Steve Jobs Announces iPhone SDK 467
An anonymous reader writes "It finally happened. Steve Jobs announced an iPhone SDK today. The plan is to release it in February, and the suggestion is that apps will need to be digitally signed (not unlike digital signing in Leopard). Here's hoping that developing for the iPhone/Touch will be cheap (or free) enough to allow the folks who have been writing apps to continue doing so. Says Jobs: 'It will take until February to release an SDK because we're trying to do two diametrically opposed things at once--provide an advanced and open platform to developers while at the same time protect iPhone users from viruses, malware, privacy attacks, etc. This is no easy task.'"
Re:Finally! (Score:2, Insightful)
February is kind of a long time, isn't it? (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, it could also be that it's taken them this long for events to prove to AT&T that resistance was ultimately futile and counterproductive. Hard to say, with that crowd.
Re:Finally! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Waiting for... (Score:5, Insightful)
No, not really (Score:2, Insightful)
I knew that most of the negative responses to this would be along the lines of saying that Apple was "forced" into doing an SDK because of the third party hacking community, when in reality third party development was very likely in the cards all along.
Malware (Score:5, Insightful)
media players that support additional audio and video codecs,
anything that lets you install ringtones for free using your own licensed music,
anything that lets you make calls on alternative networks.
Hear hear! (Score:4, Insightful)
Isn't that the truth! It would be even better if Apple provided a glide-path to current developers to becoming "legit" so that they're encouraged to engage rather than fight. Apple really has no reason to be a jerk about it except spite. Unfortunately, Steve has proven that he's occasionally prone to that.
Re:Finally! (Score:5, Insightful)
I love all the people who are now going to say that Apple is only doing an SDK because the brave, innovative hackers who just want us all to be able to free our hardware have forced their hand.
Kind of like the only reason they have a battery replacement program for iPods was because of the Neistat Brothers' video, right?
Except that it would be wrong, on both counts.
For a device like the iPhone, Apple probably had SOME kind of SDK/third party development planned all along. But the iPhone's OS is still a wildly moving target, and it's not appropriate to have an SDK before things have calmed down with the OS APIs, frameworks, etc.
But if you want to believe that a statistically insignificant (yes, really - most people don't care, much less even know, about this) group of hobbyists and hackers have "forced" Apple to scramble to release an SDK, go right ahead.
Re:Finally! (Score:5, Insightful)
The fact that Apple is a ~15k person company with a massive variety of products means that there must be focus. In part this slim headcount and focus is what allows Apple to produce really great products. (For comparison - Apple is now roughly worth the same, by market cap., as IBM, which employs around 300,000 people worldwide).
Think for a moment what a considerable development the iPhone is. Particularly the software, there is an ungodly amount of work and rework that has gone into producing the final product that you can pick up at the mall. The last thing that Apple was thinking about during the development phase was a clean documented publically available and stable API. No, you can bet that the iPhone API twisted and turned through the development cycle, massive rewritings, refactorings, and changes over a number of years. For Apple to release an SDK and API they have to be clean, stable, unlikely to change and break existing code - all of the things that during the development phase the internal API was not.
When releasing an SDK and an API, massive resources must be put into considering flexibility and change 2, 5, 10 years down the line. These things take time. Apple decided, rightly, to release a finished device this Summer. All the whining in the world (and I believe we got close to that) could not push Apple's internal API into a publicly usable stable state at that time. I think, considering that this is a brand new phone platform (not something like Symbian etc. which has been around a long time), waiting 9 months for an SDK is nothing, in fact, I'm amazed they've done it in less than a year. Mark though - Apple would have been mad never to have provided one, and personally I expected this announcement for WWDC'08, but I have found it astoundingly ridiculous how people have cried and whined about the lack of an SDK without thinking for a single minute. For crying out loud, it's been only three months. The only thing 'long overdue' will, hopefully, be the shutting of the mouths of all the incessant whining.
Re:Security weakness of their own making (Score:5, Insightful)
I mean, I know it would be unheard of for an issue to be addressed or fixed on an OS that is clearly undergoing active major change and development (as is evidenced by internals and framework changes between 1.0.2 and 1.1.1) in four months...
Could the things that Jobs says Apple is working on to make the iPhone platform secure possibly include things like this, or does Jobs need to explicitly say they're addressing this exact problem in order for you to believe Apple might actually be working on the security of one of the most important and visible products in their history?
Re:No, not really (Score:3, Insightful)
Or maybe they was even affraid that people would break the subscription lockin if it was available from the begining.. but uhm.. that strat failed anyway
Re:No, not really (Score:3, Insightful)
Ever thought that there could be incremental plans at work? You know, doing one thing at a time, considering that the vast, overwhelming majority of iPhone owners know or care approximately zero about the whole third party app issue?
Or would they have had to announce this back at the iPhone intro in order for it to be believed that it had been planned all along?
Seriously, Apple is a pretty secretive company, and this is a major product launch that could help to determine Apple's fortunes - quite literally - for years to come, and itself is probably part of a much larger strategy. Just because the announced it now doesn't mean that they felt like they were "forced" into doing so.
I mean, the phone is essentially running Mac OS X, for heaven's sake...you're telling me that Apple didn't have other designs for an amazing environment like this other than its own mostly mundane stock apps? This has been in the cards for a long time. Perhaps Apple was a but stunned by the robust nature of the third-party app community and accelerated its plans.
But to pretend like this fringe hacker community that represented a vanishingly small percentage of real-world iPhone users "forced" Apple to do this, well, that just doesn't stand up to any kind of scrutiny or common sense.
Re:February is kind of a long time, isn't it? (Score:1, Insightful)
> and not a large fee of some sort.
Sadly, it will almost certainly be worse -- it'll probably require payment of a large fee to AT&T, AND require approval of your specific app by AT&T itself. So you can forget freeware, anything remotely controversial, or that doesn't mesh with their Grand ARPU-increasing strategy of the week. (ARPU = Average Revenue Per User)
It's sad, but Windows Mobile is actually the most open platform available to freedom (as in liberty) minded developers and phone owners today. Symbian? Locked up tighter than Tori Spelling's chastity belt during 90210's filming. J2ME? Just as bad. Linux? Either crippled into uselessness by the hardware itself (a.k.a. GreenPhone's glacial GPRS and total lack of EDGE and/or 3G), or locked down even tighter than Symbian (a.k.a. just about every phone made by Motorola). The fact is, phones are one of the few areas where Microsoft uses its might to beat up its customers (the carriers themselves) for a morally worthy cause (the liberty of the phones' purchasers). Not even Sprint & Verizon can robustly defy Microsoft... they might wink at the carrier and ship the phone with certain features disabled by default, but anyone with a registry editor can re-enable them within a matter of minutes.
As for Palm... sigh. Palm. Or maybe Access. As much as I wish them the best (I was a hardcore member of the Palm camp for almost a decade, and have phones all the way back to a zero-day Samsung SPH-i300), I don't think god himself could save them at this point. Short of Access releasing a SDK that allows the latest generation of HTC's PDA phones (Mogul, TyTN, etc) to be reflashed (with or without the carrier's blessing or approval) to get ALP *INSTANTLY* into the hands of the few remaining Palm developers who still care, it's "game over".
I think the huge push to jailbreak helped (Score:2, Insightful)
I never really understood the resistance to third party apps in the first place. The iPhone could not only take a chunk of the phone market, but it could take over the entire smart phone market. The same goes for the iPod Touch and the PDA market.
This puts me in a tough position though... I want a Touch right now, but what if Steve screws current Touch owners by making the SDK cost money? Or only allows for proprietary apps to be installable (locking out the Open Source developers)? or something else... hmmm
Re:Rebels always find a way to rebel (Score:3, Insightful)
if it doesnt cost anything to sign an application (assuming the signature is only to establish who wrote the code and not actually certifying that it wont fuck with your iPhone or the network) then there is no reason to create unsigned apps unless you are writing viruses.
Re:Finally! (Score:5, Insightful)
Steve could have announced the SDK for February 2008 from the very beginning and you'd not see the bitter remarks you rant about.
The strategy Jobs uses for announcing products only when 100% done has its benefits with consumers, but developers hate when you cut them off and don't give them a clear roadmap for what to expect ahead.
Learn from this, don't just add another rant to the thousands.
Re:Finally! (Score:3, Insightful)
Wrong.
I love all the people who think Apple (particularly Jobs) is some sort of prophetic visionary. They react to the market as much as any other profit-seeking companies.
Geek cred is a small but significant factor in tech gadgets and Apple knows this, given that one of the primary reasons for Apple's rising popularity is due to OS X, and one of the reason for OS X's rising popularity is the *nix code base.
That particular video may not have been the sole factor for the Apple's battery replacement program, but it was certainly part of the increasing public awareness of the defects in the Apple devices. However, (and I say this in deep admirations) Apple nevertheless found a way to extract even more money out of its blindly loyal customers while at the same time somewhat-sorta-maybe addressing the criticisms.
And your "moving target" theory is just BS. 1) OS X as a platform has been around for long enough, and Apple took pride in announcing that their phone and new iPod runs on the same platform, and being the first non-smart phone to require some 800mb of OS codes. 2) it didn't take lots of arm-twisting for Symbian, Nokia and (dare I say) Microsoft and other companies to release SDKs for their mobile platforms. While they may have varying validation protocols and so on, they didn't parade some random wild BS theory about their OS being "uncertain". Even Jobs wasn't saying this in his bit. If the API's have been settled, they wouldn't and shouldn't have released the product.
As usual, they were just testing the market to see if they can make even more money out of 3rd parties and customers, which is after all, the goal of every profitable company.
Don't Advertise Ignorance (Score:2, Insightful)
First of all, you're making that up.
But second of all, even if you are right, then Apple would have to be the dumbest development company ever. Here's a company that has a 30 year history of making products that have API's (yes, even the Apple ][ had API's of a sort), but on their latest computer, the one they saw had a huge strategic impact, they never gave it a thought?
Seriously, what you're suggesting is so ridiculous, that I'm guessing you're trolling or astroturfing.
My guess is there never was going to be a publicly available API, but Apple finally realized if they didn't make it available, they'd be overwhelmed by people who actually want to use what they bought in the way the want to.
Re:Finally! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Finally! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:February is kind of a long time, isn't it? (Score:4, Insightful)
Come on, I'd say it's pointless and whinning until it is released and the final terms are known. It reminds me too much of the "no-SDK" whinning. A decent SDK takes time. You run the risk of getting this kind of whinning: "Yeah, they released this SDK along with the iPhone, but it's beta software at best, the API keeps changing, there are a lot of system updates, my iPhone keeps crashing and OMG there are exploits in the wild. They should have waited until it was ready, sheesh."
Observe, know the facts, react accordingly.
dani++
Re:February is kind of a long time, isn't it? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why?
AT&T is not involved with the iPod Touch or with European iPhones at all. Apple made a point out of saying this SDK is for both the iPhone and the iPod Touch. That's meaningful.
My prediction is that it'll be a lot like some Java handhelds. There will be a key repository. It will come with the public key of Apple and, for iPhones, for the carrier from which you currently get service. Developers will be issued a key pair, one to go onto the device they use for development, and one to sign the apps they're developing, but installing the pubic keys onto arbitrary devices will be non-trivial.
My prediction based on that is, anyone who cares about running a wide variety of apps will register as a developer and get a key pair, and freeware apps will have to be open source, because in order to get them signed correctly, people will have to compile them from source so that they're properly signed for their own devices.
If registering as a developer is cheap/free, I am not sure that's a bad thing...
apple will have veto power (Score:3, Insightful)
Anything they don't like, gone. They say its to protect users from spyware and other forms of malware but it'll be used to eliminate anything they don't like. Just like there isn't any decent music sharing functionality in iTunes, there won't be anything on the iPhone that doesn't settle well with the ultraconservatives in Apples Ivory Tower. Instead you'll get crippled functionality, like music sharing with ridiculous limits on the number of people/playbacks per day. As if all of their developers and customers are children who can't be given responsibility. Children don't own copyrights, so they don't need the discretion to share music beyond what Apple believes is "fair enough."
People are still going to flame me saying that we should wait and see. Well, I've been waiting and I see no way to set an mp3 on your iPhone as a ringtone. Is there any reason not to give this functionality other than to protect Apple's new ringtone business? Why would any reasonable person believe that Apple won't do the same thing when granting ISVs permission to deploy applications on iPhone?
The argument that phones are somehow more vulnerable than any other network connected computer and need to be controlled by a central authority is specious.
"Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you. May your chains rest lightly upon you..."
Re:February is kind of a long time, isn't it? (Score:3, Insightful)
Just about the right timing (Score:5, Insightful)
No. Their OS works well and will have passed QA before they shipped. Like any humans, Apple make mistakes, but they generally at least try to adhere to "it just works".
They ported their (stable) OS to a new architecture. The internal developers put up with the codebase (with any extant foibles), and they wrote a completely new UI framework (based on, but different to, Cocoa). They did sufficient QA to get the built-in applications working correctly, and then shipped the device, hitting their target.
Now that it's out, and there's less pressure, they've been tidying it up, and polishing the UI framework, the compilers, any OS routines, and they've announced they're opening it up to 3rd parties. Presumably this means they've been patching the areas they worked around internally.
There's nothing too surprising in any of the above, in fact I'm surprised the "official" SDK will be available so soon. Porting an OS and writing a good accelerated UI framework is a non-trivial task.
Simon.
Re:Finally! (Score:2, Insightful)
Give me a break. Sorry but that is uber spin of the worst sort. Apple didn't tell anyone that they where going to release and SDK to encourage development! Sorry but one of the reasons I didn't buy an iPhone was the lack of an SDK. Do you really think that anyone said "I really want more apps on the iPhone but since they are not going to release and SDK will get one now instead of later!"
Good heavens!
Re:Another thought (Score:3, Insightful)
Common misconception (Score:3, Insightful)
You have confused two very different things.
No one is saying OS X *cannot* get viruses. There are always security holes.
What we are all saying is that you *don't* get viruses, because there are none. Pick your reason - better security model, faster TTF (time to fix), smaller marketshare - the thing is there are no viruses in teh wild to catch right now. That may change but that's how it is currently and has been for years.
Until you can understand the distinction between security flaws and active exploits, you really should refrain from commenting on anything security (or even Mac) related.
Re:Finally! (Score:3, Insightful)
Notice the timing: the MacOS X development team is just winding down from the marathon to get MacOS X 10.5 out the door, and so now are available to do things like this. Personally I think that February is pushing it a bit for this. I was surprised that it would be so soon.
Re:Digital signing (Score:1, Insightful)
Microsoft tries to use signing for trust, which is usually a bad idea, because it leads towards the whole model of 'pay me to trust you so our users trust you' that Windows and Windows Mobile currently have.
Apple's Leopard signing is closer to a SHA1 hash + signature for validity of application updates. If version 1.0 is signed, and version 1.1 is correctly signed using the same private key, then OS X will treat the two versions as the
And if the signature becomes invalid, the application can no longer access your keychain passwords, meaning a virii-infected signed app will actually be blocked from accessing personal data it had permission to access just moments before.
Signing for trust and signing for validation are two different problems, and come with their own pros and cons. Not saying Apple is innovating here, but that the purpose of signing is quite different, and provides different benefits.
according to your own links (Score:3, Insightful)
"we'll patch it later..." (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Misinformation (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Finally! (Score:5, Insightful)
But if you want to believe that a statistically insignificant (yes, really - most people don't care, much less even know, about this) group of hobbyists and hackers have "forced" Apple to scramble to release an SDK, go right ahead.
I don't believe that the hackers were solely the cause for the SDK, but make no mistake, market pressure forced Apple to capitulate. They weren't planning this. They were blindsided with negative press and pressure from their customers and potential customers. At first they attempted to lay this at the feet of AT&T saying that AT&T was concerned with network stability, but that proved to be a big pile of BS, as evidences by AT&T's software development site assisting in software development for every phone in it's lineup except Apples.
And to say that the Apple battery replacement program wasn't directly influenced by that video... well, I see you've drank a little too much of the Steve Jobs Kool-Aid. Enjoy the dreams that he's told you will come.
Re:Digital signing (Score:3, Insightful)
Sure, Artie MacStrawman will, but the sophisticated fanboy will make two points:
1) Sometimes Microsoft actually gets stuff right before Apple. For example, until 10.4, OS X only had UNIX-style permissions, which are inferior to NTFS-style permissions. But,
2) How things are put into practice matters, too. Microsoft has had a good permissions system in place since, what was it, NT 4.0? However, it wasn't until Vista that Microsoft actually started, you know, using them on consumer systems to separate users as has been done in Unix forever.
So yes, sometimes MS is ahead of the curve, like with this applications signing thing, but the question is how are these things put to use? Has MS used application signing to prevent security problems? Pre-Vista, the answer was no. I don't know enough about Vista to say if they're being put to good use now.
Re:apple will have veto power (Score:3, Insightful)