Simon’s Blog

Judging by various reports on the current state of its brand new desktop OS, Leopard, Apple as a company is still pretty stretched with iPhone-related work. That shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone: the mobile space requires constant and rapid innovation, and new product development. However, I’m not sure the company is really sweating its assets in terms of moving forward optimally, especially when it comes to the forthcoming iPhone SDK.

The iPhone is a fantastic start in the mobile phone business for Apple, even if the sales figures are beginning to look a little disappointing (see the recent price cut). The product itself, though, is great: talk to pretty much anyone that’s bought an iPhone, and you’re find they all really love it. Now, the challenges for Apple are to: take the iPhone world-wide (e.g. it can’t do Chinese character sets yet); launch a family of iPhones with different form factors; and , of course, update to the original iPhone.  And, of course, they have to sort out the mess of a business model they’ve created (see the huge percentage of iPhone customers that want to circumvent Apple’s model). It’s a huge amount of work.

In the last few days, there has been a huge storm with Java developers complaining that, in Leopard, Apple hasn’t delivered to developer expectations in terms of for Java on the Mac. Now, although all the freaking out is a probably little premature, it’s clear that the Java team at Apple is under-resourced. I have to wonder whether or not Steve Jobs understands just what a great job his software engineers have done with Java for the Mac. They’re a great asset to Apple, and it’s a capability the company simply isn’t making the most of. Apple’s Java team, with just a little more investment, could have done a great job of Java on iPhone. So, just as Apple’s Java engineers do a great job of making it possible to write Java applications that look and feel like native apps on Mac OS X, so I believe they could have done with apps on iPhone.

Apple has always needed an amazing SDK for iPhone, despite Jobs simply not being able to understand they needed an API at all, to start with. The truth is, Job’s Java team could have delivered just that - an amazing SDK. What Apple appears to be planning for the iPhone SDK isn’t going to amaze anyone. It looks like it’s going to be a standard native SDK. That’s fine for what it is, but it’s going to be an uphill struggle to attract a high-volume of developers.

However, the iPhone hardware is powerful enough to support a full-featured version of Java; and Apple has a super-talented team of Java engineers. By innovating, and releasing a full Java SE (not ME) and SDK for iPhone, Apple could have attracted huge numbers (that means - millions) of Java developers to the iPhone platform. I’d be willing to bet Apple would have sold millions of iPhones, just to Java developers, if they’d sweated their assets, and done something great with Java on iPhone.

It’s a pity to see opportunities go to waste… but that leaves the door open for the competition. Sun has JavaFX Mobile waiting in the wings; and Google is rumoured to hava a Java-based mobile OS that has been described by some people as “JavaFX Mobile done right”. I’d say it’s too early to say how good JavaFX Mobile is going to be. However, one thing isn’t in doubt: the mobile phone platforms that will ultimately win out are the platforms that can attract the largest volume of talented developers: as Steve Jobs himself said, future innovations in mobile are going to be about software. Going with an SDK based around a small niche programming platform, as Apple seems to be doing, almost certainly isn’t the way to win…