iPhone as iPlatform

Posted by Brian on 11 July 2008

Today's the day the iPhone launches here in New Zealand. We're excited about this because it's a fun device with heaps of integration among the out-of-the-box software, but most importantly, in ushers in a very clever application development (and business) model.

The iPhone App Store is open for business with (as of this writing) 552 applications for download to your iPhone. 24% of those are free downloads. If you're a software development shop and you want to have your application run on the iPhone (maybe taking advantage of all the location-aware built-in GPS goodness), you can get Apple to distribute and sell your application for you! Apple will take 30% of the sale price for each person who downloads your application via the App Store. You get to keep 70%. Not a bad deal considering Apple takes care of ecommerce, marketing, distribution and delivery. Of course, to prevent l33t h4xx0r software from getting on the App Store, Apple will review each software submission for appropriateness.

From the tech side, when you develop for the iPhone you can create iPhone-specific webpages, little mini-applications called Widgets, or full-blown Mac software applications which use (largely) the same tools and APIs as developers use to create regular Mac applications that run on "regular" computers. So what we're seeing now is a re-definition of what a computing platform is. Apple has done an amazing job in allowing developers to think creatively about what software is, what it can do, and where it can run.

About a year ago, we tried running SilverStripe on a first-generation iPhone. Now with the App Store for iPhone, the world is going to see some incredible new software and new ways of thinking about software. Here at SilverStripe we're looking very seriously at iPhone development and we're helping our employees get iPhones by chipping in a bit to help defray the costs.

Seriously fun times ahead for businesses like ours and for consumers too. Three years from now I think software written by web developers will be a lot more pervasive, running on lots of different kinds of devices. Thanks, Apple, for helping to lead the way.