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Apple's iPhone Developer Crisis
David Gerard writes "iPhone development sounds closed-shop but simple — apply to be a developer, put application on the App Store, you and Apple make money. Except Apple can't keep up with the request load — whereas getting a developer contract used to take a couple of days, it's now taking months. Some early developers' contracts are expiring with no notice of renewal options. And Apple has no idea what's going on or the state of things. If you want to maintain a completely closed system, it helps if you can actually keep up with it."
Reader h11:6 points out news of a recent study which suggests that "Android's open source nature will give it a boost over Apple's iPhone," and thus take the lead in sales as soon as three years from now. It will be interesting to see how they deal with the flood of proposed apps as their popularity rises.
I've dabbled in j2me, and now programming for the iPhone. All I can say is; yes, we're forgetting Nokia and J2ME.
But there's also a reason for it. The iPhone dev kit makes me happy in my my pants compared to what Nokia offers.
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One year ago, the AppStore was not existing. Two years ago, the iPhone was not available.
How can someone make a prediction for "three years from now" ?
When the iPhone was launch every one called it doomed because it was closed, even if it was obvious Apple would sooner or later release a SDK for it. Now, the AppStore is not even 1 year old, people do not know how Apple will make it evolve (more staff, more open, ... ), and they are forecasting something for 3 years from now ?!
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I'm sorry, but isn't Apple not being able to keep up with developer applications the exact opposite of a developer crisis? Sure, it might be a crisis for the developers involved, but certainly not for the market or Apple itself!
With 15,000 available applications and over 500 million downloads, it sounds like a pretty damn succesful platform to me. With growth on that scale, it doesn't surprise me that they would run into some hurdles.
The connection to the android open source analysis completely eludes me, but I wouldn't hold my breath in any case. To most people, the term iPhone is synonymous to smartphone and being slightly more open isn't going to change anything about that soon.