(Column) - If you’ve been following the whole third-party iPhone applications debacle (and I’m sure that you have), then you know that the whole situation up until this point had just become completely ridiculous. Apple may not have been officially supporting the applications, but the hacks were plentiful, and oh so easy to take advantage of.

As I’ve said before, whether Apple initially planned to eventually offer an SDK or not, the success of unofficial applications probably spurred them on to get serious about an SDK sooner rather than later. To show his commitment to official third-party iPhone application support, Steve Jobs recently wrote a letter that revealed that an SDK is scheduled to be released in February.

This is great news for iPhone users and software developers, but I can’t help but wonder how exciting this will be once it actually sees the light of day. I mean, what is Apple’s concept of an open iPhone? As I write this, there are countless people that are doing amazing things through hacks on the iPhone, but I have a hard time believing that anything Apple produces will be as open and freeing as previous efforts by the community of unofficial iPhone hackers.

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Will developers truly be able to develop applications like we’ve already seen, or will they be more limited? If Apple restricts freedom more than is necessary and releases this SDK in a half-baked way, then it will almost be worse than if they had never offered one at all. That may be a bold opinion, but I think a lot of people will support it.

In his letter, Jobs makes reference to some advancement that Nokia is making in terms of digital signatures, and it’s clear that Apple will take an approach that allows them to still protect the iPhone on their terms. It can be hard to let go, but Apple needs to do just that with the iPhone and truly make the consumer feel like it’s their phone.

Perhaps by default the device could only accept verified and approved applications, but with just a couple of small and official tweaks, it could be opened to run all applications by people that know what they’re doing and accept the fact that something could potentially go wrong if they get too adventurous. As long as these people didn’t go crying to Apple when disaster struck, and they could still restore the iPhone to its original settings and functionality, then we would be set.

Even though complete openness would be nice, I didn’t buy my iPhone only because I was counting on third-party applications. Instead, I liked the features that the phone had right out of the box, and I knew going into the purchase that Apple had initially taken a convoluted stance on application development. This didn’t stop me, and I still love the device just as it is. While I will appreciate native supported applications, I’ve already come to terms with the fact that this forthcoming SDK won’t exactly completely open up the iPhone and its OS.

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