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I’m a little late getting to this topic since the news was released a week ago, but the latest developments in iPhone control have been very interesting to me. What’s that you say? It’s old news that you haven’t heard yet? Excellent.

On last Thursday, Steve Jobs announced that Apple would be making software for the iPhone more “secure” by no longer allowing any programs that are compiled using anything other than a C, C#, or objective-C compiler. What does that mean? It means that development for the iPhone will only become more difficult and some existing applications will disappear from the app store. As if Apple’s exclusive control of the app store was not enough. Any programs developed in Java or that use Javascript will no longer run after the next iPhone firmware update.

The biggest implication of this change that I have noticed  is that the application developed by Adobe to compile Flash files into an iPhone supported format will be blocked since it is based on a Java compiler. Not surprising, but a real bummer. Especially since the lack of Flash support is one of the biggest downfalls of the iPhone already.

On the other hand, there are always two sides to any story. A large part of Apple’s success is due to the fact that every product they have ever made has been mostly locked down. Up until just a few years ago, a Hackintosh was pretty much unheard of. But now that Apple has made the swap to Intel, homebrew Macs are popping up all over the place. But, the quality simply is not the same. Apple designs products from the ground up to work and to work well. I love my Macbook… and I like my iPhone. They both work very well all the time. However, I have never had a cell phone that did not work all the time. Granted, this is my first smart phone… but think about it.

In the personal computer market, Apple has never had a large portion of the market share. They have stayed alive and have a faithful following, but they have never been a real threat to their competition (at least since the first battles with Microsoft, Xerox, etc). In the smart phone market, Apple is certainly a leader. Sure there are RIM, Windows Mobile, and Android. For now, that does not appear to matter very much to Apple because the iPhone has dominated the market.

So basically, Apple has made it a little more difficult to develop applications for the iPhone. But it does not appear that it will be a major threat to their future sales. Ultimately, no one other than developers will even care. I have heard several times that technology follows the developers. We will have to see how the market changes over the next few years.

Stay tuned for my next post on my opinion of the future of the Android OS.