[Update: just added a video at the end of the post]
Chris Allen, author of the iPhone in Action book
In his talk at the iPhone Developer Summit this week in San Jose, Calif., Christopher Allen, an iPhone developer and author of the upcoming iPhone in Action book (there’s a 30% discount if you enter the code ajaxworld30), raised serious issues for enterprises trying to develop internal iPhone applications.
First of all, in-house programmers will have no choice than to develop their applications on a Mac, the only operating system supported by Apple’s SDK. And that could be a challenge for most corporations that are mostly using Windows-based development tools.
Once developed, iPhone applications must then be deployed using iTunes App Store. Which considerably limits the kind of control an IT department can have in who gets the application or not. A non-starter for most organisations.
“Apple allows you as an enterprise to register and gives you deployment certificates that allow to deploy just to your own employees. But they won’t give you that [the certificates] unless you have 500 employees or more. The certificate for regular mobile developers is for up to 200 employees. So if you fall in the category of larger than 200 employees but smaller than 500, you’re out of luck!”, explains Allen.
Allen, who also hosts the iPhoneWebDev.com site which is the largest iPhone Web developer community, then recommends to develop iPhone applications using Apple’s SDK only if the iPhone is the company’s standard issue device. Otherwise, you might want to consider Web applications using Ajax that could run just as well on the iPhone – version 2.1 – using tools like SQLlite in JavaScript that now lets you cache information on the iPhone.
“Don’t just blindly use the SDK because that’s what is hot at the moment”, suggests Allen.
Some enterprise developers also complained about Apple’s poor manuals that do not always document call functions, plus serious incompatibilities between the iPhone simulator and the device itself, making difficult to test an application before it gets actually deployed.
Here’s a video excerpt of Chris Allen’s presentation on issues for the enterprise creating iPhone applications:
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