Apple’s iPhone 2.0 announcement last week embraces many elements, the enterprise, security, developers and a new way of downloading iPhone apps. Computerworld’s iPhone 2.0 FAQ on Sunday filled in between the lines with some interesting tidbits from the presentation.
The FAQ explained the various levels of the SDK program for developers. “There is no charge for free apps,” Mr. Jobs said. “There is no charge to the user, no charge to the developer.”
Users will be able to download apps wirelessly from the Apple Appstore or via iTunes. Mr. Jobs identified late June for when users will be able to do that. The target date is June 27th, very close to the one year anniversary of the introduction of the iPhone.
Businesses won’t download from the public Appstore, but rather through an internal system.
Regarding restrictions, Mr. Jobs added that Apple will restrict certain kinds of applications. “Illegal, malicious, unforeseen, porn, privacy, bandwidth hogs” were identified as offenders. “There will be some apps that we’re gonna say ‘no’ to,” he said.
The FAQ described Apple’s view of the BlackBerry system. Mr. Phil Schiller, Apple’s Senior Vice President Worldwide Product Marketing described the weakness of RIM’s centralized server system. Referring to BlackBerrys, he said, they “do get push e-mail and push calendaring and contacts, and you think that they come from the servers in the [enterprise] environment, but they don’t. They first come from a network operations center that’s outside your firewall. It’s even outside the country for most people.”
Mr. Schiller took a moment to remind the audience about the outages that have affected BlackBerry users all over North America for many hours. Later Mr. Jobs weighed in. “Every e-mail goes through a NOC up in Canada,” he said. “That provides a single point of failure, but it also provides a very interesting security situation, where someone working up at that NOC could be potentially having a little look at your e-mail. Nobody seems to be focused on that. We certainly are. We think that a direct connection could be a little more secure.”
The FAQ reiterates that Apple’s 2.0 effort is wide in scope and has some powerful developer motivations and strong money making potential for all concerned. In addition, Apple has identified some key weaknesses in the RIM developer and deployment model that it aims to exploit.