information week speculation... interesting

[macgolfer53]

from information week

'But there's another possible reason as to why Apple didn't release an SDK at the iPhone release: The version of OS X the iPhone is running. I'm going to make an educated guess, based on the way the iPhone does certain things, and how the iPhone's launch delayed Leopard, and say that the version of OS X that the iPhone is running is not, in fact, an embedded version of Mac OS X 10.4, but an embedded version of Leopard.

This is speculation, but I'm pretty happy with the reasoning behind it. If this is the case, then it would be quite difficult to release an SDK that allowed you to build features that don't run on the current OS release. Apple could build a "simulator," but unless that simulator included the full iPhone OS, it wouldn't be something you'd want to trust. True, Apple could have released an SDK at the recent WWDC, but then you'd have a (probably) beta SDK that used beta developer tools running on a beta OS release that targets a device with a tiny margin for error. This is not a recipe for reliability.'

http://www.informationweek.com/news...UNN2JVN?articleID=201200060&pgno=3&queryText=

 

[mkrishnan]

Yeah, there's been pretty wide speculation that iPhone uses Leopard. Seems quite reasonable. Also lets Apple see Leopard out in the wild in a very controlled (compared to on Macs) environment, to see how it behaves.

Perhaps we'll see XCode get an iPhone SDK in the near future after Leopard comes out? But I'm not so sure that Apple will be opening the doors wide just yet. Look at the web apps. We all thought it would be a crappy, ineffective platform, and to our astonishment, many of them are quite good!