iPhone will be controlled environment

Steve Jobs has revealed further information on how open or accessible the iPhone will be to developers, and the news isn’t great. While Jobs stated that Apple would be releasing new applications to run on the iPhone, he confirmed that they would be operating a tightly controlled environment to maintain a high level of usability and reliability.

“We define everything that is on the phone. 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,” Jobs said in an interview with the New York Times.

That doesn’t sound very good, especially if you were a third party developer hoping to get in on the action. However, he did offer a glimmer of hope.

“These are devices that need to work, and you can’t do that if you load any software on them. 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,” said Jobs.

So it sounds to me that Apple won’t preclude third party developers, but it looks like each application will have to be individually vetted before it would be made publicly available for the iPhone. I’m not sure how they are going to manage this, will it only be possible to install an application via iTunes?

I can well understand Apple’s impetus here, but they are going to have to play ball with developers at some stage. I want VoIP on the iPhone! That’s if they can agree to call it the iPhone.