Breaking: Steve Jobs promises third-party apps on iPhone, iPod touch

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: Steve Jobs—the real one, you understand—needs a blog. Stat. Until then, the Apple hot news page will have to suffice for bombshells such as this one: a Software Development Kit for the iPhone and iPod touch due in February.

Boo yah. Let me turn it over to The Jobs:

We are excited about creating a vibrant third party developer community around the iPhone and enabling hundreds of new applications for our users. With our revolutionary multi-touch interface, powerful hardware and advanced software architecture, we believe we have created the best mobile platform ever for developers.

Jobs goes on to say that the delay mainly has to do with security: finding a way to balance the concerns of developers with making sure that the iPhone isn’t vulnerable to viruses and malware.

Some claim that viruses and malware are not a problem on mobile phones—this is simply not true. There have been serious viruses on other mobile phones already, including some that silently spread from phone to phone over the cell network. As our phones become more powerful, these malicious programs will become more dangerous. And since the iPhone is the most advanced phone ever, it will be a highly visible target.

Security is a valid concern, especially given the fact that, for example, the iPhone’s default root password is well-published and all programs run as root. That’d be kind of like setting kids loose in a cutlery shop.

Right now, I feel pretty damn enthusiastic—I wrote only a few weeks ago that while I liked the 1.1.1 update for what it brought to the table, I was disappointed that I lost all the third-party apps that I’d come to enjoy using. But that enthusiasm is tempered until we see exactly what the SDK entails: for example, will anybody be able to write apps, or will it be limited to an exclusive few, as with iPhone games? There will certainly be limitations that hackers didn’t have to contend with.

But no matter how you slice it, the news is promising. February can’t come soon enough.

Category: Software

Posted by Dan Moren on Oct 17 2007, 12:01 PM ET

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iPhone illustration by Joe Zeff Design Inc. // Design by Jason Brightman