Steve Jobs Talks About Third-Party Development for iPhone

Speaking to John Markoff of The New York Times:

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

Markoff points out that even if Apple maintains complete control over native software running on iPhone, third-party developers still might have an in by writing web apps targeted at the iPhone’s web browser. The problem with that is that web apps, even really clever web apps, are never going to be as cool UI-wise as native apps.

★ Friday, 12 January 2007