Five Things Apple Needs To Do To Make The iPhone SDK A Success
Tomorrow, Apple will release details of the iPhone SDK. This is really crunch time for iPhone. If Apple gets this right, it will be a key part of paving the way for explosive future growth in iPhone sales. If the company gets it wrong, it could signal a future sales slowdown.
What does Apple need to do to “get the SDK right”? Here are five key things I think they must do:
1) Enable developers to write applications that access important features of iPhone hardware and software. For example: the camera; address book; SMS messaging; various sensors etc.
2) Enable developers to deploy applications rapidly. It won’t be acceptable for Apple to mandate that it must vet each application before allowing it to be deployed. This is especially true of new versions of existing applications e.g. that might fix mission-critical bugs. In other words, Apple must not be a bottleneck in the application deployment process.
3) Enable developers to deploy applications without any input from Apple. For example, companies might want to develop private custom software to run on software for use by their employees.
4) Enable developers to develop free (as in zero cost) software. Many modern business models require that software be made available at zero cost to the customer. Apple must not put any barriers in the way of this (for example charging the developer to deploy an iPhone app).
5) Enable OTA (over the air) application deployment. Sync’ing via connecting the iPhone to iTunes running on a Mac or PC is fine for some applications. However, it won’t work be good for all applications. For many applications (particulary those where impulse purchases represent the majority of sales), it will be important that people can download, install and purchase applications simply with the iPhone being connected to the phone network.
Tomorrow, we’ll see how Apple scores against the above list…
Asam Bashir wrote:
Hope you like Ruby on Rails,
http://developer.apple.com/tools/developonrailsleopard.html
“Stay tuned for the second article in this series, where we’ll build on this basic Rails application, including customizing views, working with web forms, adding AJAX support, and supporting an iPhone interface on Mac OS XLeopard.”
Posted 05 Mar 2008 at 9:49 pm ¶
simon wrote:
Ruby is a good programming language; and there’s lots of hype around RoR. I don’t find Rails to be all that impressive, though, to be honest. But that’s just me - lots of people are super-impressed (for right, or for wrong). Apple is sensible to be supporting RoR development though.
Posted 05 Mar 2008 at 9:58 pm ¶