Applications are coming for the iPhone

ism tech

Posted Thursday, 31 January 2008, 02:48 HST @492

From Forbes: developers are readying programs that will actually run on the iPhone, instead of just in the Safari web browser. There’s a wide variety of web-based applications available, but these programs don’t offer the speed and features that an application that is actually running on the iPhone could provide. Web-based applications also have to respect firewall and security rules in order to access any Web-based data.

Apple has not released a Software Developers Kit (SDK) that contains tools that help programmers access the iPhone’s resident applications like the address book and calendar.

Windows Mobile, Palm and Symbian mobile phones do run applications directly. The operating system developers released SDKs long ago.

Apple has maintained strict control over the iPhone application market through the company’s exclusive agreements with mobile carriers. Carriers either want to sell the iPhone or sometime like it, as I discussed on 13 January 2008. It’s widely assumed that Apple will let programmers sell their iPhone applications through iTunes, which is the management software for iPhone users. Ars Technica revealed that an iPhone application installation key – a very long string of numbers – has been identified by some programmers and released on the Internet as an image file.

Of course, Apple would take a percentage on any software sold through iTunes. The Forbes article mentions 30 percent as a possible fee. As Marc Hedlund pointed out last November, the Sidekick uses a similar business model. As a Sidekick user, I agree with Marc – I hate paying for features on my phone. The Sidekick 3 doesn’t include a world clock, for example. Users have to navigate to the phone’s download screen and buy a clock.

One of the Sidekick’s original developers, Andy Rubin, now works for Google on its Open Handset Alliance project. I mentioned the project on 5 November 2007. Here are some other articles about the rumored gPhone.

There are third-party iPhone applications available, of course. Some of these are designed to unlock the iPhone, or to add an application installer feature.

But Apple can break these unauthorized applications or change the application installation key at any time by updating the iPhone firmware, as I mentioned on 26 January 2008.