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While Steve Jobs says the three plus months developers will have wait for an iPhone SDK are essential for ensuring security on the phone, other industry insiders are starting to wonder if the delay might be attributable to something else. Something, say, more tablety with a touch screen interface?
Chris Messina (pictured right), co-organizer of iPhoneDevCamp, says he's particularly intrigued about why Apple chose to go down the SDK route now.
"Is Steve getting senile in his old age and starting to cave to public clamor?" Messina asked rhetorically. Probably not, considering Apple tends to plan these things far out in advance. And while the company could certainly use a PR boost, the decision to pre-announce the release of an SDK in February still seems a dramatic shift in stance and MO -- even if the web app arrangement was meant as a stopgap measure, as some have suggested.
In a conversation this morning, Messina floated an interesting idea: basically that the February release could also be a sort of strategic buffer, or as Messina puts it, as way for [Apple] to wait a couple months to see how Leopard fares and maybe even drop a new touch screen device on the public during January's MacWorld.
"[The delay] would give them the chance to not only push out an iPhone 2.0 upgrade in February (to get the device ready and secure for 3rd party apps)," but it would also give the company a chance to release another tablet-like touch screen device. "Where else is the mobile OS going to show up otherwise?" Messina asked, adding that if Apple did come out with such a device, it would not only help legitimize the touch screen interface but also get the creative juices flowing for both web-based and native app developers.
Not that the iPhone isn't already an appealing platform. "The reality is we have more computing power on [the iPhone] than we had on a lot of PCs just a few years ago," Messina admits. Indeed, this was precisely the reason he was a proponent of creative web apps for the phone.
Whether Apple's move was calculated or not, Messina can't help but feel that Apple's SDK announcement is a sign the public (and developers) just aren't ready for web apps. "In some ways, I think that the web has failed the iPhone and Steve Jobs," he says. "It's kind of unfortunate. It could've been the first real web-driven platform. But since we're not there yet, it looks like we'll just have to wait." Given today's news, I'm sure most developers are only too happy to do so.
UPDATE: Messina details his "quasi-resignation and disappointment" about the iPhone SDK in more detail over at his blog.
