Tim Almond

The iPhone is going to be a closed platform to developers, or at least for now. I think Steve Jobs has dropped the ball with this.

“You don’t want your phone to be an open platform,” meaning that anyone can write applications for it and potentially gum up the provider’s network, says Jobs. “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.”

My deduction here is that Apple will use iTunes as a way of selling applications, with expensive developer kits, and an approval scheme for getting your software on there.

The problem is that it ignores all that has gone before. That platforms are like markets. The freer you make them, the better. Make the platform free, and people will develop software for it, and that has spin-off benefits for the owner of the platform.

The internet beat out all the proprietary networks because it was open. So, people could create solutions for it without a "broker". TCP/IP beat out every other networking protocol because it was open and free. Microsoft got a lot of developers on-board because they gave away a lot of nice things, and created a lot of brilliant, well-priced developer tools.

Even Apple learnt this. Part of the success of Mac OSX was that Apple based their operating system on BSD UNIX, so many of the UNIX/Linux people who already knew the UNIX environment came on board. The various open source applications like Apache, PHP and MySQL could all be easily ported.

Nokia and Vodafone don’t have a problem with me running 3rd party applications on my 6680 Smartphone. Nokia helped to write an implementation of Python so people can do a bit of scripting on their phone. They give away some versions of a tool called Carbide that allows for development on the phone, and tell you how to use it.

The danger for Apple is that Nokia can produce a phone with music player functionality and 2GB of storage without much effort. The N95 can support a 2GB card and can playback a number of music formats. Which then means that it’s not only challenging the iPhone, but much of the iPod line, too.

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Tags: Software Development, Technology //