People screaming to open the iPhone use as justification the whole “only third party apps do what I want” routine, ignoring the fact that the default apps on the iPhone are far and away better than the default apps on any other phone. Safari on iPhone is the best web browser out there, Mail is a real mail client (though I admit it could use a little more work, and it’s nice to hear improvements are on the way), Google Maps is pretty damned advanced, etc.
I really don’t buy the whole “we need third party apps NOW” argument. They’re nice, but hardly necessary, and I would wager that 99% of iPhone users are happy with what they get out of the box.
Don’t get me wrong; I think the iPhone is great. I am simply stating facts. There WAS a ton of outcry for Apple to open up the iPhone. The fact that Apple — a company famously (or infamously, depending on your point of view) known for keeping things relatively closed, with a tight lock on software/hardware integration — decided that it would be in its best interest to open the iPhone with a third-party SDK, says a lot about the demand and about the changing criteria for what can be called a “smartphone.” As popular and great as the iPhone is out of the box, the fact remains that if Apple wants to seriously compete with business devices like the Blackberry with its multitude of apps for almost any purpose, then it needs to have an open SDK. Jobs saw that, and it happened.