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Steve Jobs Announces 3rd Party SDK for iPhone for February 2008

This is such great news. If you look around today at some of the really good apps that are available for iPhone now, just imagine what kind of quality apps we'll see once it's opened up! It's going to be amazing.

On a side note though, now that Apple announced Leopard's shipping date and the SDK for iPhone, and ideas what they're planning for the October 26 press day?

Must be something otherwise they wouldn't bother, but it seems to me that the two really big pieces of news are already out? Mmm-kay?

Cheers.
 
Why do Apple mention viruses? I think there's no virus for Mac OS X :confused: Or is this just a pretence for all the great apps that excited before, isn't it?
 
This is wonderful news!

The multi touch interface is the future. Cool! :)

Smart of Apple to take this step carefully due to the possibility of virus and other issues.
 
Macrumors said:


Steve Jobs has posted an open letter revealing that Apple will be releasing a 3rd party SDK for iPhone and iPod Touch development. The SDK will be released in February 2008.

At this time, the letter only appears on Apple's Hot News page:

We've reproduced it here in its entirety:



Article Link
Click to expand...

Wow. I noticed the direct attack on Nokia's "totally open" campaign against the iPhone. Very nice and underhanded in the way they say it like a compliment. I didn't realize that Apple really saw this ad campaign as any threat to market-share. People on these forums always seem to make such an issue of things, but I've never seen Apple as being that concerned with them. They have always had a closed off approach that seemed to say "we know what's best for you." This move is a pleasant surprise. Right after responding to Amazon's music store by lowering the prices of DRM-free songs, we get this. I love competition. I'm glad to see Apple responding to consumer needs and making more open devices, even if it's only been a small community that has been begging for this. I can't see how I won't be able to get mobile word and excel in the future now. Then my work will buy me an iPhone!

Great day.

-Ado
 
This is great news...


BUT I think that their SDK only will be permitted to companies that will buy a digital certificate to apple.

I am not seeing in a near future a public SDK available... Steve give the Nokia example.. maybe Apple will do something like that..
 
Sweet! Hope they don't block current jailbreaks/apps in the next firmware updates, otherwise Feb will be a long time to wait.
 
Great news for the 3rd party developer network.

Hopefully they don't force everyone to get a digital signature in order to distribute. Should be interesting to see how they solve that little dillema.
 
One thing to keep in mind: the certification process for these apps will almost certainly eliminate those that would harm Apple's iPhone profits. I don't think you'll see VoIP or IM, at least not until they can either convince AT&T to go with it or find a way not to lose money on it themselves (if they believe they would).

There may be other types of apps they'll decide not to allow; since we don't know the terms of their deal with AT&T, who knows what they might be. I expect endless bitching about this until an iPhone can be hacked to death with not only Apple's permission but endorsement (i.e. forever).

The terms Steve outlined work for me. But they'll annoy a small-but-loud group.
 
Yeah baby!

Now that's what i'm talking about. but before the zillion trolls hop on this thread whinging about how apple's just done an about face, 2 pennies worth.

iPhone OSX 1.0 thru 1.02 is based on Tiger code, ie. no binary signing, sandboxing of apps etc.
iPhone OSX 1.1.1 is closer to Leopard, ie. binary signing and sandboxing of apps.

Now when did 1.1.1 come out oh yeah Sept, and when is the premiere development platform for iphone AKA Leopard coming out? Oh yes 26th Oct.

So when Jobs says that an SDK is coming in Feb, it's not cause he's running around bolting a dev platform on, cause of all you whiners, it's because he's got a finite number of programmers and a product schedule that rates getting iphone and leopard out the door more important than working on an iphone sdk.

The SDK was always on the cards, just he couldn't say when, til now. Probably a bit of PR there to temper the hacking teams from ***** up iBricks long enough for Apple to do this properly.

M.
 
elppa said:
Please note Jobs also says they "plan" for February, not "definitely" February, so don't start whinging on Feb 1st when we don't have your SDK.
Click to expand...

Software development is very hard to schedule and deadlines often slip. Look how close we got to the Leopard release before Apple was comfortable with a version to actually announce the date.

I care very little about the actual date (although, the earlier the better obviously), the important thing is that Apple has publicly committed to it!!!!
 
sweetie81 said:
Why do Apple mention viruses? I think there's no virus for Mac OS X :confused:
Click to expand...

Just because there aren't any doesn't mean there can't be any.

And really, the BEST way to write a virus is to make it look legitimate so that the user installs it all by him or herself! With computers this is harder to do since we're mostly used to buying software from trusted sources. But when people are installing lots of little apps on their cell phone it becomes much easier to fool them since thesea apps are each coming from a random place on the 'net.

I'm certain that one of Apple's methods for combatting viruses will be to make everything available in one central download location and telling people to ONLY use software on that site. There's more to it than that, of course, but that's the biggest, easiest thing they can do.
 
Nice! Good that they announced it now instead of allowing people to be irritated for several months over not being able to add certain features.

So great! I wonder if this was planned of if it's simply a result of customer pressure and many articles mentioning the deficiency - I think the latter given their previous statements about third part stuff.

Anyway, wow! This is gonna be fun.
 
Rot'nApple said:
I agree with your sentiments above, but didn't Steve say at the iPhone announcement somewhere along the way that they weren't opposed to 3rd party apps or an SDK but that they wanted to do it right or something like that. I thought that was expressed by him somewhere along the way???
Click to expand...

I was kind of curious of this myself, I went back and checked. (This is from Engadget's news feed so if I can't fully vouch for accuracy.)

Steve said:
"We have been trying to come up with a solution to expand the capabilities of the iPhone so developers can write great apps for it, but keep the iPhone secure. And we've come up with a very. Sweet. Solution. Let me tell you about it. An innovative new way to create applications for mobile devices... it's all based on the fact that we have the full Safari engine in the iPhone."
Click to expand...

So not a denial that there would ever be 3rd part apps, just that was the solution they had found at the time.
 
Good news (even though I don't own an iPhone or iPod Touch). This definitely has been needed.

I guarantee that apps will have to be downloaded from the iTunes Store (for a small cost). Makes too much sense from both an Apple standpoint (revenue) and developer standpoint (revenue and incentive to create a good app) not to do that.

Don't expect free apps.

At least this will stop people whining about not having iPhone apps.
 
We can only imagine how apple will unveil this SDK, and the quality software that will come out of it. Hopefully this will turn out to be like PalmOS deving on seroids. There has to be like 2 million + apps for PalmOS even with their cruddy UI.
 
MikeDTyke said:
Yeah baby!

Now that's what i'm talking about. but before the zillion trolls hop on this thread whinging about how apple's just done an about face, 2 pennies worth.

iPhone OSX 1.0 thru 1.02 is based on Tiger code, ie. no binary signing, sandboxing of apps etc.
iPhone OSX 1.1.1 is closer to Leopard, ie. binary signing and sandboxing of apps.

Now when did 1.1.1 come out oh yeah Sept, and when is the premiere development platform for iphone AKA Leopard coming out? Oh yes 26th Oct.

So when Jobs says that an SDK is coming in Feb, it's not cause he's running around bolting a dev platform on, cause of all you whiners, it's because he's got a finite number of programmers and a product schedule that rates getting iphone and leopard out the door more important than working on an iphone sdk.

The SDK was always on the cards, just he couldn't say when, til now. Probably a bit of PR there to temper the hacking teams from ***** up iBricks long enough for Apple to do this properly.

M.
Click to expand...


Gee, that makes a lot of sense.

Too bad...it'll be totally ignored around here.
 
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