I think this move has less to do with his Steve-ness wanting to allow 3rd party developers than it does with the imminent announcement of the gPhone. If the rumors hold, and Google develops an open phone platform, what choice does Apple have but to compete? The fact that the SDK will be available in February and not now also suggests they were caught flat footed on the issue.

They are going to "allow" third parties to add value to their product? How altruistic of them.

I wonder how much the SDK is going to cost? On top of the cost of the iPhone, of course.

HTC smartphones aren't open to my knowledge and they are wonderful devices, for what they are. I don't believe Nokia smartphones are open either.

So, requiring a digital signer is "open"? Since when?

One thing I can do with my Palm V device is to write my own software for it, using freely available development kits. How would I do this with an iPhone? Would I have to send my app to Apple for its official Okey-Dokey before I could use my own software on my own device?

No thanks. What makes my Clie so useful to me is that I can put whatever I want on it, without any restrictions. Because of this, my device can diagnose my car's ills, control my astronomical telescope, keep track of my work hours, play my OGG format tunes, surf the web, show pictures and videos, and much, much more; all because it is a true open system.

The bottom line: If it ain't open, it ain't really yours.

I want any app I install to WORK!

Thus the main reason many apps for Windows simply don't work, work poorly or screw up five other apps once installed.

Apple's approach makes sense.

They say make whatever you want and we'll verify that it'll actually work as advertised and not screw up the rest of the phone.

What's wrong with that?

Unless you want constant system conflicts and constant iPhone restarts because that new 3rd party app constantly freezes your phone.

If you wanted that you could just buy a Zune or an Xbox360

(ouch)

Apparently, Apple is going to review and approve each i-Phone add-on. So people will be lining up, and waiting for a department of over-stressed, under-caring interns and temps to try out the proposed add-ons and updates.

Not a smart position for Jenius Jobs to put Apple into. Please just open this thing up, and let us complete it for you. And, you can move on to the next thing. When you try to restrict us, we suspect that you have no next thing.

i'm rather pleased that apple decided to do this, and frankly not surprised at all. they even hinted in the early days that security issues would make it a bit trickier to open up the phone to development but never indicated that they didn't want people to have the opportunity down the road. it was also clear that ajax-based web pages were not really a strong enough solution.

i hope they will continue down this road and let custom skins and ringtones and stuff eventually filter into the phone as well, although i expect ringtones will be tough since they have this dumb model where you pay as much for one as you do for an entire song. the first computer i ever owned which let me customize the sounds on it was a mac plus, so i was sorta disappointed that they were forced to follow the at&t phone company model with that.

I'm as happy as anyone that there's going to be real, supported, third party apps coming to the iPhone. But your post is misleading in that you said a recent "update removed third-party app support and broke some people's phones"

It broke people's phones who used various tools to "unlock" it from AT&T, which is a different issue than installing 3rd party apps.

Second, all iPhone software updates have erased the entire OS and reinstalled the new one. So did 1.1.1. Since Apple has never supported third party apps on the iPhone, it is no shock they didn't go out of their way to preserve apps already installed.

Finally, the update didn't "remove" third party app support. There never was any third party app support. People were hacking the iphone and finding ways to install things that Apple never made easy to do - and it was impressive - but when you tinker with a product in this way, you can't expect it to always work the way you want it. As John Gruber at Daring Fireball wrote, that's the "un" in "unsupported." You're free to do whatever you like to the iPhone, but if the hack stops working, you can't go crying to Apple.

The update did make it harder to access the iPhone's file system and install other applications, hence making the iphone hackers go back to the drawing board on adding apps.

Fortunately, that weird cat and mouse game should go away in February. I'm looking forward to seeing how Apple implements official 3rd party application support on the iPhone.