The future of the iPhone as a programmable platform

The future of the iPhone as a programmable platform

Fugui Yan

Computer Science Department

Griffith College Dublin

I.                    Introduction

iPhone has become one of the most popular smart mobile devices in the world. In this report, I will briefly describe what these two authoritative papers talk about and provide my own views.

II.                 Literature Review

1.      The first paper which is “Evaluating the iPhone as a Mobile Platform for People-Centric Sensing Applications” briefly evaluates whether the iPhone it is suitable to be a smart mobile device programmable platform. The author analyses the advantages and the disadvantages of the smart mobile device programmable platform. For the advantages, the author briefly discusses the programming language, which is Objective C which is easy to grasp, APIs, User Interface, application distribution and so on. For the disadvantage, the author shows that iPhone can not support the push notification service. “With the push notification service, probes can be sent by the Apple backend servers, which, in turn, serve as relays for push messages sent by a sender host to a receiver iPhone. As the receiver iPhone is woken up by the probe the user is asked by the iPhone OS whether to let the application run in response to the probe message or not. [1]”

2.      The second paper which is “IPHONE SECURITY ANALYSIS” concisely illustrates the security structure and the vulnerabilities within the iPhone Operation System. The author pays attention to the issue of jailbreaking, and says that the jailbreaking have made financial losses for Apple and AT&T and the reputation of the Apple.

III.               Conclusion

Firstly, for the programming language Objective C, if programmers have learned Java or C++, they will think the syntax for Objective C is a little bit weird. It uses square brackets to instantiate, but if we are familiar with the syntax, then everything will be the same. Another issue which should be paid attention to is the memory management to avoid memory leak. Objective C uses reference count to manage object [3]. Secondly, right now Apple has already published the SDK including Push Notification Service [4], but one thing which is worth to know is the probe programming which I found in the paper. I will spend more time to investigate this topic in my leisure time. Thirdly, for the issue of the jailbreaking, actually, it is about the privilege to the root system. We know that, Mac and iPhone, both of them are based on Unix System. If User gets the root privilege, he can choose to install any third-party application he wants which will result in the poor sale of the application on the App Store [5], which will continuously make developers lose the enthusiasm because of the financial issue.

References

[1] Emiliano Miluzzo, James M. H. Oakley, Hong Lu, Nicholas D. Lane, Ronald A. Peterson, Andrew T. Campbell, “Evaluating the iPhone as a Mobile Platform for People-Centric Sensing Applications”, “http://sensorlab.cs.dartmouth.edu/urbansensing/papers/miluzzo_urbansense08.pdf”, Nov 4, 2008

[2]Vaibhav Ranchhoddas Pandya, “IPHONE SECURITY ANALYSIS”, “http://www.cs.sjsu.edu/faculty/stamp/students/pandya_vaibhav.pdf”, May 2008

[3]ObjectiveC,http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/ObjectiveC/Introduction/introObjectiveC.html”

[4] Push Notification Service, http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3576

[5]Benjamin Eriksson, Codemill Ab, Emanuel Dohi , Fredrik Georgsson ,  Per Lindström, “Research in the App Store Era Experiences from the CenceMe App Deployment on the iPhone”,  Sep 2010