Mike Ash:
Code signing itself is a neutral technology, but it gives incredible power to the system vendor, and that power is just waiting to be exercised and abused. I believe that the iPhone is serving as a testbed to see how users and developers will react to an environment with ubiquitous code signing and control. If it goes well I think we can expect to see our desktop Macs gradually move in this direction as well.
Overall, I like what Apple announced. I don’t mean to take away anything from what looks like great work they’ve done. However, I do want to point out that the spin was a bit much:
- Apple is taking 30% for what amounts to a VersionTracker listing. This is an acceptable, if a bit stiff, deal for most developers. However, it’s a much larger cut than Apple gets for music, and it seems to be more than what Apple would need just “to pay for running the App Store,” as Jobs said. It’s more like an access tax.
- Forstall said that Apple is opening up the “same native APIs and tools that we use internally to build all our iPhone applications.” More accurate would be to say that the SDK includes the subset of the APIs that Apple will allow developers to use. There are a bunch of very important things that Apple’s built-in apps can do that will not be available to developers.
- Jobs’s previous statement that the iPhone contained the entire OS, except for data such as desktop pictures and sound files, turned out to be a huge exaggeration. Lots of modern Mac APIs (that have nothing to do with the mouse or keyboard) are missing “to keep things slim.”
As with the original sweet SDK, Apple has made entirely reasonable business and technical decisions, but they chose to spin them unnecessarily.
