Why the iPhone does not have a SDK
Sunday, June 24, 2007
A lot of people were pretty disappointed when at this WWDC Steve Jobs announced that there will be no iPhone SDK and people will basically have to create specialized web sites for the iPhone. This was a foregone conclusion to me. Here is why.
Almost every app we use on our computers can be divided into 2 categories-
Also the apps in the second category would require a heavy duty pc and you would probably want to use a huge monitor and a separate keyboard/mouse along with it. Can you for a moment imagine writing your next program in a screen the size of iPhone , which too is half covered by a touch keyboard? No, right.
On the other hand, the apps in the first category don’t require all that horsepower and you probably wont mind checking the top stories on Digg on your iPhone.
Thus it all becomes pretty clear. Apple realized this fact and thus instead of preparing a full blown SDK which would really wont be worth the effort or of much use to anyone, they decided to concentrate on preparing a full blown web browser which could run inside the iPhone and let the web apps run through it.
Now maybe there are some people who disagree with me here and believe a full blown iPhone SDK would be useful. In that case, why not prove me wrong. Post a comment below listing some useful app which you think would make the iPhone sdk worth it. Note that the app should really be useful to the people and not be there just for the cool factor.
Almost every app we use on our computers can be divided into 2 categories-
- Apps to view information.
Eg - Google Maps, Cragislist, Rss readers, Gmail, Digg, etc. - Apps to create information.
Eg - Eclipse, Photoshop, Word, Excel, etc
Also the apps in the second category would require a heavy duty pc and you would probably want to use a huge monitor and a separate keyboard/mouse along with it. Can you for a moment imagine writing your next program in a screen the size of iPhone , which too is half covered by a touch keyboard? No, right.
On the other hand, the apps in the first category don’t require all that horsepower and you probably wont mind checking the top stories on Digg on your iPhone.
Thus it all becomes pretty clear. Apple realized this fact and thus instead of preparing a full blown SDK which would really wont be worth the effort or of much use to anyone, they decided to concentrate on preparing a full blown web browser which could run inside the iPhone and let the web apps run through it.
Now maybe there are some people who disagree with me here and believe a full blown iPhone SDK would be useful. In that case, why not prove me wrong. Post a comment below listing some useful app which you think would make the iPhone sdk worth it. Note that the app should really be useful to the people and not be there just for the cool factor.
Labels: iphone
