Developing on the iPhone OS

Apple just recently announced the iPhone 3.0 Operating System – although users can’t upgrade to the new OS yet, developers already have the opportunity to start working with the new SDK (Software Development Kit). Apple presented an impressive list of no less than 100 new features, and we already have our favorites: support for MMS, landscape keyboard, cut/copy/paste, notes sync etc. Being avid iPhone power-users ourselves, it goes without saying that we are very excited by this upgrade, both from a user and a developer point of view.

I guess the iPhone really appeals to developers because:

- The device itself is awesome and very user-friendly. I think this compels developers to try to create applications that are in line with the iPhone culture: clean design, ease-of-use…

- The SDK looks nice! Yes, although we haven’t started developing anything on the iPhone SDK yet, what I’ve heard, what I’ve read and the few screenshots I saw of the SDK gives me the impression that the kit is very object-oriented and that code is easy to test and debug (we’ll confirm that later).

- And the Appstore, of course, which has become a huge market place for mobile applications. The store hit 100 million downloads and 3000 apps in September 2008. Now in March 2009, Apple reports 800 million downloads and 25000 apps.

We’ve heard a lot of success stories from iPhone developers. I read an article on the developer of iShoot, who earned $800,000 in just five months after putting his game on the appstore. TechCrunch recently poster an article on the frenzy of developing apps for the iPhone:  Let’s all quit our jobs and become iPhone App developers! Fair enough, but remember that 25,000 apps are out there, and that very few of them are big hits.

So if we come back to geoviu, what’s in for us? As far as maps are concerned, Apple reports that “You can now embed maps within your applications using the new Map Kit framework. Map Kit works with the Google Mobile Maps Service and features panning and zooming, custom annotations, current location and geocoding”. So they’ve improved their support for maps in the new SDK, I’m sure that’s good news for us. We’ll keep you posted on how we manage to port our concept to the iPhone!