Apple is reputed as the computer company of surprises. 2007’s WWDC gave us many surprises, but few were gratifying. The biggest and most anticipated surprise was the iPhone SDK — otherwise known as a modern web browser. To make sure everyone has access to such a modern web browser, Apple has released Safari for Windows.
Despite Jobs’ best attempts with his RDF to sell web apps as “very sweet” and “innovative,” Developers aren’t satisfied. Blogger John Gruber of daringfireball.net wrote:
Telling developers that web apps are iPhone apps just doesn’t fly. Think about it this way: If web apps – which are only accessible over a network; which don’t get app icons in the iPhone home screen; which don’t have any local data storage – are such a great way to write software for iPhone, then why isn’t Apple using this technique for any of their own iPhone apps?
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If all you have to offer is a shit sandwich, just say it. Don’t tell us how lucky we are and that it’s going to taste delicious.
— WWDC 2007 Keynote News
Gruber isn’t alone in his sentiments; most expected more. Jobs gave two reasons for Apple’s cold-feet — security, and UI concerns.
Jobs said, in effect, he didn’t want users having cluttered interfaces, and he didn’t want crashy apps interfering with the iPhone experience.
I find this concern to be absurd. Palm has had 3rd party development for years. They designed their UI with this consideration in mind; a single tap returns you to a home screen of the standard Palm apps. There is no confusion, and no clutter — just an easy-to-use, customizable interface. The UI is clean, consistent, and well-organized, even with a host of randomly-downloaded add-ons. There are plenty of intuitive and navigable ways to display 3rd party apps. If Apple wanted to let others develop iPhone-native apps, Apple had plenty of examples from which to draw.
While there have been several virii released for handhelds, none have been able to reach critical mass — not even the ones for Windows CE/Mobile. There are SDKs and 3rd party apps for Blackberry, Windows Mobile, and Palm. The application ecosystems for these devices is flourishing. The security concerns, even for dominant platforms, have been low — even for systems inherently less secure than OS X. Handhelds are challenging for worm writers; even handhelds running the same system may have substantial differences in hardware platform, network interface, and system services. This, combined with low market penetration, has kept handhelds from being primary targets.
However, Apple’s goal for the iPhone is fairly substantial, and its platform is high profile, to say the least. With a unified platform, security glitches become easily exploitable. Hackers have been hacking for decades without SDKs. If Apple neglected to put in a reasonable security model, hiding behind a closed platform will not save them. Security through obscurity has been proven false many times over. Considering Apple’s overwhelming desire to be seen as “secure”, I doubt they overlooked this issue.
Stripping down a resource-intensive desktop OS to an embedded OS is challenging, to say the least. It may be that Apple has had to remove most of OSX’s userland, requiring apps to run directly on kernel calls. Task priority may be another issue. Apple may have fine-tuned the thread prioritization with its apps to guarantee a seamless UI experience. Thus, Apple doesn’t want 3rd party apps running in this carefully balanced structure. A poorly written program could cause a host of priority issues. If Apple did chose to go such a route, we will never see a true iPhone SDK, at least for this product generation.
Bearing that depressing thought, a lot of pundits claim there will be no “killer app” for the iPhone. The iPhone is not designed to be a platform for killer apps; rather, it is its killer app. While there are plenty of other smartphones on the market, most are targeted aggressively towards the business market. The few that are consumer oriented, are total crap — the SideKick and BlackJack spring to mind. Apple’s product is stylish and desirable. Knowing Apple, it will “just work”. Smartphones like that are as rare today as compact hard-drive MP3 players were in 2001.
The iPhone doesn’t run true 3rd party apps. Apple just doesn’t want them, or Apple can’t let them exist. Regardless, their existence will not determine the success of the iPhone. If the iPhone can perform its tasks as well as an Apple product should, its success is guaranteed.