Developers, Developers, Developers, Deve…

As the world awaits with baited breath for Steve Jobs to make his big announcement on Monday at the WWDC as usual, there is quite a bit of speculation as to what exactly the announcement will entail. The prediction is of-course a faster and sleeker 3G iPhone that everyone is expecting. While most folks are talking about the hardware one area that seems to be remiss in most of the discussions, except for a few posts like this one and this one, is the fact that there is also an SDK for the iPhone/iPod Touch that was released back in March of this year. The iPod is now a fully fledged software platform and this is a huge deal. You can have the coolest product on the planet but if you don’t have the applications or the developers to support it doesn’t matter how many iterations of the hardware you put out.

I’m not sure if it was a deliberate strategy for them to not include the SDK when the iPhone was first released but we know most likely the reason for the SDK in March was precipitated by Google announcing Android six or seven months prior to that. Needless to say deliberate or not while a company like Apple can consistently churn out cool devices and products it seems to me that they certainly need third party developers to sustain the product in the marketplace.

With this latest iteration of the iPhone (we’re guessing 3G iPhone) ) Apple hopes to solidify it’s iPhone user base worldwide. Third party developers are going to feel confident and comfortable once a solid user base is established. They will start cranking out applications which in turn will further reinforce the user base already established by hardware sales.

One person who seems to know the importance of developers is this guy…