Before the iPhone launch, Jobs put the kibosh on any talk about Apple opening up iPhone’s platform for third party developers by saying "You don’t want your phone to be an open platform", Apple then backtracked slightly on that statement when they announced that developers could use the web kit engine to develop sophisticated web 2.0 sites and applications for the iPhone.
You will agree that it that didn’t mean complete freedom for third party developers which has motivated folks at #iphone IRC channel to build their first unauthorized iPhone GUI "Hello world" application.
Apple’s take on restricting third party developers sums up Apple’s philosophy. Their products are closed up tight, so that nobody can meddle with them. People weren’t allowed to touch the OS in Macintosh back in ’84 and nowadays they can’t even change the battery in an iPod.
As Nick Carr put it: "In Jobs’s world, users are users, creators are creators, and never the twain shall meet." And really, from a commercial sense, Apple’s philosophy has been a proven winner, and we still love Apple for the great things they have done especially in the last decade. So why change a winning formula?
Apple might not want to change it but the iphone hacking geniuses at #iphone IRC channel seem to disagree and are taking the battle to Apple’s playground, as they have just released the binary of the first unauthorized iPhone GUI application though the application just displays "Hello World" and does nothing else it definitely is a big step in being able to achieve their goal of developing a high quality set of binary utilities for the Apple iPhone.
They have also released the source for the demo application, buildable with the community-built toolchain and UI Kit. There’s also a compiled binary version of the application being hosted here.
This does not mean, however, that the iPhone is completely broken open as apparently each
iPhone has its own special code to be cracked, and even if the code is
entered, there’s no guarantee that the next software update won’t break everything again. Even then it is an impressive achievement towards complete iPhone application freedom.
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