A nice article at  gizmodo (No iPhone SDK Means No Killer iPhone Apps) talks about how the iPhone will fail because of the lack of 3rd party apps and an SDK. Not sure that this will be the reason it fails I think that 3rd party apps aren’t quite the deal breaker that developers would like to think of them as.

I am disappointed in this whole iPhone thing as I’d love to have one of the phones - but not if it won’t run my software. I think that Apple should never have responded to the SDK 3rd party questions with anything like a hint of an opportunity. To market the iPhone as “no SDK required” rather than none available is perhaps an indication of how some of the other promises coming from Apple marketing will turn out once the iPhone is here.

However SDK aside the iPhone will not live or die on that basis but on it’s friendliness to users and I think if it is to have it’s best chance of success I would probably have done the same thing and limited 3rd party apps so as not to have the distraction. I assume it will be upgradeable - and perhaps at future date (after they deliver Leopard) it will become a 3rd party device.

I stand by previous posts that I think there are a lot of obstacles to mass adoption of the iPhone. The logic that loads of people have iPods and will buy the iPhone for that reason is great - but I think for it to be valid loads of those people should have gone and bought macs or macbooks - they didn’t. Why not? who the hell knows!

My guess price and lack of applications - a lesson for the phone perhaps!

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 12th, 2007 at 9:52 pm and is filed under Development, Gadgets, iPhone. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.