iPhone apps: When 2.0 means 1.0
In the last week, Apple has released a major update to the iPhone, including a second generation of the iPhone hardware and a new version of the operating system that runs both the iPhone and the iPod touch.
Yet for all this talk of second-generation hardware and updated software, one of the most important components of the new iPhone is definitely still at version 1.0.
With the release of the updated iPhone software, Apple flung open the doors of its new App Store. On its first day, the App store was populated with more than 500 programs, and that number is growing rapidly.
Think about that: 500 programs, all of them at version 1.0. On a device that had never before supported software written outside of Apple. It’s exciting, seeing the birth of a brand new software ecosystem. But it’s also scary. If people were worried about the first-generation iPhone hardware and software (many vowed they wouldn’t buy an iPhone until the second version arrived, for fear of buying a buggy 1.0 product), how should they feel about more than 500 programs on a brand-new platform, all at version 1.0?
For Beta or Worse
Writing software is a complicated thing. It’s easy for bugs to slip in, but hard to track them down. Over the years, programmers have come up with some solid methods for making sure that even the initial releases of their software are relatively stable. Unfortunately, many of those methods weren’t available for the first generation of App Store programs.
Take beta testing. These days, lots of people have heard of it: pre-release versions of software or Web sites are made available for users to try out; those users can then discover the bugs that slipped past the programmers. When people use software in ways (and, in the case of iPhones and iPod touches, in places) that programmers never envisioned, bugs surface that would otherwise not have been spotted until the program was put into general release in the cold, cruel world. (I participate in pre-release product tests myself, and I find bugs all the time. The system works pretty well.)
Unfortunately, there was no way for iPhone programmers to beta-test their products before the App Store launched. The software used to create iPhone programs was a secret. And only a select group of programmers were able to run their programs on real hardware, rather than in a Mac-based simulator. Developers in countries without iPhones could only test their programs on the iPod touch.
Even worse, Apple’s cloak of secrecy around the iPhone software programming tools prevented programmers from sharing tricks they had picked up during their work. The programming community, especially on the Mac, is remarkably collegial—programmers post blog entries detailing things they’ve learned all the time, and the quality of all the programs in the Mac ecosystem benefit as a result. Without blogging and Google searches, the only way iPhone programmers could share what they’d learned was through the old, inefficient medium of
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