This weekend in San Francisco, the second annual iPhoneDevCamp 2 is underway. Whereas the first confab focused primarily on Web applications, this one has a definite native application flavor, thanks in large part to the fact that the iPhone software development kit (SDK) is out of beta and now available for developers.
When the iPhone was released in June, many developers were disappointed by the absence of an SDK for writing third-party applications on day one.
A year ago, we said that no iPhone SDK meant no killer apps. It came, and the apps are here in staggering numbers. But many of the amazing apps and concepts we grew to love as unofficial apps aren’t here, and only about 100 of the 500+ apps at launch in the official store are really useful or desirable—the rest are dupes or just bad. There are no less than five apps to turn my iPhone into a flashlight, yet I can’t turn it into a 3G-powered Wi-Fi hotspot. Why?
Monday’s message is pretty simple: Apple is going for iPhone market share in a big, big way. The iPhone 3G seemingly only has two major hardware additions: 3G networking and GPS. The battery, I suspect, might be stronger (and, given the shape of the back of the iPhone 3G, perhaps a stronger but bigger battery. No front-facing camera. No video from the rear camera. Instead of building a better $400 iPhone, they worked on halving the price of last year’s phone.
Don’t think for a minute that Microsoft is ignoring the iPhone. In fact, the software giant is probing the gadget for profit opportunities. For a little more than a week, a team of the company’s Silicon Valley software engineers has been examining the iPhone software development kit (SDK for short), a set of tools Apple released this month that let outsiders build software for the iPhone and the iPod touch. Microsoft executives aren’t sure yet whether they’ll find worthwhile opportunities to sell iPhone software–but they seem eager to find out.
It’s not often I write something completely positive about Apple … but there are exceptions to every rule, as I’m about to prove. As Thursday’s iPhone special event approached, I was looking forward to it, but with some trepidation. As a user who has had third-party applications on his iPhone almost since such a thing was first possible, I had concerns that Apple wouldn’t quite understand how well this system had been working. But now, having read the coverage of Apple’s briefing, I am happy to admit I was completely off-base with my concerns.
The invite to the media event next week suggests that Apple has figured out how it wants to tap demand from all those corporate types that wish their employer would support the iPhone as well as other devices such as the BlackBerry. Evidently, since the event is also about the launch of the much-awaited iPhone software developers kit, Apple is banking that third-party software (and possibly the ability to update it–the map image shown on the invite includes a place called “Software Update”) is how it will differentiate the iPhone from the BlackBerry. Makes sense: the iPhone–essentially a Mac in a tiny, keyboard-less package–is more of a general purpose computer than is the BlackBerry. Who knows what new apps corporate programmers will come up with to exploit the iPhone’s many talents?
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