Native clients for iPhone

How soon do you think we'll be seeing native clients being released for the iphone?

When did Steve Jobbs say they'd open it up to 3rd party developers?

the SDK is supposed to be released in February. I think you can be fairly certain that new stuff will start popping up immediately following that.

my guess is a good number of developers already have what they need to start developing...As soon as SDK rolls out, id give it a week or two before we see the good stuff start to be released.

I wonder how much they'll charge for apps. If the prices are ridiculously then your going to see a lot of people (including me) jailbreaking their phones instead.

I think you mean native 'apps', not 'clients'. There already are many (at least a hundred I'd estimate) native apps, but they require jailbreaking to install. When the phone/ipt is opened by apple, I'd bet all those apps will be ported over the legal way very very quickly.

Yeah, I meant apps- my bad. Hmmmm... I didn't even think a lot of people would be charging for their apps once the iphone is opened up....

You think there's any chance Apple will surprise us and open it at macworld??

Shannonb said:

I wonder how much they'll charge for apps. If the prices are ridiculously then your going to see a lot of people (including me) jailbreaking their phones instead.

Click to expand...

Doubt it. I think the Palm/WM software community does quite well considering how much junk is out there with a price tag.

Although I'm sure apple will be releasing apps at a price, I would tend to think that many of the developers out there will be releasing their new apps as freeware (or at least I hope that they will). That seems to be the trend right now, but then again, adding legitimacy always seems to make things more expensive.

Yeah, once it is open, geeks won't find it cool to hack apps for it anymore. Legitimate/large companies will start to make 'useful' apps and charge for them.

I don't think it's really fair to make any assumptions yet. All we know is that an SDK is coming. We don't know who it will be available to (specially selected/approved companies? Everyone?), we don't know how apps will be installed (from iPhone interface, through new iTunes revision, etc), and we don't know how the apps will run (completely native, inside some kind of offline sandbox like current Safari-based apps).

Until we can answer some of these questions, I don't think Jailbroken apps will go anywhere. I STILL think that even if the SDK is open to all comers, the iPhone Dev folks will still be hacking away. Speaking from a coding standpoint, I highly doubt ANY SDK released by Apple will include the methods/calls that the Dev team is using for their unlocks. They won't be going anywhere.

There will be free apps and paid apps. Just like software is.