iPhone Ups and Downs, Unhappy Developers, and the MIDI Controllers You Can’t Have Yet
Whether you care about the iPhone or not, the Summer of iPhone Development reveals a lot about where mobile computing, and mobile music creation, might be headed. That includes Apple’s challenges as well as its accomplishments.
Despite the hype around Apple’s platform, the iPhone and iPod Touch have some strengths and weaknesses, just as any platform does. The strengths you probably know well by now: slick UIs, rich, mobile-optimized developer tools, and a device people love. That has given us some interesting, genuinely-useful music tools amidst the toys and novelties, demonstrating how even a niche can benefit from development capabilities. But the tight development and distribution restrictions, imposed by Apple and their exclusive US service provider AT&T, have compounded some of the negatives of the device. The result is a platform that has some developers raving and some ranting (sometimes simultaneously).
The big news for digital musicians, specifically, is that restrictions created by Apple may keep some music apps from shipping, or for supporting Apple’s official, exclusive SDK and store.
Case in point: the tasty-looking MIDI controller you see above hasn’t made it into the store - and it’s not alone. If the developer were able to distribute it, you’d have it right now. With Apple controlling the store, you might have it tomorrow, or next month, or never - the frustrating thing being, the developer doesn’t even know. And poor communication in regards to the store is just one challenge that’s turning some developers off from Apple’s device.
Digital music creation was built on the openness of the Windows, Mac, Linux, and even Palm and Windows Mobile platforms. That means the situation with Apple’s locked-down development channels is one to watch closely. It also could mean the jailbroken, hacked iPhone platform is here to stay — and that competing platforms could gain some ammunition from Apple’s relatively closed nature.
Not All Developers Are Happy
It goes without saying that some of Apple’s moves have made some developers very happy indeed. The iPhone/iPod Touch is a platform that strikes a unique balance between desktop-class functionality and what’s needed on a mobile device. Developers have complained that platforms like PalmOS or Java ME are overly stripped-down for mobiles, whereas Windows Mobile isn’t optimized enough and is too much like the desktop OS. Apple has done a lot to balance those concerns and wrap it into a beautifully-designed UI and hardware. (To see just how much they’ve done, look no further than AppleInsider’s iPhone 2.0 critique. Even as they complain about the iPhone’s flaws, they note the ways in which competing devices are worse.)
But that doesn’t mean all of Apple’s developers are happy campers. Here’s a quick round-up of some of the complaints:















