When all the furor hit the net about the iPhone not really being open to developers I had this little niggling something of a thought at the back of my mind. It took a few days for it to come to the front but what I finally realized is that the iPhone is, at least initially, a thin client. It’s a phone, a networked device. It may run some version of OS X but it isn’t being offered as a stand alone computer.

The lack of open APIs may disappoint programmers but may not mean much to the average consumer as more and more desktop capabilities migrate to the web as services.

iPhone’s web display capabilities offer a terrific opportunity for small to medium sized businesses to provide services to non-office employees via the web. The average Cocoa programmer may not get to make his game run on an iPhone but everyday productivity capabilites like networked addresses, time billing, shopping (America’s favorite passtime), to do lists, and basic word processing are already available for us. This iPhone positioning makes a lot of sense. (standard disclaimer – remember that I am a web designer)

Yes, Steve Jobs did try some slight of hand in trying to pass web apps off as an API. And, yes, telling traditional developers that their development platform of choice wasn’t being opened up on the iPhone now should cause a stir, but the end result for the consumer is still an extremely flexible tool. The future is networked. iPhone fits right into that future.

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This entry was posted on Friday, June 15th, 2007 at 7:32 am and is filed under Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.