Developers Unhappy About Apple's Third-Party iPhone Apps Solution

At WWDC, Apple announced that their solution to third party apps on the iPhone would be web applications. While this was heralded as good news by the press, and rightfully so, it was not something that went down overly well with the developers themselves.

Apple's announcement was greeted as great news, but not by developers. This is mainly because they knew too well that it was nothing but spin. Sure, you can make web applications; however, those in the know about developing for the web, were well aware of this, ever since Apple first stated that the iPhone will be running real OS X and real applications like Safari. So Apple's solution for third party programs is, in a nutshell, nothing. Support for web applications has always been there, no wonder developers are a bit miffed.

What makes even less sense is that Apple decided to drop this particular ball at WWDC. At any other time, it would have been a general statement to the public clarifying the situation, but at a developer's conference, it was plain insulting. Apple should have come out and said that for the time being, while there is no way for developers to make applications specifically for the iPhone, they can still make software that will also work on it, in the form of web apps. Instead, they came out with something that was not far from announcing that the next generation of iPods is actually the current generation of iPods, only in brown.

But besides being offered spin from Apple in the issue, many Mac developers are less than satisfied by the offer because of the technical implications. Since the iPhone runs OS X, many developers were expecting to make applications for it the way they make applications for the Mac. Web applications are developed in a totally different manner, that is as different from developing for OS X as developing for Windows is. Furthermore, web applications can only do so much and would not be able to take advantage of the hardware the way traditional applications do.