Steve Jobs admitted at the D conference that Apple was rather cagey about allowing developers to write third-party apps to run on the iPhone:

This is an important tradeoff between security and openness. We want both. We’re working through a way… we’ll find a way to let 3rd parties write apps and still preserve security on the iPhone. But until we find that way we can’t compromise the security of the phone.

That caused an angry wave of comments condemning Apple for alienating developers all over again (remember, lack of developer support is now the “accepted” reason for the failure of Apple’s original Macintosh computers). Scoble points out that Jobs “is not an idiot”, and that, in time, Apple will open up its iPhone:

So, what do I think will happen? Oh, I can see the Steve Jobs keynote in 2008 right now. “We’ve sold eight million iPhones, more than we expected” and “remember how I said iPhone apps needed to be done with JavaScript and HTML? Well, we heard from all of you that you wanted to play games on Pogo.com so we added Flash. And we’ve been working on our own iPhone applications for more than a year now and we’re sharing the developer tools we use internally.”

:))

But he’s probably wrong there. Steve Jobs is betting heavily on the Web. And Safari. Take a look at these comments from his interview with Walt Mossberg at D5:

The second reason (why Cingular invested in Apple’s iPhone) is more profound: they have spent and are spending a fortune to build these 3G networks, and so far there ain’t a lot to do with them. People haven’t voted with their pocketbooks to sign up for video on their phones. These phones aren’t capable of taking advantage of it. Youv’e used the internet on your phone, it’s terrible! You get the baby internet, or the mobile internet — people want the REAL internet on their phone. We are going to deliver that. We’re going to take advantage of some of these investments in bandwidth.

and, if that wasn’t enough,

… It’s REAL Safari, REAL OS X. We put a different user interface on it to work with a multi-touch screen… it’s an amazing amount of software.

Clearly, (notwithstanding Cringely’s comments today about AT&T’s bandwidth crunch), Jobs is encouraging developers to build web-based applications for mobile Safari making use of the high-speed 2.5G and Wifi networks that are near-ubiquitous in the US now (and Europe. And far-East Asia). That way, Jobs gets to have his cake and eat it too. And now you see the reasoning behind the strange release of Safari on Windows. (Getting developers to get their application services render well on Safari - REAL Safari, remember?)

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