Steve Jobs wrote on the Apple Hot News feed today that the iPhone and iPod touch will get a developer kit in February 2008. This doesn't say there will be 3rd party apps then, but you can start writing them. Hold it! Wait a second...

"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."

- Steve Jobs (January 2007)

     So we had to wait 13 months for AT&T to improve their West Coast network to reach the status of the East Coast! (We will not even get into the fact Palm, Nokia, Blackberry, and Windows Mobile has all allowed third party apps from day one!)

     Now why would we have to wait from iPhone launch to February? Almost a year to make third party applications! Well Apple said back in April in an official statement...

However, iPhone contains the most sophisticated software ever shipped on a mobile device, and finishing it on time has not come without a price -- we had to borrow some key software engineering and QA resources from our Mac OS(R) X team, and as a result we will not be able to release Leopard at our Worldwide Developers Conference in early June as planned.

     Ah, okay so the 20 or so people who work at Apple had to put Leopard on hold to work on the iPhone! Okay so iPhone delayed Leopard and once the iPhone came out they went back to work on Leopard. Great so now the iPhone won't receive any updates until Leopard is up and then they will work on the iPhone developer-kit until February and then they will start releasing patches for all the bugs and security issues Leopard may have.

Wow, Apple may need to grab some more employees!