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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.
- These characters were randomly selected.
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 Microsoft are at sea with a UI that is stylus centric and outdated, putting a fancy launcher on the front won't help.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...
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.
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.
Would you please be so kind to stop modding posts you disagree with as troll?
I mean, everything in my post is factually correct:
Thank you! Here's the text. Link.
DEFINED FREEDOM, Gnuisance, Monday (NNGadget) - The Free Software Foundation (NASDAQ: RMS) has announced the Free Software alternative to the evil, DRM-infested, locked-down, defective-by-design iPhone: the GNUPhone.
The key technical innovation of the GNUPhone is that it is completely operated from the command line. "What could be more intuitive than a bash prompt?" said seventeen-year-old Debian developer Hiram Nerdboy. "The ultimate one-dimensional desktop! Just type dial voice +1-555-1212 -ntwk verizon -prot cdma2000 -ssh-version 2 -a -l -q -9 -b -k -K 14 -x and away you go! Simple and obvious!"
The phone will also serve as a versatile personal media player. "I can play any .au file or H.120 video with a single shell command! The iPod could never measure up to this powerful ease of use." Video is rendered into ASCII art with aalib. "If blocky ASCII teletype softcore pinups were good enough for 1970s minicomputer operators, they're good enough for you. Respect your elders."
The KDE project will be bringing its next-generation KDE 4 desktop to the GNUPhone. "You can flip, twirl, dice, blend, fold, spindle and mutilate your terminal windows to your heart's content," said developer Aaron Seigo. "Look at that cool effect! Any complaint that basic functions don't actually work is ignorant of the intrinsic beauty of the Plasma API and is just more FUD spread by haters like Stevie Ray Vaughan-Nichols and Novell Corporation."
Actual successful voice calls are expected by 2011 to 2012. Regulatory approval is proving problematic in the corrupt, corporate-captured US environment. "The FCC said that if we dared switch on this, uh, 'piece of shit' in a built-up area in its present form, they'd break all our fingers with a fourteen-pound cluebat," said Nerdboy. "They're obviously shilling for Apple, Nokia and Microsoft."
The second version of the GNUPhone will run EMACS on the HURD kernel and be operated by writing eLisp macros on the fly. "It's the clearest, most elegant and natural operating environment anyone could conceive of," said Nerdboy. "Really, we're not out to destroy Apple; that will just be a completely unintentional side effect."
http://rocknerd.co.uk
The problem is windows is a very awesome developer friendly platform.
As a developer that started out programming on windows, I whole heartedly disagree. There is nothing simpler than turning a text file's execute bit to "on"... chances are any unix system will just figure out how to do it with automagical consistency.
If you don't believe then you wont understand why people don't like to write code for linux.
I don't have to put my faith into anything. This is completely testable and repeatable by anyone.
I would imagine people that don't write programs for linux simply do not know how to in the first place. If the expectation is to simply jump ship and find yourself in the exact same ship, then you make no sense.
Most of the API's - networking, sound, filesystem, gui have no cohesion and are basically duct-taped together. It does not have .NETs simplicity and ease of use. Since .NET ties in the client, server and web through various technologies
What you're failing to mention is that networking, sound, filesystem, gui... have nothing in common other than being API's. They've been in development for about 40 years now (obviously some longer than others), redesigned and re-factored over and over again. I'm pretty sure most of the usability kinks have been implemented already, and what we have today is the aggregated result of that process. You mention .NET but often times its like swatting a fly with a sledge hammer. The problem simply isn't big enough.
Even the Mac was a horrible platform until OS X... And even OSX was buggy as hell until recently...
So... until it became a unix system?
What OS, in your mind, does not contain rather large flaws?
Cue fanbois ranting...
Oh the irony...
Contrary to the parent's quote that the only motivation would be fandom... I think I'm only doing this cause I'm bored and maybe for the benefit of anyone who wouldn't know better.