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January 10, 2007

iPhone's missing piece: the developer platform?

This post is inspired by a brief conversation I had with Raven.

Amid all the breathless hype around Apple's iPhone announcement yesterday, there was a conspicuous lack of coverage about the openness of the platform. Apple kept mum about a developer platform around iPhone and how open a platform it was going to be. Would it be as closed as the iPod/iTunes duo, for which there is no way to write meaningful applications without reverse engineering? Or would it be as open as development for the general Mac platform, complete with an SDK and a developers' network?

We can perhaps divine the answer to this from Wall Street's reaction to this announcement yesterday. Apple stock rose approximately the same amount percentage-wise that RIM's stock fell. In other words, the market expects iPhone to encroach on RIM's customer base, which is largely made up of enterprises. There is no way Apple can keep the iPhone platform closed and expect enterprises to adopt it. If the market is right (as it usually is), then we should see some overtures from Apple towards providing a proper development platform around the iPhone.

Let's look ahead to when an SDK and other platform components for the iPhone will stream forth from Apple.

[Update: I was totally wrong on this count; I spoke too early. The following day, Steve Jobs clarified that the platform will be closed, just like the iPod. There will be no developer toolkits and community as with desktop Mac applications. And so Apple remains a consumer electronics company at heart and in direction.

I think Apple is sabotaging adoption of its iPhone with this move. Enterprises won't pick it up because the platform is not open enough. Consumers won't pick it up because the phone is tied to Cingular, which (at least anecdotally) has the 'fewest dropped calls of any network' because you can't make calls in the first place with its coverage. Apple's two-year exclusive deal with Cingular, and the price tag aren't exactly going to help either.

And as you might expect, RIM and Palm stock have recovered by quite a bit.]

Posted by Vishy at January 10, 2007 10:51 AM

Comments

They said that it was going to run Mac OSX, so presumably the OSX toolchain (gcc/Xcode and friends) will be used to target it. Or is there evidence that points to the contrary?

Posted by: Punya at January 10, 2007 06:49 PM

Punya,

I thought so too; it's the supposed to be the same OS after all. I was wrong — see my update above.

--Vishy.

Posted by: Vishy at January 11, 2007 01:07 PM