Developments in iPhone-land

was away at the end of last week, so I missed much of the hubbub about Apple’s letters to the would-be iPhone developers. The poorly-phrased missive was initially interpreted by some as a rejection, but later assessments suggested that it was intended more to keep devs in a holding pattern as Apple scrutinized the requests.

Since then, it’s become apparent that some developers have gotten accepted into the program, though the numbers appear to be fairly limited at present. While the SDK allows you to develop apps for the iPhone, developers need to obtain a certificate from Apple in order to to test applications on their phone and distribute programs via the App Store, get access to Apple’s iPhone documentation and support, and to install the 2.0 beta version of the iPhone OS. Even those in the program appear to have limitations, though, as there seems to be a five iPhone limit for testing; installing it on unauthorized devices will render those devices inoperable.

Presumably, more devs will be allowed access to the program as time goes on, but I have to wonder what kind of impact the five phone limit will have on beta testing. One developer I spoke to pointed out that if there’s no way to enable wider beta testing, we’ll likely be seeing “a lot of buggy apps on day one.” Given how much noise Apple has made about security and stability, I’d think that’s a scenario they’d want to avoid