Since its star studded preview back in January of this year, the collective masses ave eagerly awaited the launch of Apples new iPhone. With that launch now just 18 short days away, one lingering question has been disappointedly answered by Steve 'Call me God' Jobs himself.

Can users write their own applications to run on the iPhone?

Yes and no.

It's a bit of an odd answer. Many had hoped that Apple would have released an SDK (Software Developers Kit) for the iPhone. Such a kit would include all the documentation and library's that any capable programmer could use to code their own iPhone based applications. Unfortunately, Steve Jobs recently announced to those in attendance at a Worldwide Developers Conference that Apple had found a "sweet" way of supporting third party development for the iPhone.

As it has been for years with OSX and Safari, those third party developers can write their own applications using Ajax and CSS to run under Safari. This will be the case for the iPhone as well. But it would seem that Apple is keeping iPhone software development to themselves.

Certainly, anyone (with some measure of programming skill) can build an application to run within a web browser, wither it be for Safari, FireFox, Internet Explorer, or Mozillia. But stand alone iPhone applications are being kept proprietary for the time being.

Having Safari based applications does complicate things for the end user somewhat. In order to launch Safari, you need net access. If you're on a plane, 30,000 feet up in the air, the chances of having a stable Internet connection are slim to none. Additionally, no one yet knows how much the data plans will cost. Most every cellular provider offers Internet surfing and e-mail over their networks, but at a cost of a few cents per kilobyte. If an iPhone user has to connect to the fire up Safari, connect to the net, access the URL for that third party app, and download that data every single time they want to run said program, then most folks are going to have an aching pocket book after a little while.

It seems frustrating of course. Just look at the iPod for reference. It's been a flood upon the market place, yet Apple still hasn't released an SDK for it. Of course, one could always drop Linux onto their iPod and run all the third party apps they want. But if Apple were to open up the OS for both the iPod and the iPhone, then they would most likely see a considerable boost to their market share, simply for the sake of all those software developers out there that would start creating nifty little apps for those devices.

But in a odd twist of quotation, Steve Jobs had said some two weeks ago “I think some time later this year we will find a way to let third parties write apps and still preserve security.… We would like to solve this problem, if you could be just a little more patient with us, I think everyone can get what they want.”  

Its been six months since the iPhone was first announced, and probably a couple of years since Apple first started to develop it, and they still haven't addressed the issue of third party apps? On the one hand, perhaps Apple wants to keep those iPhone apps exclusively Apple for the time being, and will eventually release an SDK. Another speculation is that Apple is beginning to develop games for the iPhone, to compete with the PSP and GameBoy. A little more than a year ago, I had reported on how Apple had been snatching up some very notable game developers, and with little hint of what they were tasking those new developers with (read that story here). I had thought that perhaps Apple was going to start releasing some more advanced games for the iPod. Perhaps they're building some games for the iPhone.

Could the iPhone hold more in store for us than we ever thought?