I honestly think Apple had no idea what they were dealing with when they entered the cell phone market. It seems like the hacking movement forced the truth down Apple's throat that they can't survive against the enormous will of the people. In a way, I think the hackers showed Apple that thirty party developers were making the iPhone way better than Apple could ever do on its own. Apple was naive to think they could go it alone with their closed architecture. iPods: yes; computers and PDA's: NO WAY!
What makes you think that they hadn't been planning this from the beginning?
They can't just listen to the news and then one day decide, ok, next week we will have an SDK built from scratch. They had to have been testing this thing and refining it for quite some time now.
Apple has very strict product development roadmaps... 2-3 years from concept to market. During this time, their engineers are working around the clock to bring something to market in a tremendously short time frame and often this means that things like 3rd Party SDK's might not be ready when the baseline product needs to be deployed. The prototypes they tested two years ago may be nothing like the final product for which the SDK is made, hence the SDK development doesn't begin until later in the timeline.
Apple clearly knew what they were doing as research most likely showed them they could sell a million phones just fine without any authorized third party apps. They knew others would develop them in the meantime, but they had to keep their end of the AT&T bargain so they were forced to make modifications that disabled many of these hacks and THAT if anything was at least, I will concede, a catalyst to push Apple to move on getting the SDK out the door.
I just think back to when analysts said their move to Intel could flop because it would take at least a couple years just to port OS X over to Intel... so what does Jobs do? He drops the X-bomb by revealing that Apple had already been compiling it in secret since the first iteration of OS X. Even so, it wasn't that instant that the Intel Macs were ready for deployment.
My brother works at an executive level in a product development atmosphere, currently responsible for microprocessor design at AMD, and a microchip alone is a tremendous project, nevermind an entire product.
Long gone are the days when a single engineer could understand, assemble, configure and program every component of a PC's hardware and software... it's a massive undertaking to deploy a 3rd party SDK for something as dynamic as iPhone. This is a new interface paradigm, but it's still Apple, and they can't just roll out some POS kit that doesn't ensure maximum security, maximum interoperability, and maximum aesthetic uniformity and ease of use across all apps for a seamless user experience. That's not as important to other companies but I'm sure it results in Apple's SDK for this new territory being a lot harder to develop and protect from exploitation... and I don't mean just tinkerers who want to install a Pac Man ROM on their iPhone, but malicious folks who want to create viruses, etc.
TV