Why Apple is releasing the iPhone third-party SDK by February ‘08!

Blogged on October 17, 2007 at 11:06

Apple announced earlier today they’ll be releasing a third-party SDK in February 2008. In my opinion this was planned all along and there are a few reasons why I believe this didn’t happen at launch, but they needed to “buy” time to get the whole infrastructure ready for the wave of development coming in.

I felt like the iPhone was somewhat “rushed out” and I can back that by saying that Apple has not accustomed us to announcing a product that was to be actually released over 6 months later. And the reason behind this being that they knew other competitors were investigating the same technologies, and Apple wanted to keep the “novel” factor

The other reason is the large infraestructure that has to be deployed both on the hardware and on Apple’s end, to ensure both security but also ease of use and of install of those new apps. After all, Apple just released their “Web Apps Collection” website a few days ago, something that should have been out all along.

The final reason is that they didn’t announce that iPhone apps were to be online web apps until later on. They did mention that it would be some closed format, etc… but only in June did Steve Jobs announce that their intentions for apps on the iPhone were webapps. I can’t agree with having a phone, or better, a portable define that is a *lot* more than just a phone, to not be able to include offline apps that are missing from the phone. An example pops to my head: my boss is switching back to a Blackberry (although he hates it now, after having used the iPhone!!!) because of the lack of a To-Do list app… In all honesty, he bought an iPod Touch to go along with it, but I believe other people discovered other things that were missing. I miss a password management app. I’d love to have Password Safe (Password Gorilla, on OSX) on my iPhone.

Another parallel thing is the whole “webapps paradigm”… I really like some webapps out there! Heck, I’ve been using more webapps lately, and the percentage is increasing. But I don’t feel so good about entering my passwords and personal data into a webapp, that’s hosted somewhere, susceptible of attacks and data mining, etc… This are very serious issues! And I’m not a “privacy freak”… I don’t care too much about having photos, mails, profiles, etc… around the web. But not personal stuff, like credit card information, secure passwords for home banking and such, etc…

And, oh boy, I can’t wait to get a SSH client working on my iPhone!!! Can we access the disk now, Apple?? And have some web development tools for quick hacks and fixes on my stuff?? Pleeeeeeeeeeease… ??