A site I’ve been working on recently requires explicit iPhone support.
The main problem is that the site has a Javascript heavy interface, which relies on a fairly non-standard click & drag model. Mobile Safari has fantastic support for web standards, but because it’s not a mouse & keyboard kind of device, a lot of the desktop interface model doesn’t seem to apply. Thus a lot of the more funky functionality in this site simply won’t work.
As I don’t have an iPhone myself (and don’t plan on buying a bunch of assorted handsets to test sites on,) I went in search of the next best thing; the iPhone simulator in the SDK. The main problem is that the SDK itself costs up to $300 per seat and only runs on the Mac. That’s a little bit steep considering all I want to do it run the browser emulator so I can get this site working nicely in Mobile Safari. I’ve been corrected by Tate that the SDK only costs if you want to publish software for the iPhone.
Some other web devs have touted desktop Safari as an appropriate tool for testing iPhone sites in, but aside sharing a base rendering engine they’ve got almost nothing in common. There’s a large number of curious quirks in the mobile version that simply don’t exist in any other browser, and patching them without having access to a handset seems highly improbable.
Essentially non-Mac developers are stuck with guesswork and contortionist tricks until Apple either releases a mobile mode for Desktop Safari, or opens up the SDK. Neither of these things are overly likely considering that most Apple products heavily apply the principle of vendor lock-in.
I’m hoping I will be able to fix the issues on this site without resorting to buying myself a second hand iPhone, but in the future it may not be so simple. For one of the most prevalent mobile Internet devices on the planet, it has a very high barrier to entry for development.