IraqiGeek’s Blog

iPhone: Another proprietary device from Apple

Four days ago, I commented on the iPhone announcement and had some doubts about what Apple’s plans were about allowing third party developers to write applications for the iPhone.

Sure enough, it didn’t take long to answer that one. It looks like the iPhone will indeed be a closed environment. As iTWire reported yesterday quoting his Jobbiness from an article in The New York Times saying “We define everything that is on the phone,” and “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.” Is there anything more they need to say?

Those statements are fundamentally fundamentally wrong. First, Mr. Jobs seems to think that developers aren’t capable, not on their own, to write good applications for the iPhone. Second, somehow he thinks he has the right to control what the users of the iPhone can and can’t run on their devices. And third, he seems to think those users aren’t smart enough to distinguish between good and crappy applications written for their devices.

In any case, Apple has no right to control what users can and can’t run on their devices. Once a user has paid for a device, any device, he/she owns this device and should be able to run anything they see fit on it, and it doesn’t matter if what the user wants to run happens to be a crappy application that will somehow ruin the device. Whether his Jobbiness likes it or not, people have the right to be stupid.

For me, this closed environment around the iPhone simply ruins the deal for me. When I buy an electronic device, I want to be able to run anything I see fit on it, without regard to how that may affect the operation of my device, cause its MY device.