As you well know, I’m an iPhone owner and fan. While it has been the best phone I’ve ever owned, it isn’t perfect. I’m writing this as I sit waiting for a meeting that isn’t going to happen (I got stood up), I decided to write this little post on my iPhone* about my thoughts on tomorrow’s iPhone SDK announcement by Apple. There are many questions about what will and will not be possible for 3rd party developers, but I’ll go ahead and make my predictions:
- Delivery will be done only by the iTunes music store
- Software will be signed by Apple making small developers mad (and many users)
- Signed apps will be approved by Apple but they’ll claim they will be fully supportive (time will tell)
- There will be options for free apps
- There will be some apps available immediately
- There will be a Blackberry-like service to push corporate email to iPhones
- There will be a lightweight iWork suite announced
- There will be Bluetooth keyboard support
- Developers will have more access to the hardware than feared but less than hoped
- I’ll go out on a limb that they’ll also announce a small tablet device with the touch interface but that may be further out (6 months)
- I’ll be buying around $20-30 of software that is immediately available
I admit I’m taking the shotgun approach. My money is on 1-6. We’ll see what the future holds for us.
* The draft was on the iPhone, but links and final was done on my desktop