Jobs praises Nokia's 3rd party app scheme, but he has it wrong
In chatting up Apple's sudden change of direction today on the whole native iPhone SDK issue, Steve Jobs did a little name dropping by mentioning that he digs the way Nokia does things with S60's support for third party applications. It seems apparent from the get-go that Steve has every intention of offering apps through some sort of official, money-generating conduit -- iTunes, we'd wager -- and with that comes the promise of digital rights management, authenticity verification, and all those nasty little technologies that set the hacking community ablaze. To that end, Steve mentioned that he digs Nokia's approach of requiring that apps be digitally signed so they can be traced back to their developers, an effort to stem "viruses, malware, privacy attacks" that he thinks will flourish on a "highly visible target" like the iPhone. There's a problem, though: there's no telling when the last time is that Steve touched a phone not of his own creation, but we've used S60 devices pretty recently (like, today) and we have it on good authority that you can disable certificate verification for installed apps. Think iPhone users are going to have that option? Probably not. Apple's still visibly concerned about keeping the iPhone under its perceived draconian control (even though it's been busted wide open time and time again), and we've no doubt that trend will continue in full effect with the SDK. It's a huge, landmark upgrade from the web-based SDK developers have now, yes -- but we'd recommend Steve screw around with an N95 for a while before he heaps any more love on the way Nokia goes about its business.
