

Developing for the iPhone: The Fear - e1ven
http://daringfireball.net/2008/10/the_fear

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river_styx
_The Phone and iPod apps are special, because at a fundamental level they
perform tasks that cannot be duplicated in a web app. But there’s nothing any
more special about Mail than there is about, say, Calendar._

He's wrong. The Mail app would be near and dear to Jobs because he wants to
take over the market of Blackberry and similar devices also. Keeping a web
browser open in order to receive mail pushed real-time from an Exchange server
would be extremely awkward.

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jcl
_The problem is that the apps that are the most interesting, the most
important, are the ones that take the most work to create. And the apps that
take the most work to create are the ones that are most likely not even to be
made in this environment, because the risk is greater._

I find this argument appealing because if Apple took it seriously, it would
lead to a more open development process. Unfortunately, I'm not sure the logic
is sound -- innovative or important applications aren't necessarily big, so
the development cost of one needn't be much more than any other application.
If innovative applications are more the product of chance and insight than
long development cycles, Apple only needs to attract many developers, not big
developers.

However, if you assume the logic is correct, then Android may end up _helping_
the iPhone: If a developer has an idea for the iPhone that requires
significant investment, they can develop it first for Android for some payoff,
then (with development costs largely sunk) they can port to the iPhone. The
net result is that the iPhone would get a large, innovative application that
it wouldn't have gotten had Android not existed.

~~~
nuclear_eclipse
I have a feeling that porting from Java/Android SDK to ObjC/Cocoa/iPhone SDK
is probably still a lot of extra effort and presents many hazards of its
own...

~~~
jcl
Granted, but I'd guess the major cost of an application is coming up with the
idea and working out the functionality and any user interface issues. With
that cost sunk, porting -- or even rewriting from scratch -- could well be
worth it, especially if you can already gauge the popularity on one platform.

Along those lines, I think we'll quickly see the most popular iPhone
applications either ported to Android by their original authors or cloned
outright by others.

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thorax
It's a long article. Quick summary: NDA is gone, but for the App Store you
still can't trust Apple in the sense that you need to trust a ladder before
you'd climb it. It's not unreasonable to insist that Apple write down some
rules and stick to them regarding accepting applications for the App Store.

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toxik
Some rules would be nice yeah, in the same sense that the laws of nature make
me comfortable with climbing said ladder.

~~~
nuclear_eclipse
Just because the concepts are sound, how do you know the ladder was well-
constructed, doesn't have any damage that might weaken its structure, etc? You
need to trust the company that built the ladder to make quality ladders, and
you need to trust the individual ladder to not have any major faults.

