Whiners, start your engines [UPDATED]
by moose
So, MacWorld reports that some developers have started complaining about the limitation of the iPhone SDK. Remember when Apple released the iPhone, “developers” copmplained about the lack of an SDK, then Apple announced that they would ship an SDK, and “developers” complained in advance that it would be expensive, locked, only for some selected third-parties… Then Apple releases the SDK, which is, actually, quite good, and offers probably one of the best deal for small indie devs in termes of development costs and distribution of their apps. And what happens? “Developers” complain that there are intolerable limitations and blah blah…
So Rogue Amoeba has posted a list of said “stifling” limitations:
we worry about the potential for innovation to be stifled, due to these restrictions:
- Allow applications to be installed at the user’s discretion, not Apple’s
- Allow applications to run in background on iPhone
- Allow access to root user on iPhone
- A MediaPicker API for accessing the iPod music files is needed
- Add option to allow iPhone applications to access entire filesystem
- Allow iPhone applications to access the host computer when docking
- Permit Voice over IP on the cellular network
- Allow iPhone applications to access the docking port
And a good serving of Apple stocks would be nice too, with fries.
[UPDATE: let's make it clear: this post is not a rant against Rogue Amoeba, I think they do great and useful software. Nor are they the only ones "complaining" about the SDK. There's been sightings of the fast-growing species (actually more tech pundits than real developers) all over the web, for example here, here and here. It's just about being slightly fed-up with people never ever being satisfied with what they are given.]
March 12th, 2008 at 01:14 CET
Except that their suggestions are (for the most part) highly reasonable.
Rogue Amoeba are respectable Mac devs already. I don’t think they deserve the quotation marks.
March 12th, 2008 at 07:47 CET
Of course they are perfectly reasonable… for them. They’re basically asking for changes that would make THEIR software work on the iPhone. And I’m not even sure about the bit about “VoIP over EDGE”, in the context of a cellphone it des not seem reasonable: I’d personally wish for it, but “reasonable”?
And then, my problem is not with people making wish lists, my problem is with people that will always complain, not matter what they get.
March 12th, 2008 at 09:55 CET
Well, it isn’t reasonable for phone companies, since they’ll be loosing revenue - but phone companies aren’t terribly reasonable either.
VoIP over EDGE could be a minor inconvenience for phone companies if lots of people began to use it - but even without that suggestion, a few of their others are critical.
Not allowing bytecode to be executed or interpreted from any other sources apart from the iTunes store is problematic, meaning firefox-style extensions, emulators, virtual machines, or even automation programs in the vein of Automator (mobile) would be disallowed.
Then there’s the filesystem and memory access restriction. If you can only access files and data inside your sandbox, you’re going to have a whole load of very fragmented data in a variety of application specific formats.
It isn’t so critical for applications such as games, which rarely need to share data, and have a very stand-alone design paradigm - but let’s say you want to make a program that takes the frontmost page in safari and lets you chat a link over IM to somebody. Under Apple’s guidelines, that’s prohibited, since you’d have to access data inside Safari’s memory space.
Or working with your iTunes library - many people use last.fm - and thusly it should come as no surprise that MobileScrobbler is a very popular application for Jailbroken iPhones. MobileScrobbler can’t access iTunes DB data with this restriction.
Forget ad blocking or media plugins for Safari. Forget extra A/V codecs for the QuickTime media layer. Forget convenient ‘add to del.icio.us’ buttons.
Root access, I can understand, too. Some applications would require root access.
And then there’s the ‘no background services’ rule. I do understand the reasoning behind this - Apple doesn’t want poorly written services slowing the phone and eating battery life - but surely apple could relax the limits a little? How would your IM application check for new instant messages and keep you logged in while not in the foreground if not for an ‘Unknown Purple’ sub-process? Apple’s own apps require background processes to run - Mail and SMS.app, the iPod app, etc. In this case, even just allowing small, tightly controlled background services would be acceptible - restricting them to sizes of less then 512KB, even.
Ultimately, I was very impressed with the iPhone SDK and distribution method, and I honestly don’t think the distribution method was Rogue Amoeba’s main concern - it was the lack of capacity to write the applications they want to write!
Really, though, the usefulness of the SDK is severely compromised with those restrictions. I think the XCode integration, Aspen Simulator, DTrace/tethered debugging, and $99 ‘AreYouSerious’ developer certificates were fantastic ideas, implemented extremely well. But these few little problems (assuredly not terribly hard to fix, at least from a technical standpoint) really get in the way of what would otherwise have been an absolutely astounding software release.