iPhone Open Application Development, 2nd Edition

Preface

So you want to write applications for the iPhone. The first thing you should know is that—even after the initial release of the Apple SDK—the iPhone is by and large a closed device, and Apple has taken steps to lock developers out of the operating system. This hasn’t stopped people from plumbing the iPhone’s depths and creating applications. Since Apple’s initial release of the iPhone, the popular device has been touted as one of the most heavily hacked mobile devices in existence. As early as fall 2007, Nicholas Penree’s http://jailbreakme.com logged that over 30 percent of the market had broken into their devices to run third-party, unsanctioned applications on their iPhones, and the community has since been growing steadily.

A team of iPhone hackers, known as the iPhone Dev team, reported over six million page hits on their website within the first 30 days of the release of the iPhone 3G. Most other sites hosting iPhone hacking tools have similarly reported record traffic, and even Apple’s own employees have been caught traipsing around the Genius Bar touting their “customized” devices.

Within only a few months of the iPhone’s initial release, the open source community had accomplished an amazing feat that caused a considerable disturbance to Apple: the community designed a free, open source compiler and tool chain for building iPhone applications, deployed an over-the-air community distribution repository, and built a notably large developer base. All of this was accomplished ...