CEO Steve Jobs has come out and said that Apple will allow developers which external to his company the chance to develop applications for the iPhone, but he has said, at least initially, that this will only be via existing browser applications.
Jobs told the Apple Developer Conference that applications created with Web 2.0 Internet standards will work with the iPhone, so write applications for Safari and AJAX using the updated version of the Safari web browser and that means no iPhone SDK is required.
Immediately this brought a hail of invective from traditional developers all over the planet, mostly on techie blogs and developer sites.
Jobs said Developers can create Web 2.0 applications which look and behave just like the applications built into iPhone, and which can seamlessly access iPhone’s services, including making a phone call, sending an email and displaying a location in Google Maps. In this way Jobs feels that third-party applications created using Web 2.0 standards can extend iPhone’s capabilities without compromising its reliability or security. These applications can be uploaded to an iPhone via the web or just used on the end of a browser.
Some developers question how they will write programs that can use the hardware features like the touchscreen, the motion sensors and proximity sensor? Which will leave Apple as the only company that can harness these features. The more vocal developers only hope that later Apple will relent and issue specific APIs for handling these features.