The iPhone SDK: What Apple Got Right

It's not often I write something completely positive about Apple...but there are exceptions to every rule, as I'm about to prove. As Thursday's iPhone special event approached, I was looking forward to it, but with some trepidation. As a user whose had third-party applications on his iPhone almost since such a thing was first possible, I had concerns that Apple wouldn't quite understand how well this system had been working.

But now, having read the coverage of Apple's briefing, I am happy to admit I was completely off-base with my concerns. I think Apple has hit a proverbial home run here, with everything from the Enterprise support to the actual SDK to the approach it plans to take for distribution. Here's why I think Apple did everything right...

Enterprise support

Even though AT&T hasn't offered an enterprise iPhone plan until recently, there's no doubt that iPhones are in use at any number of large companies (including Apple, of course). Apple, it seems, has seen this, and proved today that it's listened to these unofficial yet very important corporate customers. By adding full Exchange support, remote wipe capabilities, Cisco IPsec VPN, WPA2, and other such features, Apple has removed all the roadblocks to large-scale corporate purchasing.

The SDK

From a non-technical person's perspective, the SDK would seem to deliver everything a developer could possibly want. Developers have access to the iPhone's sensors, its locating abilities, OpenGL graphics, OpenAL audio, audio recording, the camera, and much more. The SDK is free, and runs on top of Xcode. It includes a drag-and-drop library of iPhone interface objects for use in Interface Builder, the ability to locally debug an app running on the iPhone, video capture and performance analysis tools to find bottlenecks, and perhaps most impressively, a full iPhone simulator that runs on your Mac, so you can develop for the iPhone even if you don't yet have one.

While the SDK is free, if you want your application distributed, it will cost you US$99 to join the iPhone developer program. I think this is a reasonable arrangement--by not distributing apps for free from every single developer, Apple will make sure that those who want their apps distributed are at least somewhat serious about their projects. And yet, the $99 price point is low enough that even smaller developers will be tempted by the opportunity for millions of iPhone users to see and potentially purchase their program.

About the only downside here is that Windows developers will need to purchase a Mac to develop for the iPhone...as if having to buy a Mac is a downside.