Apple closed the iPhone down fairly tightly and haven’t provided a toolkit for developers to play with and compile their application with. No matter: Nightwatch made one. They haven’t allowed instant messaging. Other people made their own1, even a video conferencing client. A few thoughts on all of this.
Apple’s move was certainly more motivated by their unholy alliance with AT&T than a personal desire to lock down the phone. After all, they know very well the Mac developer community really does deliver great applications for their platform and that’s a large part of the attraction many of us feel for the Mac. So they told developers to use web technologies to deliver their software to the platform. And here we have a Skype client, fully web-based. Which I reckon is no easy feat, but it was done anyway. So thanks, Apple! This pushed developers to get creative and hack together some interesting pieces of code that will certainly trickle down and get used by ‘regular’ folks soon enough. Whatever the next Web will be, it should have some interesting technology to make it happen.
- This is far from a complete list, I’m sure [↩]
Ask yourself this: Are Apple liable for any damage caused by malware built by 3rd parties? They can take a bunch of kudos for providing the platform, bask in the glow of people buying the product to get at all that extra juicy goodness and the worst they’ll face in court is “you didn’t lock it down tight enough to prevent me from downloading malware”
Its a win-win - expect that they’ll open it up in 6-12 months once the hacker community has debugged the whole process for them.
Well many analysts have commented that most other smart phones are open for developers although they would face the same problems as those alleged by Apple. The side that I’m on, though, is that Cupertino does not want anything to adversely impact the experience. Crappy apps with crappy UIs.
I do think they will open everything up eventually although whatever the hacker community does might or might not help them. They certainly have the toolchains and APIs available. The more important win, here, is both the liberation of the technology and the showing off of a little of the phone’s potential, thus putting further pressure on Apple to release those tools.
After all, anything that can’t be improved in some way is boring to have in the first place.
As far I’ve seen Apple blew it this time with this iPhone, it’s a bad product, it’s no revolutionary device as they still claim… bad market research, a mere fashion toy for rich kids that don’t care/know much about technology :)
The iPhone does definitely win a lot because of its ‘fashion’ statement and I think even the hardest Mac fanboy will agree that it might bear more weight on sales then pure technological merit. The fact of the matter is that while there are many more features it could have, it’s doing quite well for itself so far.
I’m sure the next revision will fix a lot of these things and add more technology. I’m not too sure about the market research, they seem quite content with how it’s selling thus far. I still have to admire the fact that, revolutionary or not, the iPhone has stirred the mobile market a fair bit. That’s where the consumer will win - because whatever Nokia or Motorola do next, they will need to take their cue from what Apple just did.