People, Geeks, Consumers, and almost everyone I talk to had and has been complaining about the iPhone being locked down to have 3rd party applications installed. Even though there was a solution as soon as the first person was able to JailBreak the phone. And as soon as that happened we started to see a string of iPhone native applications being released by everyone who knew how to write for the Cocoa platform.. OS X.
Soon we had a sexy little application called “Installer.app” which you “App. Tapp. and Install” any 3rd party applications that were included in the Community Sources. The best part about the Installer.app was the rigorous testing they put through all of the applications that were available on it. There were several other sources that you could manually add the link to in the plist for the Installer to read, but those 3rd party (more like 4th party) applications that had not gone through the testing would cause your precious iPhone to freeze up (yes it happened to me too) so you’d have to force shutdown and then reboot.
And then the great news came about the iPhone being able to be unlocked for use with other SIMs (other than AT&T). Which sent AT&T into madness and Apple had to send out an statement of seize and desist. And closely after Apple released a firmware update version 1.1.1 which basically bricked (unusable) all of the iPhone that were unlocked and jailbreaked… unfortunately when I upgraded my iPhone it got stuck too. I had to restore the phone and then it loaded 1.1.1 and since then it has been working good.
My friend also had upgrade his firmware which caused his iPhone to constantly blink as if the sensor on the iPhone was having a seizure.
After reading several digged articles and several forums, I’ve come to a conclusion that the main reason Apple didn’t release an SDK along with the iPhone was because they had to put the entire team back on the project to finish Leopard. Since the iPhone also uses the Safari 3.0 browser and is partially based on an early Leopard build. First of all Apple had to delay Leopard so they could launch the iPhone in the month that they had promised and second of all they can’t really launch an SDK based on an incomplete version of the OS.
Which brings to attention that iPhone SDK might come out in January 2008. It just might be possible that they’ll release it earlier but again Apple is shorthanded on software engineers so much so that they have to shift the direction of the entire team in order to launch a product. With their stock (AAPL) price reaching an all-time high of $173.04, I’m sure they can afford to hire some more programmers.
Anyhow, so expect an iPhone SDK later on this year or early next year in January of 2008, which should enable us to put Summerboard and the list of great applications that have been developing so far in the underground.
UPDATE: Steve Jobs just announced! Apple SDK February 2008
“Let me just say it: We want native third party applications on the iPhone, and we plan to have an SDK in developers’ hands in February. We are excited about creating a vibrant third party developer community around the iPhone and enabling hundreds of new applications for our users. With our revolutionary multi-touch interface, powerful hardware and advanced software architecture, we believe we have created the best mobile platform ever for developers.” Steve Jobs on October 17th, 2007
Thanks for the great article. Keep up the good work.