Reality Check | Ephraim Schwartz » Will Apple give iPhone developers the SDK they want?

March 05, 2008 | Comments: (0)

Will Apple give iPhone developers the SDK they want?

TAGS: Apple

Unless you were one of the lucky ones to get an invitation to the Apple event in Cupertino tomorrow where Steve Jobs will unveil the iPhone SDK (Software Developer Kit), you’ll have to wait for the news reports to find out how much power Apple will give to third party developers.

In advance of that I thought I’d ask a few ISVs what they’d like to see in an SDK.

[ Get the whole scoop on the iPhone SDK, how to make the iPhone fit in the enterprise, and the latest security issues that the popular smartphone raises in InfoWorld's special report. ]

Ronjon Nag, CEO of Cellmania, is an ISV with a large community of developers that use the Cellmania platform for mobile applications.

Nag says at a minimum level, developers need access to the iPhone APIs for phone book, address book, location-based and GPS-based services plus access to the media player functionality.

However, Nag says Apple is likely to be wary of handing out too much control to the developers lest they interfere with the carriers service and network.

On the business side, Apple has to answer the most important developer question of all, how can I make money? And, Nag warns, if any one of the parties that share in the revenue stream gets greedy the whole ecosystem breaks down.

Antonio Rodriguez, former CEO of Tabblo, a photo sharing site since acquired by HP is now the general manager of HP publishing services.

Rodriquez would also like to see programmatic access to location-based services and access to the iPhone camera.

However, Rodriguez has his doubts as well if this will happen.

If you rate Apple from 1 to 10 on how much they want to control their environment, Rodriguez says, he would give Apple an 11.

"Apple will come out tomorrow and probably sand box developers from using the network altogether. If they do grant access to the network it will have to go through some sort of certification process like they do with iTunes," said Rodriguez.

Rado Kotorov, Technical Director of Strategic Product Management at Information Builders, a business intelligence ISV says it’s all about VPNs [Virtual Private Networks].

"The key problem is there is no enterprise level security and no enterprise level VPN," Kotorov said.

Without that, Kotorov’s customers have no secure way of logging into dashboards, sorting or doing calculations. Kotorov loves the UI which would allow users to jump from chart to chart and dashboard to dashboard but without enterprise level security it just won’t happen.

Odd as it may sound, Kotorov says that although the iPhone screen is way small in comparison to a laptop users know how to create the report parameters that make sense for the screen size but are still useful when away from their main device.

Then there’s Tony Meadow, principal at Bear River Associates, a mobile ISV.

Meadow has been working with mobile systems since Apple’s Newton in 93.

What is exciting for developers is that Apple has redefined cell phones the way Mac redefined personal computers, says Meadow.

iPhone's strong emphasis on usability not just graphic design is what developers find attractive. Meadow points to moving from the point and click metaphor to the pinch and squeeze interface as an example of why usability on the iPhone goes deeper than just graphics.

"It’s a gestural interface," Meadow says.

Meadow’s hope and he says the hope of most Mac developers, is that they will be able to write native applications that live on the iPhone.

"While there are amazing things you can do with Web-based applications using Java script, which is what Apple suggested when the iPhone first came out, there are a lot of things you can’t do that well with a Web-based app," says Meadow.

Meadow expects an SDK similar to what is available for the Mac using a high level language like Objective C.

What he really hopes is for transportability between Mac and iPhone applcaitons.

"I would like to think of it as writing for the Mac but this one runs in the palm of your hand," Meadow said.

Rob Enderle, principal at the Enderle Group, is not a developer and he looks at the SDK from a different perspective.

"Apple should maintain a lot of control over development because there is no [consumer] tolerance for an unreliable phone," Enderle told me.

On the other side of the coin, Enderle thinks developers don’t trust Apple to allow them to talk to customers directly.

The friction between what Apple wants and what the developers want is where the drama comes in, says Enderle.

If you give a lot of control over to developers and Apple does not maintain the high quality of what goes on the iPhone, "the market will move elsewhere," he says.

We will have our answers tomorrow.

Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on March 5, 2008 02:05 PM

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