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Plaupius on 20 March 2009
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averyblund said:
Plaupius said:

Regarding all the different App Stores that keep popping up, and considering the first mover advantage (though some claim such a thing does not exist), the real competition between the manufacturers is not so much on who has the most downloads, it is a competition to get the most developer support for your platform. In 8 months Apple has gotten more developers onboard than Windows Mobile or Symbian have in years. Currently, Apple has 50 000 paid developer members, and who knows how many more have downloaded the SDK. Nokia, MS, Palm and RIM have an uphill battle if they aim to garner more developer support than Apple.

As you point out, Apple has a lot of things going for it, and IMO it is very clear they have planned a long term strategy to leverage everything they have. Existing OS X developers have very little trouble developing for the iPhone OS, the development environment is polished and the documentation is quite probably the best I've come across. But the real beauty lies in what comes next: the iPhone developers learn objective-C and Cocoa frameworks, and a portion of them will start doing apps for the desktop as well. I'm pretty much dead certain that there is going to be an intermediary step along that migration path, and that's going to be some kind of multi-touch tablet using the iPhone OS. And it will use the App Store for application distribution.

At least that's how I would do it if I was running things :)

On the topic of SDK downloads:

There have been more than 800,000 downloads of the iPhone SDK since its release.

 

And you hit the nail on the head when it comes to Apple trying use the the iPhone to leverage devs into Mac support. This is very clear. Mobile OS X is so very similar that many of the first batch of quality games were Mac games (Bugdom, Cro-Mag Rally come to mind). Talking to the Pangea folks a few months back about a support issue I asked what they thought of developing on the iPhone- the implication from him was that it was only slightly harder than flagging ARM in the compiler. He didn't get specific but he said it was very simple to port. This works well for Apple both ways since iPhone apps should be similarly easy to move to the desktop with some UI tweaks. More than that even is just the general training that these devs are getting with the OS. That should make them much more keen and comfortable when the proposition of multi-platform software comes up.

 

Wow, I wasn't aware of the 800k figure. That's just staggering!

Now, about porting, it's both fortunate and unfortunate that things are so easy to port to and from desktop OS X. Unfortunate because the touch-UI paradigm is so different from the desktop that those ported games often feel off. It's not unlike the Wii and games ported from, say, PS2 with just waggle added. Yeah, it works, but it's far from optimal. And even though iPhone apps in most cases would be easy to port to the desktop, it would seldom make much sense since the design philosophy is so different.