ldopa.net

That’s the only way to describe the growing revelation among the geek community that Apple’s new iPhone will be a closed system (like the iPod) and not an open one (like the Treo). Excitement is high for the iPhone, and when Jobs first referred to the software running on the iPhone as “Widgets”, I — probably along with every other nerd — imagined he was referring to the bundled combination of HTML, JavaScript, CSS and occasionally compiled binaries that comprise Mac OS X’s Dashboard Widgets. Visions of rapidly developing my own custom widgets to control my appliances and check on my dog danced in my head, but apparently according to Jobs this would be verboten, and the official reasons are weak:

“You don’t want your phone to be an open platform,” meaning that anyone can write applications for it and potentially gum up the provider’s network, says Jobs. “You need it to work when you need it to work. Cingular doesn’t want to see their West Coast network go down because some application messed up.”

Weak. But on the other hand: I can kind of understand their position. I’m one of the first people to want to tinker with any gizmo I buy — I have a modded XBox, a PSP that plays homebrew emulators, a Yamaha P-120S electric piano I’ve opened and fiddled with many times. I like to fiddle with things. My brother, however, goes even further than I do: he often fiddles with things to the point where they don’t work anymore. I actually know a lot of people like this. I think, for those people, having the iPhone and the iPod being a closed system actually might save them a lot of grief, “saving them from themselves”. Apple Inc. is increasingly in the business of making appliances, and very few people outside of the sweaty geeks from Make Magazine hack their toaster. That’s probably a good thing, because at the end of the day, you really just want your phone to work.

However, primarily I suspect the reason for the “closed” nature is not because of reliability issues — even on the incredibly spindly and crashtastic Palm OS third-party apps are allowed — but instead because pretty much any gizmo that touches Apple’s DRM is going to be a closed hardware platform from now on. If you release an SDK, the first thing people try to do is crack your DRM. Apple is now (surprise surprise) the world’s leading producer of DRM encrypted media, and it’s not actually in their best interest to give the hacking community clues on how to strip off the FairPlay DRM that protects their media from file sharing networks.

So will we ever see third-party/homebrew apps on the iPhone? My prediction is “not as long as it plays iTMS media”… so, no.

~jeff