iPhone Cost of Development

When I first heard of the iPhone I thought "Who in their right mind would pay $500 for a toy?" And then I played with one. As soon as I used one for the first time, I knew that the iPhone was going to be my next phone. Aside from having a sleek feel and some neat apps (this was iPhone 2G, before the SDK came out), it had a touch screen and I knew it would be awesome for various chess programs, even though there wasn't an SDK out for it yet.

So I bought one, and played with it, and loved it. Then I jailbroke it, and then I had some fun playing around with Jiggy, which was a Javascript framework for writing simple, interpreted programs for a jailbroken iPhone. Soon after, iPhone OS 2.0 came out, with the promise of an SDK to develop native applications for the phone. I kept waiting and waiting for people to come out with the cool apps I knew would be amazing for the phone, but it never happened. So I started researching how I could make it happen for myself, and this is what I found:

The Apple Developer's License application cost $100, and it was slow processing, and no guarantee you would get one.

The iPhone SDK had to be run on an Intel Mac, which costs at minimum $900 with a student discount.

You have to invest money into books on Objective C and iPhone programming, since it's foreign for most programmers.

The time you invest in writing a program might not even be worth it if Apple rejects your program from the App store.

There was a toolchain for compiling jailbroken apps, but a dependency was broken in 3.0, so it's next to impossible to try the jailbroken route unless you're already an extremely gifted programmer. Hackintosh's sounded appealing, but the bottom line is there's too much hardware support that's missing from a Hackintosh and things just get ugly when Apple issues a new OS upgrade (especially if they change the requirements for the latest version of the SDK). Adobe CS5 sounded like it might have provided a nice alternative to the SDK, but then Apple changed that too.

So comon, Apple - give us a break. The average person can't just drop $1000 on products (plus the cost of the device, if they want to own one) to employ some innovative ideas. Why not allow 3rd parties to write code outside of the SDK? I have so many great ideas, but who knows if I'd ever be able to implement them, not owing to lack of programming experience, but simply because the cost of entry is too great.