Is Steve Jobs Giving Up on the Desktop?

Published on by Nick Bradbury

Apparently a few people were surprised when I blogged about being disappointed when I heard that third-party developers wouldn’t be able to build native iPhone apps.  After all, I’m a Windows desktop developer, so why would I care about the iPhone?

The truth is, even though I’m a desktop developer, I think the future of computing is mobile.  Before long, mobile devices will provide the ability to carry around the equivalent of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.  You’ll be able to find out whatever you want to know regardless of where you are.  That’s insanely powerful.

But so far I’ve hated every mobile device I’ve seen.  They’re too clunky, too geeky, and generally just too user-hostile.  I’ve stuck with a woefully outdated, underpowered cell phone for years because of this.

So I got pretty excited when I saw the iPhone.  Finally a mobile device which recognized the importance of the user experience.  This was something I could develop for.

Then Apple announced that native iPhone apps wouldn’t be possible.  Why not?  According to Steve Jobs:

“You don’t want your phone to be an open platform.  You need it to work when you need it to work. Cingular doesn’t want to see their West Coast network go down because some application messed up.”

Wow.  Is it just me, or does that sound like Steve Jobs is willing to give up on the desktop because it can’t be secured?  After all, the iPhone runs OS-X, and Jobs basically said that Apple can’t secure their OS enough to trust third party developers to write native apps for it.  So we’re supposed to believe that they can secure their browser enough to run web apps on the iPhone?

Sure, there’s a lot of power in combining a great mobile device with a great web app like Google Maps, but even successful web developers realize the importance of native apps.  For the iPhone to really take off outside of the geekosphere, it has to be able to access data that’s not on the web, and it has to provide a seamless user experience. 

For that to happen, Apple needs to open up the iPhone to outside developers.

7 thoughts on “Is Steve Jobs Giving Up on the Desktop?”

  2. Simple PR talk. Instead of saying “Sorry, we tried to make it on time but we don’t have it ready” they are saying “It’s for your own good! Just relax – we have everything under control.”
    I’m really surprised that people actually think iPhone will remain closed platform.

  3. “But so far I’ve hated every mobile device I’ve seen. They’re too clunky, too geeky, and generally just too user-hostile.”
    Take a look at this: http://www.oqo.com/
    It’s the smallest PC in the world, yet it is relatively powerful (1.5GHz CPU, 60GB HDD, 1GB RAM, WiFi + Bluetooth).
    Take a look at the docking station. This shows how small this PC really is. The docking station contains the optical drive, by the way.
    No, I don’t work for them, but I believe it is pretty cool ;-)

  4. Using Web Apps instead of ‘desktop’ ones on your mobile is still an utopia.
    For this to work, you need to guarantee cheap and fast mobile access to internet everywhere.
    This is not cheap almost anywhere in the world, fast internet access on mobile devices is not ubiquitous anywhere either (may be in Japan?!?).

  5. Perhaps we will see something like Google Gears appearing for the iPhone, this would give you offline storage but within the sandbox of the browser.

  7. “Sure, there’s a lot of power in combining a great mobile device with a great web app like Google Maps, but even successful web developers realize the importance of native apps. For the iPhone to really take off outside of the geekosphere, it has to be able to access data that’s not on the web, and it has to provide a seamless user experience.”
    Actually, except for business users, I think it’s the other way around. Most people outside of the geekosphere couldn’t care less about third party apps.

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