| >> Prior to the iPhone, there was virtually no real development allowed on phones that achieved any levels of success (carriers had the platform locked down hard). cough The development for mobile phones partially sucked (and still does, partially; it's in the nature of the beast I suppose, for now) before the iPhone, but I don't know about it being not allowed. You have to draw a distinction between so called feature-phones and smart-phones here. Feature-phone dev was and still is largely restricted (not to mention uninteresting from most POVs) but the same cannot be said about smart-phones. Seeing how the iPhone is supposed the be a smart-phone, we should compare it to those I think. And to that end, I seem to remember writing mobile apps for Windows Mobile and Symbian long before the iPhone existed. Some of that writing didn't even suck that much and I definitely didn't have to ask nobody's permission to distribute the apps. Python for S60 [1] appeared before the iPhone not to mention the c/c++ based toolchains from MS and others. Even the appstore concept is not really Apple's invention, Handango predates it by quite some margin for example. >> In many ways, the iPhone has been the founding of "open" phone development I don't know in how many were those ways. I would say it made it's (phone development) products cool (albeit not yet mainstream) for the masses, and that is very nice and respectable, but "founding" and "inventing" and "reinventing" are just hyperbole filled, marketing words that Apple touts around. >> Post iPhone, we've seen actual competition in this space - the entirely open Android strategy (though their App Store also has restrictions, they just apply them post-release rather than pre-release); the semi-closed iPhone and Nokia Ovi models, the web app model of all the platforms. A few lines up, you were talking about "phone development" and I assumed you were referring to application development because you mentioned carriers platform locks. Now you refer to appstores. Not the same thing. And even there, there was competition [2]. >> People claiming that Apple has created a locked-down environment have very short memories I would argue that it's somebody else exhibiting short memory here but I have already. >> even the closed nature of the App Store via 3.3.1 would have been considered insanely open only 5 years ago.
No... it would not have been. Again, please see [2]. The thing is, we had "open for development" smart phones before the iPhone. The platforms were less cool. Some of today's platforms, that are still more "open for development" are more cool in at least some ways that the iPhone. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Python_for_S60
[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_digital_distribution_pl... |
Having seen [2], I think my point is even stronger - first class smartphone development really began with the iPhone (the App Store predates any other competitor). Of the third party services, only 4 predate the iPhone by more than a month or two (and of those, only 2 achieved even the level of success needed for a Wikipedia page).