Apple iPhone Will Run 3rd Party Apps Through The Web

At the Apple developers conference in San Francisco, Apple CEO Steve Jobs revealed how the iPhone will run applications from third party developers; they will run inside the Safari web browser application. Rather than provide developers access to the cut-down version of the Mac OS that the iPhone uses, Apple is asking developers to write applications that use Web 2.0 and AJAX technologies. At the conference, they demoed a directory application that showed off what it can do to good effect: from the application, the iPhone could make calls, access google maps and even download and display PDFs.

The upside of this is that developers will be able to write applications in advance; tey can test most of the functions of the software in the version of the Safari Web browser app that runs on MacOS X. And it solves the problem of distribution; as apps are basically web apges, they can be accessed by just starting the browser.

The downside is that this approach does not provide full access to the iPhone. Although Apple VP Scott Forstall demoed the directory application that Apple had produced, they didn’t describe if there is any way for an application to render graphics beyond a web page that displays in the browser. This limitation may prove to be an achilles heel; is there any way for the iPhone to run graphical games, for instance?