Mr. Jobs is moving in that direction, too, but it appears that he wants to control his device much more closely than his competitors.
“We define everything that is on the phone,” he said. “You don’t want your phone to be like a PC. The last thing you want is to have loaded three apps on your phone and then you go to make a call and it doesn’t work anymore. These are more like iPods than they are like computers.”
The iPhone, he insisted, would not look like the rest of the wireless industry.
“These are devices that need to work, and you can’t do that if you load any software on them,” he said. “That doesn’t mean there’s not going to be software to buy that you can load on them coming from us. It doesn’t mean we have to write it all, but it means it has to be more of a controlled environment.”
[NY Times]
Egads - what is Apple thinking?!?! At the very least it seems like it would be a no-brainer to allow for an open user-installable widget architecture. You could do that without ANY risk to the stability of the phone.
Apple made a big deal during the iPhone launch about how the iPhone is running OS X - but they now tell us that they have all that power locked away out of reach. This is such a cruel tease... Apple now has the best mobile hardware and software platform out there - and if they were to let developers on it amazingly innovative things would emerge from big and small developers alike. But by making it a completely walled garden, they are throwing all that potential out the window.
Macintosh fanatics are NOT happy, and an anti-iPhone backlash is starting to emerge now that the launch euphoria is fading.
Having the iPhone be a locked down device is probably the one thing that will keep me from standing in line to buy one the day it comes out.
I am NOT happy about this. *grrrrr*