Apple opens iPhone's SDK - free, or is it?

On Friday, March 7th 2008 at 11:55 AM

By Andrei Pociu (View Profile)

Developers have been awaiting for the possibility to develop programs for the iPhone ever since the handset was made available more than one year ago, however Apple was reluctant to open up the platform for development. On March 6th, Apple unveiled the new tools and technologies that make up the iPhone and iPod Touch SDK, currently in beta version.

Similarly to the Pocket PCs and Smartphones running Microsoft windows, an emulator - iPhone Simulator - has been developed that is capable of running the iPhone applications on a Mac for testing/debugging purposes. This as well as the SDK only works on the new Intel-based Macs and will not run on the older PowerPC machines.

The SDK is free, but to get your application distributed, Apple charges a $99 licensing fee for commercial as well as free applications. If an application is not licensed, Apple is capable of shutting down the distribution of that software. For proprietary software development, Apple charges another $200.

The SDK can be downloaded at http://developer.apple.com/iphone/program/.