The “Break it Down” Blog

In a complete about-face, Apple now loves 3rd party developers and 3rd party apps… who would have thunk it?!

John Hering sends along the scoop that Apple has officially announced (the once rumored) iPhone/iTouch SDK will be released February.

Apple says the reason the SDK is taking a long time is due to the complexities of developing an open SDK for 3rd party developers while still keeping the platform free of viruses and malware that can silently spread. I believe them, that is a tricky task.

They also lauded Nokia’s design of using a developer-issued security cert required to run any code published to the device. This is similar to what the BlackBerry does, and while I agree it is a big security boon, it discourages 3rd party app development as the bar to even get started is atleast the cost of the cert and complexities involved in getting it.

Although I can’t argue that strongly against it, it’s not like I want to see 100k downloads for my phone and only 1k of them are legit and the rest are viruses or shit software that the person writing had no intention of keeping going.