There should be no doubt that Steve Jobs has either finally snapped (unlikely) or that there’s yet more evidence that when he’s wrong, he stays wrong (more likely):
” The last thing you want is to have loaded three apps on your phone and then you go to make a call and it doesn’t work anymore. [..] You don’t want your phone to be an open platform,” [Jobs] said. “You need it to work when you need it to work. Cingular doesn’t want to see their West Coast network go down because some application messed up.”
What? No one’s West Coast network ever went down because of software installed on the client. This is either ignorance or outright lies on Steve’s part. If software installed on a mobile phone could drop the network, a) the network itself would be to blame and b) we’d all be in deep doody by now because there are tons of third-party software running on mobile phones today already.
Listen, now: It is perfectly technically possible to make two tiers of applications – trusted with full privileges and plebeianware – where we’re given full access to the commoner level. Only the higher level has access to hardware layers. This is the reasonable thing to do, and it’s not going to take months to design an SDK either.
And even if it’s all one flat space, a well-designed architecture should make it impossible, or at least very, very hard, to install software that can wreck the rest of the system. Things like APE demand superuser privileges to install on Mac OS X; Apple could simply disallow any software that demands them that are not amongst The Chosen Few System Apps.
The problem here is entirely one of attitude. The most successful smartphones today are those that fellate Microsoft or provide an open platform (or, rarely, both); iPhone looks set to do none of those, and unless the bundled software sprung directly from Zeus’ forehead, it’s not gonna cut it, it’s not going to fulfill every need a smartphone user could reasonably have. Once again from the interview:
“You don’t want your phone to be like a PC.”
Damn straight. I want it to be like a Mac, and this is nothing of the sort.
I understand your gripe, and it was my immediate reaction as well. But, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that apps for the iPhone will still be huge improvement over what is available for other smart phones.
Also, I think that true-native apps for the iPhone will be allowed at some point in the future…
By http://www.cleverdevil.org · 2007.01.12 18:09
I am under no conviction that there won’t ever be native third-party apps – Steve opens the door to that. But he does say it won’t be an open platform.
Additionally, web apps really aren’t the answer on a phone, not even iPhone. The biggest problem is that of prohibitively high data rates, and there are other issues. Like you say, web apps on iPhone can be cooler than web apps on, say, Treo, but that doesn’t really say a lot, and they’re still not genuinely usable. On iPhone especially, with no Flash or Java, there’s an even wider gap between the technical capabilities of web apps and native apps.
By Jesper · 2007.01.12 20:23
I don’t think that Steve’s saying that one buggy app on an iPhone somewhere could bring down “their West Coast network”. I think he’s just talking about iPhone users on the West Coast, and that he wouldn’t want hundreds (or thousands) or people’s phones to break because of some bug in 3rd party software he has no control over. He’s just being arrogant in suggesting that Cingular’s West Coast network will be almost entirely composed of iPhones. As for wanting the iPhone to “be a Mac”, I disagree: I think the most important part is for it to be a good phone. I don’t want my iPod to be a Mac either, just an excellent music player, which it is. I guess it’s inevitable that people do, though, when Steve made such a big fuss over its running OS X.
By James · 2007.01.12 20:41
I want it to be a Mac in the respect that I can write good apps for it using Apple’s own development tools distributed free of charge with the device, and benefit off of other people’s apps.
The iPod is much less flexible – the iPhone embeds an iPod, but the iPod could never embed even a simple phone app. The iPhone is begging to be developed for, and that wouldn’t have changed if Steve had been silent about it running OS X.
By Jesper · 2007.01.12 21:00