The Risk Factor
I mentioned among a series of tweets that the risk for developing an iPhone app is becoming pretty high lately. The biggest problem is that there’s no guarantee that the user’s data is safe in these respects:
- There’s no guarantee that iTunes performs faithful, controllable, restorable backups for any data stored in an application’s virtualized ./Documents/ folder
- Even if it’s possible for a more technically savvy users to extract the backed-up data (and we’re discounting the factor that there is iTunes for Windows and I don’t have much clue how we existing Mac developers are going to deal with that, other than offering service utilities for Windows), there is, AFAIK, currently no way to put the backed-up data back into an app bundle as the user wishes
- Many developers (among them Craig Hockenberry and Brent Simmons) have expressed the frustration over the fact that we developers have absolutely no means to help the user out of any trouble. Releasing an app in wild becomes playing with Russian roulettes.
My biggest fear is that if the situation doesn’t improve, these risk factors will swell up to the point that supporting becomes endless nightmare for developers, and many data-intensive apps will become simply not do-able–because users won’t trust them with their local data. Some forms of liability issues will also surface.
And if the situation doesn’t really improve, I fret that those factors will start driving out applications that rely on local data (many productivity apps fall in this cateogry), leaving only three do-able apps: games, web service clients, and photo apps (because they have access to the camera roll).
Games and photo apps are by their nature platform- and device-dependent and they will always have a place as native apps. But the driving-out of native productivity apps, local-only or more “rich” (i.e. they sync or work with remote ends), will make the point of going native a huge disappointment. If that is what’s going to happen in the long run, it will be a big setback for the whole point of a native iPhone SDK.
lukhnos :: Jul.23.2008 :: tekhnologia :: No Comments »