Comments on: Is The iPhone Any More Attractive To Developers Now Than It Was Two Days Ago?

By: SXSW 08: Life after the iPhone « Innovation Cloud

SXSW 08: Life after the iPhone « Innovation Cloud — Sat, 10 May 2008 15:15:27 +0000

[...] Mobhappy (Carlo Longino) Is The iPhone Any More Attractive To Developers Now Than It Was Two Days Ag… [...]

By: Brennan

Brennan — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 20:59:44 +0000

I know the CW is that PalmOS is old and busted but at least it’s still *open*. You can still write and distribute your own app without asking permission from anybody.

By: Bela

Bela — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 03:36:54 +0000

The best thing in the iPhone SDK is that Java is not supported. Apple software is successful because they are polished. That kind of perfection is not achievable with java.

By: raddedas

raddedas — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 10:22:03 +0000

Completely agree – the Blackberry comparisons do seem to be missing the whole issue of a keyboard and a platform optimised for messaging, push email itself only ever seemed a small part of the proposition for me…

As for market share – everyone is now well aware that mobile applications are officially dead and a waste of space, but even if we ignore operator portals there is the small matter of eg. the 7 million downloads/month from getjar.com. That would be more than one app per iPhone user per month from one random freeware site on the net.

Interestingly, look at this kind of mobile download success story and you see that the kind of apps people seem to download may not be the kind Apple wants to distribute – and by placing themselves as a major testing bottleneck, Apple will have no choice but to limit the scope of applications available to customers. This can be a good thing – no-one benefits from 300 competing calculator programs – but how much do you trust Apple to decide what you are allowed to run on the electronics you paid a lot of money for?