Give the iPhone a universal hardware interface

Third-party software sucks. There, I've said it. It's a sweeping generalisation and, like every other such blunt device, overlooks a few diamonds in the rough, but the tech-world being the sweeping headline-whores that we are, we don't care.

You see, the backlash has already started. Christopher Spera, over at Gear Diary, has written about how Handango - once the poster-child for all that is great and good in the world of aftermarket software for mobile devices - has gradually developed into an ogre among small developers, and a greedy one at that. Minimal dividends to software authors, together with draconian re-download policies for buyers... neither makes for a tempting marketplace when a large number of platforms (many Microsoft's) are boasting third-party feature upgrades as a core strength.

So can you blame people for seeing the regimented walled-garden of the iPhone as some sort of salvation? How many people outside of the techtastic elite actually buy add-on software, aside from the occasional Java game? Analysts like Daniel Eran make a good argument that there's little reason that out-of-the box capabilities can equal and exceed the functionality much of the top 10 Handango downloads give you.

And once you've started doubting software as the grand expansion, devious minds look elsewhere for their market leverage. Enter Paul Murphy, ZDNet's eagle-eyed Linux hound, and his treatise on why Apple really ought consider not a software API but a hardware one; or, more accurately, an aftermarket hardware interface.

Think iPod dock connector with bells'n'whistles, something that opens up the third-party market and yet allows Apple to keep tight rein on the user-experience. Murphy envisages a Sony Memory Stick sized nugget of processor, memory and embedded application that, once slotted in, brings new functionality within the loving constraints of the OS X UI.

"Opening [the] iPhone would provide developers with a large market for products inheriting their power, user identity, network access, and user interface from your product" Paul Murphy

Electronic payments, scanning and data-logging for industry, home automation, any number of connected apps that regularly bruise a database with queries - all possible projects, all "niche markets" that would benefit from a solid hard and software platform. The specs of the iPhone itself wouldn't matter to performance, since each add-on would live in its own task-specific ecosystem.

The more I think about it, the more I agree with Paul that this could be Apple's kickstart to a new industry. It depends on Steve Jobs being willing to innovate, something which even the most hardened Microsoftie would agree has been his forte, and on third-parties recognising the iPhone as not just a swish cellphone, not even a smartphone, but as a new paradigm in our connected lives.

Dear Steve: About that iPhone... [ZDNet.com]