Inability to install applications

Yes and no. The media misinterprets this. The iPhone is not a completely closed phone. You can easily install widgets, practical utilities created by combining scripts, CSS, and HTML. You can do many things with them—basically the same things you can do with a web application. What widgets cannot do is access the phone’s reserved functions. Widgets cannot store data on your phone, access your contacts, or send text messages without your knowledge. On the other hand, you can use the widgets that exist today, which is an advantage, as there are thousands of them.

Why is that? Security, not so much business policy. Symbian already encountered this, and Nokia and S60 struggled with these problems with their smartphones. Creating a virus for these phones was not that difficult, because every program could do just about anything. Finally, in the third release, Nokia introduced rigorous certification, and if your application wants to dig deep into the phone, it must be reviewed and certified by an authorized Nokia partner. For a fee. That, too, is the price of application security.

If Apple wants to achieve anything, it is maximum device stability. In other words, it wants your phone to do what you bought it for. And that definitely cannot be achieved by everyone installing any app they find on the internet onto their phone. Those of you who have an S60/R2 phone will agree with me that slowing down or completely disrupting the functioning of your phone is a piece of cake, all you need to do is install a few utilities from the internet that are simply poorly programmed. And Apple would like to avoid that, even at the cost of the device not having the dubious option of installing anything on it.

I would like to point out that it is very likely that applications will be available for purchase later through iTunes - certified applications. You cannot download any other applications to your phone, except for widgets.

Is this a bad thing? Personally, I think it’s the right way to go for the average user, and for hardcore techies, it’s a challenge to try to get around it—either by hacking the certification or buying a phone that supports Linux.

Note from the future: Apple actually launched the App Store in June 2008, allowing users to purchase apps directly from their mobile phones or via iTunes, with similar restrictions to those previously imposed by Nokia on Symbian S60 – only officially approved apps could be installed, and unlike Nokia, they could only be purchased from a central store. Even earlier (in early 2008), however, unofficial “installers” such as Cydia appeared, allowing the installation of unofficial apps on “jailbroken” phones whose protection had been broken. It is claimed that their success convinced Jobs to come up with the App Store, but this was not true. Apple began working on the App Store shortly after the iPhone was introduced, when the widespread response from developers showed that there would be interest in selling iPhone applications.

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Inability to install applications

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