ryansutter·net

Well, as Anthony has pointed out, Apple has decided not to allow 3rd party iPhone apps.  So much for my prediction.

At first I was surprised and then I realized that perhaps I just got a little overly optimistic about Apple’s ideals.  After all, they’ve never opened the iPod up for 3rd party development either.  Tech heads with nothing better to do still managed to hack the iPod to the point where they got a Linux distro running on it, so there is yet hope for breaking into the iPhone, but things like this don’t get Apple’s blessing.  Considering that Apple got 200+ patents on the iPhone and intend to defend the hell out of those it doesn’t seem highly likely that they’d want it to be an open platform.  Still, I give it a week before it becomes a “moddable” device, people get sued, and the race is on between the OSS folks to keep it open and Apple to close it up.

I really don’t understand this move at all.  It may even be suicide for the iPhone, despite the incredible innovation it offers because every other smart phone device in the world allows the installation of third party applications.  I have Read Maniac installed on my SLVR for reading books.  It’s a Java2 Micro Edition app that will run on any Java-enabled smart phone in the world (read: almost all of them).  If I move to the iPhone, I will not be able to read books on my phone anymore without some sort of reading software and looking over the Apple site, I can see no reading software on the horizon (or document management software of any sort).  I am certainly not the only bibliophile in the world so an iPhone with no eBooks is a major problem for me. 

What’s more, I play little games in downtimes.  Sudoku, Chess, Tetris, Minesweeper, Scrabble, all of these have a place on my SLVR already.  All free J2ME apps that I downloaded on my iBook and put on my phone via Bluetooth.  No ability to add little games like that to the iPhone (or only to add those that Apple chooses to sell) is again, a huge drawback.

My guess here is that Apple is going to follow the model that all the cellular phone providers are trying already, selling the only software available for their platform directly to the consumer via their iTunes store.  There will be games and apps, but they will all come from Apple unless a user is willing to risk voiding their warranty by making use of the hack methods of getting into their handset that will invariably be discovered. 

I don’t buy my third-party apps for my phone today and I resent the need to buy them tomorrow if I switch to the iPhone.

With this one decision, they have moved me from the “gonna buy” category to the “wait and see” category.  If I get a better screen and experience but have to give up the freedom to add functionality via open software, I might just decide it’s not worth it.