Technology news and Jobs arrow Fuzzy Logic arrow Steve Jobs says no third party apps on iPhone - yet
Steve Jobs says no third party apps on iPhone - yet E-mail
by Alex Zaharov-Reutt   
Monday, 15 January 2007
Two online interviews with Steve Jobs shows us that the OS X on the iPhone is not the same as OS X on Macs in at least one respect: Jobs says he’ll restrict third party apps on the iPhone. Why?

An article from the New York Times and another from MSNBC show us that Steve Jobs has no intention, at least at this stage, of allowing third party apps to be written for the iPhone like they are for Macs. Right now, on the Mac platform, anyone who is capable can write any application they choose. But the iPhone is set to be different, and Jobs has his reasons which we look at below. 

From the NYT at the link above, Jobs says that “I don’t want people to think of this as a computer. I think of it as reinventing the phone.”

Jobs also told the NYT that “We define everything that is on the phone. You don’t want your phone to be like a PC. 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. These are more like iPods than they are like computers.”

Jobs continues telling the NYT that “These are devices that need to work, and you can’t do that if you load any software on them. That doesn’t mean there’s not going to be software to buy that you can load on them coming from us. It doesn’t mean we have to write it all, but it means it has to be more of a controlled environment.”

So, there will clearly be more apps for the iPhone, apps that we can buy, and apps that may even come from third party developers. But it will be a very controlled process, and Jobs says he has good reason for this.

In the MSNBC interview linked above, Jobs gives his reasons why the iPhone is a closed, and not an open system.

Jobs told MSNBC, regarding the phone networks and Apple’s choice of working with Cingluar, that “We talked to several of them and educated ourselves. [Cingular] were willing to take a really big gamble on us. We decided what the phone is. We decided what software would be on the phone. And so we could make the product we wanted.”

And to make the product that Jobs wanted, he wants control. He told MSNBC that “You don’t want your phone to be an open platform. 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.”

Jobs doesn’t want to see the iPhone overloaded with third party apps that fill the iPhone memory to capacity, slow it down with badly written applications that take too many resources, or in any way impede the iPhone from working when you want it to.

So, what else did Steve Jobs say, and isn't this the opposite approach that Microsoft is taking? Read onto page 2 for the conclusion...



 
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