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iPhone SDK first impressions

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past week you’ve probably heard about the new iPhone SDK beta release by Apple. The SDK opens the doors to what promises to be a groundbreaking platform for software development. In fact, legendary VC firm KPCB believes in the platforms possibilities so much that they have set up a $100M investment fund in order fuel the flames of innovation. It’ll be interesting to see what comes out of the iFund.

Even though developers like myself have been drinking in the SDK for the past several days Apple has silenced open discussion of the SDK via an NDA (required to get the SDK). Hopefully, this restriction will be lifted once the SDK goes public near the end of June so that we can dig into some meaty code details. One thing that I will say is that it appears that Apple has really put a lot of work into producing the SDK. The documentation on the iPhone Dev Center is excellent and hints at a well planned out release.

There has been a lot of discussion surrounding the new AppStore and the 70/30 split Apple is making with developers. On the surface the developer deal sounds great and a 70/30 split with Apple taking care of hosting, processing fees, and a lot of the marketing seems fair assuming that millions of potential users get exposed to an app. However, as they say, the devil is in the details and we have a lot of details yet to flesh out. I’ll reserve my final judgment to the time when the SDK and the developer program go public and we’ve had a few months to see how it all works out. Until then I remain cautiously optimistic about the business deal and ecstatic about a cool new platform to develop software for.