iPhone Might Support 3rd Party Applications

During the Question & Answer part of his interview at the ‘All Things Digital‘ Conference with Walt Mossberg today, Steve Jobs gave iPhone users hope for potential 3rd Party Application support on the upcoming device.

This [3rd Party Applications] is an important tradeoff between security and openness. We want both. We’re working through a way… we’ll find a way to let 3rd parties write apps and still preserve security on the iPhone. But until we find that way we can’t compromise the security of the phone.

I’ve used 3rd party apps… the more you add, the more your phone crashes. No one’s perfect, and we’d sure like our phone not to crash once a day. If you can just be a little more patient with us I think everyone can get what they want.

This reinforces an earlier statement by Jobs from Apple’s Shareholder meeting on May 11th:

Jobs did acknowledge that the company is still struggling to decide if third-party developers will be able to create software that will run on the iPhone. It’s a decision Apple “is wrestling with,” according to Jobs.

Do it! Do it! Do it!