It didn’t take long for developers to start criticising Apple’s iPhone SDK, which was launched last week to allow people to create native applications for the handset. For example, Jonathan Zdziarski, one of the leading lights of the underground iPhone coding scene, has laid into the SDK:
“The Apple SDK, as many have come to find, has arguably crippled much of the functionality that set the iPhone apart when first released. Even simple features like the ability to run a program in the background, have been crippled in the Apple SDK.”
This backs up a separate post I was reading this morning on the Technovia blog, which backs up the ‘apps can’t run in the background’ point, while also claiming that “No application can access any other application’s data” and “There appears to be no way that I know of for apps to sync to the desktop”.
Has Apple indeed crippled the iPhone SDK? And if so, will developers put up with it in the knowledge that getting an app onto iTunes could be a big revenue generator? Time will tell.
(via iPhone Atlas)
I disagree with the notion the SDK is crippled because of lack of multitasking, all one has to do is look at Windows mobile to see how multitasking basically ruins the user experience as memory hog applications tie up the device, rendering it unusable for periods of time. Also it is a Godsend that apps can’t run in the background as I am sure it would only a matter of time before some shady coder found a way to download your mail, contacts, phone call history to some website running in the BACKGROUND completely oblivious to the user.