AT&T Welcomes Programmers for All Phones Except the iPhone

By Saul Hansell
I’m still trying to understand why Apple would go to such extremes to keep people from writing programs that run on the iPhone. I’ve been writing about Apple’s software update that seems to have deliberately disabled third-party applications that users have installed.

In particular, Apple’s explanations don’t make sense to me. This is what Steve Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, said to Newsweek in January:

“You don’t want your phone to be an open platform,” meaning that anyone can write applications for it and potentially gum up the provider’s network, says Jobs. “You need it to work when you need it to work. Cingular doesn’t want to see their West Coast network go down because some application messed up.”

That sounds reasonable until you realize that there are many millions of phones that run operating systems from Palm, Microsoft and others for which third-party applications are created all the time, and networks don’t seem to be crashing as a result.

I spoke to Mark Bercow, the senior vice president of business development at Palm. It’s his job to encourage developers to create programs for Palm’s Treo smart phones. He said Palm’s operating system imposes very modest limits on what developers can do. They can’t restructure the databases on the phone — such as the address book — that are used by many different applications. And they can’t change the inner workings of how the phone connects to the telephone network. But otherwise, programs are free to make calls and use as much data communications bandwidth as they like. Indeed, some developers have made video streaming applications, a particularly big bandwidth hog. (Of course, the cellular companies are free to charge whatever they wish for bandwidth use.)

Mr. Bercow said he had not heard of Palm ever trying to block any developer’s program because of anything it did to a wireless network. He added that Palm and wireless carriers — including AT&T, the new name for Cingular — work together to encourage developers to create applications for their phones.

“The notion of carriers getting in the way seems a little odd,” he said. “The trend is toward openness.” Palm says that two-thirds of Treo owners have purchased a third-party application, and 10 percent of them have 10 or more third-party apps.

AT&T has a very extensive Web site devoted to encouraging developers to write programs for its phones on half a dozen platforms. It does discuss the iPhone, but it points out that Apple only allows limited applications that work through the Safari browser.

So why would AT&T be worried about network problems caused by an iPhone and not from these other phones? Michael Coe, an AT&T spokesman, wouldn’t say.

“The company that decides which third-party apps go on the iPhone is Apple,” he said. I pressed him for one example of a concern that might be a reason for Apple to limit third-party applications.

“It seems to me that you are trying to pit us against Apple,” he said. “We are not going to get into an Apple vs. AT&T discussion.”

What’s especially odd here is that Apple has indicated that it will eventually allow third-party developers. This is what Steve Jobs told Walt Mossberg at the D conference:

This is a very important trade-off between security and openness. We want both. We’ve got good ideas, and sometime later this year, we can open it up to third-party apps, and keep security.

And hackers who have explored the workings of the phone say it uses the frameworks and structures that Apple uses on its other platforms to enable development; it just hasn’t been documented. So if Apple is going to allow applications later, is there any reason — other than vindictiveness or obsessive interest in control — that it would want to cut off those developed by the pioneers who figured things out ahead of the official launch?