Bring on the iPhone apps!

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Tuesday, 05 June 2007 15:25

Your IT - Mobility

But at the D: conference, Jobs said that “We’re working through a way [to make third party software a reality]. We’ve got some pretty good ideas that we’re working through, and I think sometime later this year we will find a way to let third parties write apps and still preserve security.”

“Nobody’s perfect”, Jobs also said, “but we sure don’t want our phone to crash. We would like to solve this problem, if you could be just a little more patient with us, I think everyone can get what they want.”

Third party apps are common on competing smartphone/multimedia computer platforms, with Windows Mobile Pocket PC smartphones able to download software directly from the web and install it immediately – no additional PC required, if the software is delivered in .CAB file format.

Third party support for the Palm is also legendary, and while the Palm OS is, as it stands, a slowly dying yet still popular phone operating system, it is single tasking, uses touch in a basic way and needs a big upgrade to truly compete with Microsoft, Symbian, Linux and Apple.

Of course Symbian has also been around for years and has wide third party software support. People want to customize their devices with additional features if possible, and with the iPhone it will be no exception.

After all, everything else Apple has ever made has been hacked in some way, with the Apple TV hacked to run Joost, OS X and more, the iPod hacked to run Doom, Linux and more, even the iMac itself was hacked to run Windows XP in the time before Apple offered Boot Camp, at a time when Apple said it wasn’t going to offer the feature.

My how things are different today. While there will be a dearth of non-Apple software at launch, if Apple gets their iPhone SDK and third party software quality control program up and running quickly, we’re sure to see as big a flood of third party apps as Apple will allow, expanding and extended the iPhone in ways that we’re sure even Steve Jobs himself hasn’t yet imagined.

So, thank you, Steve Jobs, for relenting on the issue of third party apps for the iPhone, albeit with some conditions. It may be the iPhone, but as we said, with additional software, it really is the iPC - which is a lot shorter than "handheld iMac"! :-)