Slow Death Of The iPhone Platform

Yes your heard right, the iPhone platform is going to die a very slow painful death all thanks to its own maker: Apple

Picture an entrepreneur that got an idea for a new fantastic mobile application, off course that person want to target all mobile platforms to archive the greater market place: Android, Symbian (J2ME/C++ whatever the tool), Blackberry, Windows Mobile/Phone 7 and the iPhone.

So the person might get individual quotes for each platform but because the iPhone is such a close environment the developers that can target that platform will off course charge much more for development so because development for all the other platforms are reasonable they might decide that its then not worth targeting the iPhone... Note that even if they do accept the quote there are still all the issues where Apple reject applications to the AppStore sometimes for every stupid bizarre reasons.

iPhone Development Just Got Harder

When I look into buying a new phone this year I look at a lot of things (does it have a camera, are there apps available , does it have a nice data plan, does it have 3G and Wifi etc) but as a developer I mostly want to code for it... That is why my current phone is a Windows Mobile device since I can easily use MS Visual Studio.Net with C# without having any other cost.

The iPhone is a great device (like the new iPhone 4G will b even better) but its hard to code for it, a big disadvantage.... You need to buy a Mac, learn Objective C or some other tool (like MonoTouch etc), pay the USD $99.00 per year (that isn't actually very bad if you got the money)

With the release of the new terms and conditions for the iPhone OS 4.0, Apple disallow applications not written in C / C++ or rather Objective C.... Development just got harder!

I just want Apple and everyone to remember, for us developers and companies its about USERS/CUSTOMERS... If we can't develop applications easily because a platform is closed down then its the USERS/CUSTOMERS that will suffer since they will not get the kind of applications that they want.

THE USER / CUSTOMER MUST B MORE IMPORTANT, ALWAY!!

I hope this will change for Apple else I will go for another platform like Android where I can actually use a tool like Java to code or go for Windows Phone 7 where you can use MS Visual Studio.Net 2010.