[Ben Levine]

Greg Joswiak, Apple's Vice President for iPod Product Marketing, has made a statement declaring that Apple is taking a "neutral stance" on 3rd party development for the iPhone. What this means is that Apple is neither for nor against all the 3rd party applications that have been coming out for the iPhone in the past couple of months. Developers can now rejoice knowing that Apple isn't gunning for them.

Now this isn't a blank check from Apple allowing developers to do whatever they want. The thing developers have to keep in mind with this statement is that while Apple is not against you, they're not going to help out either. If Apple releases an update that breaks an app, too bad. Apple is not going to take the time to develop updates that will not accidentally break 3rd party apps. Apple also wont release an update intentionally designed to break apps either. At least not yet.

Update (Edward Kirk):
Apparently Joswiak was unsatisfied with his statement's degree of neutrality. He added that Apple is constantly reassessing the situation and reserves the right to change their stance at any time, so the possibility that they might stop being nice about it someday does exist. Further more, Apple even went as far as to say "software updates will most likely break" native apps as they go forwards.


[via Gearlog]

[Pepper]

its nice to know that they wont intentionally try to break apps, i was always worried about that, and i still haven't updated my iTunes to the latest version because of that.

[Hans]

thats about as good as we could expect, i like it

[accordtec]

From a marketing point of view, Apple will benefit from this because more people will purchase iPhones to use for their specific carrier. Seems like AT&T will be the ones losing out.