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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.
As an owner of an iPhone I am frustrated with what I can't have. What I do have is pretty darn sweet, but things like adblock won't ever come to my phone. And that's where it's needed most, where my bandwidth to the phone and inside the phone is the smallest. So in that regard I'm really rooting for android, but I can't help but draw parallels with Linux on the desktop.
Sure, we all know how great linux is for certain tasks, but it has missed that spark that makes it catch on in a big way outside IT infrastructures and embedded systems.
So that three years prediciton is sounds a lot like "the year of the linux on the desktop"
Sheldon
Android might be open-source, but Android phones using Google's app store are completely locked and Tivoised, developers can't even download their own apps from the store using their unlocked phones. The fact that Android is built on top of Linux is as irrelevant as the fact that the iPhone kernel uses Mach and BSD.
Did we not forget a little mobile OS, outselling both? Did we not forget that Nokai still sells probably more phones per month than apple and android per year? Did we not forget that j2me and symbian programs do not only run on nokia phones but on a lot of other phones?
This does not mean that i done believe that android is not a promising and cool platform, nevertheless hundreds of millions (more likely well over a billion) active j2me compatible phones, for which everybody can develop would derserve to ben mentioned, when comparing the iphone to some competitors.
The article linked is incredibly vague and seems to presuppose that the trajectory of all open-source projects is up, up, up. While this is possible -- if Google puts the resources into constant improvement, Android certainly will improve -- it presupposes that Apple is going to be standing still. Not so. Apple's iPhone platform is now a moving target, and the year to two-year market advantage is going to be difficult for Android to top.
Google, as much as I love some of their products, has shown themselves to be a bit spotty with support and improvements to many of their initiatives. Everyone understands that mobile is a big deal, but if Google's decides that they can dominate search just as much on the iPhone than on their own platform, it's possible their drive to improve Android will wither.
The fact that the platform is open-source means virtually nothing to consumers, by the way. They simply want to make calls, surf the web and play games.
I've been actively developing simple apps for the past few months. The submission process has been straightforward and acceptable. Nothing has taken longer than a week. Critical questions (banking, etc) have been answered in one day.
Would I like it to be faster? Sure. But right now I'm satisfied.
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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It's not like Apple could use its 20 Billion dollars in the bank to, you know, hire more people to handle the developer requests.
Apple may have 20bn in the bank but I bet that the iPhone developer support group doesn't have the keys to the vault, and the sharehoders and SEC wouldn't be too chuffed if it did.
Thing is, in any large organization, you have to prepare budgets and plans months in advance and get them approved by accountants - who rarely understand concepts such as "no one has done this before so we don't have a fscking clue how many developers per month will sign up over the first 3 years"...
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
Other than cut and paste which is the only feature i do miss, I don't see why people want background apps. I don't want the world to know that just because my phone is on they can IM me all day long.
The point is battery life. I can go two full days between charges with 3G on, calls, occasional bluetooth(it is only on when i am in the car ) and wifi when it is available. 3G 90% of the time, when i am home or at a place with wifi for a while I turn it on.
My other phones would last 3-4 days between charges, however I never surfaced the web or played games on them.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
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.
The iPhone is pretty hard to program for, the Android is holy crap hard compared to the iPhone.
However if you're a mac developer already, the iPhone is easy.
The Android is Java, and not even standard Java. Most of it's still undocumented (yay they have the names of the functions, but NO DAMNED INFORMATION ON WHAT IT DOES for a lot of the Android API.) At least every single function is documented in the iPhone SDK, although apple needs more examples. Android has examples that don't even work.
Keep in mind that the author of the report, "Informa Telecoms & Media" has a vested interest in people believing the key to the mobile market is an open source platform (This was in fact the key finding of their report). Informa runs what they call "ONLY Mobile Specific Open Source Conference and Exhibition in the World".
Be cool if the journalists of the world still looked into the motivations of their sources. Informa needs to send IBT, Businessweek and the rest of them a check for advertising fees.
If you're a newbie to any programming platform it's going to be hard. Your original comment about OS X iPhone being hard to program, followed up by if you already are a Mac developer it's easy to program for supports my statement.
The key is for seasoned developers who know C/C++/Java and have no moronic bigoted view regarding ObjC notation to comment on the simplicity or difficulty of Cocoa.
Having the experience of with or without Cocoa it's a no-brainer. Cocoa does the heavy lifting and learning ObjC is easy. It also clarifies the MVC paradigm immensely.
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.