iPhone Developer Program - not so great?
According to Zac Bowling the iPhone developer program, who many are being turned away from, isn’t all we would have hoped it to be. Or to use his own words; “total, laugh-out-loud, crap”.
Take a look at Zacs’ post for a list of some of the major limitations. To put some shortly:
- No way to write a usable IM or IRC client
- No Silverlight/Moonlight
- No third party flash support
- No apps can run in the background
- No apps can interact with the file system
- No access to the dock port
- No access to the Bluetooth hardware
- No way to tie in to the data sync integration (so no syncing a 3rd party app from you Mac to a corresponding 3rd party app on your iPhone)
But, as you read some of the comments made on his blog, there are some very real and sound reasons there are such restrictions. Chris (site) did a nice summary:
To you it may be completely OK to drain your iPhone battery in 3 hours to have your IM or IRC client running in the background checking every 5 minutes for a new message. It might be completely OK that other applications would want the exact same privilege. And that’s because you’re application developers and you only see it from your point of view.
But what about Johnny Knowsnothing that installs the app from The App Store and finds that his iPhone battery suddenly sucks? Do they understand the state of application development enough to blame you, the application designer? I don’t think so. They blame Apple. They cry out that their battery life sucks and demand Apple fixes the issue. Apple starts replacing batteries that don’t need replacing and that increases cost. All because you didn’t understand that the iPhone isn’t a desktop and requires a different approach to your application design.
As a recent switcher, I’ve already bought several books to start learning Objective-C and to begin developing apps for the Mac and (eventually) the iPhone; so at first glance, Zac’s post kinda irked me. But I can understand some of the limitations and hopefully with time things will progress and be more open. I could see value in having access to the Bluetooth hardware and data sync integration. I would prefer stable battery life over an IM program, but that’s not to say there aren’t any apps out there that wouldn’t greatly benefit, or rely, on being able to be used in the background.
We’re already allowed to have mail check our mail for us whenever we want (in the background), so hopefully (under some guidelines and maybe some warnings to the consumer?) the SDK will open up a bit more in the future to allow such things.
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