that can't crash it. No surprise, seeing as the phone has taken QA resources away from Leopard -- stability is going to be the first priority for the product. After all, the first wave of users are more interested in making calls and using the device as a really cool iPod. However, it's a pretty safe bet that the phone will have an SDK eventually. Processor-wise it's not that far removed from most BREW phones, and Apple's toolkits should target the device nicely when the time comes. Believe me, lack of J2ME on the phone is a feature, not a shortcoming -- J2ME is very brittle, and support for most of the extensions that would make for a killer phone app is very uneven across handsets, so apps are very kludgy. Everyone's treating this Safari/AJAX announcement as this big deal, but it's actually more access than anyone was really expecting out of the gate. Apple doesn't seem to really 'get' the mobile market -- the thing that they've overlooked that at&t subscribers really care about is the availability of personalization content like wallpapers and ringtones for purchase. So far, Apple people have been saying that this is something they'll get to later. However, conventional wisdom in the mobile market is that most consumers buy personalization content the first couple of weeks they have the device. None of these things are going to stop this device from selling well -- the price point might, but the technology in the phone is elegantly integrated, visually appealing, and easy to use. Those things in themselves are a killer app.
Bullshit for so many reasons.
... still people hate it.
First, iPhone comes with four killer apps built-in. All a device needs is one. The iPod is a sensation and it has one killer app: seamless integration with your iTunes audio video collection which enables on-the-go playback of same anywhere, anytime.
The iPhone has:
1) Calls - the killer app from phones
2) iPod - the killer app from iPods
3) Web (Web 2.0 even) - the real full-featured Web, the killer app from the last decade of mainstream computing
4) Email - the killer app of the Internet some say
Notice that Apple put these four along the bottom of the iPhone's display. The other 11 apps are chachkis. You can do Google Maps or calendaring online.
Some have called the iPhone's UI a killer app. If you have been frustrated by a phone UI before you may agree.
OK, but what if that isn't enough for you? What if you are considering an iPhone but you really don't need it for the phone, iPod, Web, or email features? (Please read the previous sentence again while considering the absurdity of it.)
Then for you, the iPhone has many avenues for third-party accessories:
1) Ajax applications
2) iPod dock connector applications
3) Bluetooth applications
4) Wi-Fi-n applications
5) custom hardware modifications (this is huge in phones already)
6) iPhone-related Mac/PC apps
7) cases, holders, mounts, etc.
The funny thing is, with the original Mac you could install software on it, and developers complained about not having any accessory slots to put hardware. Now iPhone has a slot that is being ignored and everybody wants to install software on it.
The consumer market is all about zero configuration. Installing and updating software is configuration. Nine out of ten people fucking hate it. It's why most people still do not have PC's. People will make outrageous sacrifices to avoid having to configure something. They'll use lab computers at school, surf the Web only at work, or use online productivity apps that suck, just to avoid owning their own computer or installing software on it. Among Mac users, the majority do not install software, and it has been reduced to dragging and dropping one icon from some other storage to your hard disk
Everybody wants to know, what is Apple's secret? What makes their stuff so easy to use, what makes people like it so much? It is zero configuration. When Apple did Mac networking in the 1980's the Macs networked themselves, you just had to physically connect them. When they rebuilt their OS for the 21st century they re-built the zero configuration networking as well, this time around TCP/IP. There were 20 years of "configuration TCP/IP" before Apple switched from AppleTalk to TCP/IP and created zero configuration TCP/IP. Why didn't somebody other than Apple build zero conf networking first? Apple is the only computer company in the consumer market. All others are in the mainframe replacement business. So it is no wonder that non-technical people like Apple's zero configuration products, because non-technical people fucking hate configuring things.
Oh, they hate it. They hate it worse than taking an exam, they hate it worse than going to the doctor. If your business plan involves consumers configuring things, then get out of the consumer industry now.
It is amazing to me in 2007 that the PC industry a) still exists, b) hasn't gotten a clue yet. ZERO, I mean ZERO configuration. You turn it on, it works (built-in apps). You plug it on, it works (dock connector). You click it, it works (Web/Ajax).
> OGG player
The iPhone's video decoder is ISO MPEG H.264 only. It can't decode Ogg. If you were to install an Ogg decoder software onto the iPhone, if there were even a place to put it (no QuickTime), and if you could get full frame full-rate playback, you would probably drain the battery in an hour or less instead of five.
You could potentially make an iPod dock accessory that decodes Ogg in a chip. However if people wanted one this would already exist.
The thing with Ogg is that is scratches an itch that only 0.0000001% of humans have, and you have to understand patents to even understand why it exists. And you have to think that paying a few bucks for an encoder that has a matching free decoder is a bad thing, which nobody in the audio video business actually does. We pay Apple $29 every couple of years and they maintain a collection of professional codecs as QuickTime plug-ins that work throughout the system and within all of your applications. For example, you can open up the Mac version of Microsoft Word and put H.264 video into your documents. You can export H.264 from your 3D app, your video editor, Adobe Flash.
MP3 has come and gone, so has Ogg. The world standardized on MPEG-4 in 2001, 2002. Google is converting YouTube to MPEG-4 right now.