
For you maybe....
did you really mean 'not unreasonable' as opposed to 'not insubstantial'
....or are we meant to be grateful for every opportunity to give Steve our cash
Developers who stumped up $99 to become part of the iPhone application ecosystem are to have their subscription extended for a couple of months, while rumours bubble that Apple is planning to offer a more exclusive iTunes experience. CNet reports that developers who signed up early to create apps for the iPhone have had their …
Here's a question. What's the deal with writing an app for the iPhone for exclusive use within a corporation? e.g., is there a way to push it out to hundereds of handsets WITHOUT using the iTunes App Store?
I'm fully aware of the jailbreak road, but imagine supporting hundereds of users who upgrade their firmware every couple of months then wonder why nothing works any more...
Theres an inherent problem with this. In order to comply with your (in my view, logical and perfectly understandable) desires, Apple has to open the platform. it has to create some way for your corp to develop-distribute-multidistribute the application, and as soon as it does that, it loses control of itunes, as it wont take too long for some devious BOFH to rEngineer or Rip that process straight to piratebay et al, and then you have a nice, convinient way of being able to plug applications onto your un-jailbroken iphone without going through iTunes at all.
the only way I can see for apple to retain some kind of control here is by liasing with each individual business that wants to do this and probably creating a "closed" section of itunes, for BOFHtechs to upload their corporate wizardry to, that they can then have ihpone users download for free, upon submitting their corporate ID.
The app store does indeed offer a way to offer apps for use within an organisation. As I understand it you still have to through the app store, or at least something very like it (an un-jailbroken won't run anything which isn't signed, and the app store is the only way to get apps on the iPhone) but you get a private area that no-one else has access to and don't have to charge for the downloads.
Any iPhone dev can distribute without the app store - it's called ad-hoc distribution and it's fully supported by Apple. You email the device ID of the iPhone to the developer, they register it with their app profile, then email you the app - you can then install it using iTunes. It's all official and above board, but mostly used for beta test 'coz unless you have an enterprise dev account, you're limited as to how many copies of each app you can distribute this way.
- Paris, because she doesn't really know what she's talking about either....