Relax, it’s over, we came out of it alright. The iPhone 3G is officialized, and it’s pretty hot. Not just the faster speeds and real GPS, but the forthcoming apps and low price tag make it more a more than drool-worthy piece of hardware.
But what about us jailbreakers? Many of use run our iPhones on T-Mobile and run a plethora of free, non-official apps. The dev teams have done a pretty good job of keeping the iPhone open, allowing for many third party apps to be made available through the installer app. Some of these applications are stellar and will make their way to the official app store. One of the apps shown off at WWDC today was Band, a GarageBand-like app with a great interface for making music. It’s been part of the jailbroken iPhone universe for awhile and now has the official blessing of Steve Jobs, but other apps won’t be so lucky.
So where does that leave us who want open hardware, and where does it leave the software makers? Understandably, nobody at Apple was able to talk to me about this today, they’re all pretty busy, but the iPhone 2 firmware’s been out for awhile so it’s safe to assume the jailbreakers have been busy with it.
What’s really going to be interesting is how Apple treats jailbroken iPhones if they find a way. It’s possible that these liberated handsets could be locked out of the apps store, meaning users would have to choose between the freedom of open development or the sophistication of a fully enabled platform. We hope devs come up with a way to get around that.
We’ll keep checking in the coming month, of course, but our bets are on the dev teams. So far nothing has deterred them from making an open platform out of iPhones and iPod Touches without any significant hurdles thrown by Apple. We’re guessing they can keep this up, though until we see exactly how the app store interfaces with the hardware, things will remain uncertain.
