Slashdot Mirror
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.
J2ME is crap because phones are only required to implement small portions of the specifications to be able to claim J2ME and practically no code of any complexity can make it into J2ME without heavy reauthoring. Once again Java lives up to the promise of "write once, debug anywhere". The real problem is with phones like my RAZR V3i which has a camera but no Java support for it, meaning you can't use any of the cool Java applets (like QR code readers) on my phone - but the point is that the specification should have demanded that these things be supported when the hardware is available on the phone. The lack of this requirement is confusing for consumers and developers alike.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It's not irrelevant at all because you can already run non-blessed software including an entire desktop on the non-Android side of your Android phone. In fact, it is entirely relevant, because you can do this to the phone already.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Well considering the iPhone is a 2 year old hardware design (with a minor 3G upgrade since) it's not surprising that the hardware is nothing special now. The rest of the market has been catching up massively since the iPhone was pre-announced over two years ago. Microsoft are at sea with a UI that is stylus centric and outdated, putting a fancy launcher on the front won't help. Android can benefit from all the mistakes the iPhone made because it is more recent. The Palm Pre has the fancy interface but they're clearly behind, hence the HTML/JS web apps rather than native (for 3D games) which will surely come along later.
The iPhone has the central app store problem - a glut of rubbish that would never have been released in the past that bloats the listings, and a drive to cheap poor quality product in some form of lowest common denominator and the risks are too high for anyone to release anything significant that isn't a game. 15,000 apps, great statistic, but if 14,500 of them are tosh, and the other 500 are hard to find, or not even written...
If you bought a G1 and have the knowledge, you can turn it into a ADP and do just as you please.
Developers can
Does Apple has something like that? I guess not, since there are no developer versions of the Iphone.
BTW, Where can I **legally** download the source to the Iphone OS?
It really feels like Apple's iPhone store is being weakened by its own bureaucratic approach. Sure, it's great to have virus-free apps, but how about choice, diversity and freedom? The content validation works pretty easily for music, but apps are not the same business at all. If you've got to re-certify your stuff each time it's updated, to renew your damn certificate, how can you focus on doing good software?
I do not give a rat ass to open source stuff on my phone, but it could be an interesting approach to make it at least possible on iPhone. How about a common certificate for multiple developers and non obligatorily checked releases?
Stupidity is the root of all evil.
Disagree completely, the iPhone is very easy to program for. This is from someone who never did Mac programming, or objective-c, and has been programming Microsoft since dos4.01 days. I got my first application running in a few hours, was published in two weeks of getting my license. Apple provide a very easy experience to get up and going, free tools, great tool chain and ide.
Now, if they could just fix up the useless error messages, and the many problems of the certificate chain it would be fantastic. I spend a lot of my time just getting apps on the device, or ready for the store.
And google will become popular for developers when its handset does. I would love to start working on that beast.