Apple has finally bowed to the will of its customers and allowed the development of third party applications for the iPhone.
The company had been refusing to allow development of third-party application software for the iPhone, claiming that AT&T did not want it. AT&T has denied this and is paying for developers to come up with software for their other phones. Apple also wanted the only applications to be written on Apple's Safari browser; however, developers did not like this platform.
In a press release Apple has said that it wants native third party applications and the company will have an SDK in developers' hands in February.
Apple now says that it wanted to make sure that the phone would be safe from viruses first. The press release hints that Apple might use some form of digital signature as part of the software protection package.
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