iPhone 1.1.3 Update Confirmed, Breaks Apps and Unlocks

An anonymous reader writes "Gizmodo has gathered conclusive evidence which confirms that the iPhone Firmware 1.1.3 update is 100% real. It installs only from iTunes using the obligatory Apple private encryption key, which nobody has. The list of new features, like GPS-like triangulation positioning in Google Maps, has been confirmed too. Apparently it will be coming out next week, but there's bad news as expected: it breaks the unlocks, patches the previous vulnerabilities used by hackers and takes away all your third-party applications."

Comments

Re:Walled Garden

[Mikey-San]

I'm not a developer, but I'm really thinking this Walled Garden thing is for the birds - which makes me want one of these less and less.

Okay, don't buy one. Apple's responsibility is not to you, the hacker (I love when I get the chance to use that word in the traditional sense), but to the person who buys the device and will never do anything unsupported with it. Why? Because these people either don't want to deal with incompatibilities or problems resulting from an update, or because they can't deal with them.

Normal users don't want to "update their phone" (which is a weird concept to many consumers in the first place) and have it break in some way. Because the official SDK isn't out yet, and there are no guidelines that third-party developers are following, Apple has no realistic way to support their software across updates. Attempting to do so at this point would be a massive, stupid waste of the available time of their engineers.

"Well," you're thinking, "the users who install unsupported third-party apps would be able to deal with bugs, or understand." No, most of them are going to whine and bitch on the Internet like they do now when Apple reverts their phone to a standard, known-good state during an update. But even if I'm wrong about that, it doesn't matter. The responsibility Apple's engineers have to the customer base on the whole is to guarantee that this phone that people bought "just works".

But this presents a problem, right? It makes this amazing portable device only what Apple wants. For some, this is a real issue. You can't disagree with that, really. To solve this problem, you need a supported SDK. And that's coming. Officially. That means developers like me can write software for the iPhone and it won't vanish after an update.

Releasing an SDK means you have to support it. Putting together an SDK you can support, and that is easy for developers to use, takes time. It's not just documentation, which in of itself is a large task if you want it done right--it's API design, build toolchain design, getting the supporting websites together and ready, training your developer support people in the new stuff, etc. It's huge! But Apple is doing it.

For now, third-party software developed through unsupported means is just that: unsupported. In the near future, according to Apple, we'll have a supported means of developing software for the iPhone. And it'll be better software, because we'll have the documentation we need.

There's no "walled garden", just a device whose SDK is in beta somewhere inside Cupertino walls.