Minute44 - Dan Schonhaar

You heard right… Apple, a company that can seemingly do no wrong at the moment might have hit a snag with the iPhone 3G (More specifically, the newest iPhone software and it’s “support for third party apps”). Problem is it’s a snag that Microsoft has all but eliminated from Windows for the past six or seven years. Of course this is just speculation on my part but to be honest, if it looks like tuna, smells like tuna and tastes like tuna… it’s probably tuna. I’m talking about DLL hell.

Of course we can’t call the problems that the iPhone is experiencing DLL hell because the iPhone, in no way, runs windows. However it is quite plausible that the same issue is happening with the iPhone OS. What made me think about this is Chris Pirillo’s video about his Iphone problems. Basically, if you couldn’t be bothered to watch the whole video, the gist was he has had to re-format his iPhone about three times because after a short while he was unable to run any third party apps. Now, from that video you can just about make out he has about 8 pages of apps on his home screen, which lead to many live viewers saying that it was the sheer amount of apps he had installed that was causing the problem. Pretty logical, I thought. Pirillo, however, later dismisses these theories as “idiotic” which, truth be told, kind of blind-sided me.

I mean… why is it idiotic to think that an OS, when loaded with a ton of apps, might start to cough? Windows has done it since the beginning. Are apple now becoming a victim of their own strain of DLL hell? Quite possibly. What Pirillo also adds in that video is that at several times he thought that he’d pinned the culprit down to one particular app, only to uninstall it and the problem continue. That’s a classic DLL hell symptom if I ever saw one. Look at this scenario: You install your 50 apps, one of them goes away and does an update… that update replaces a file that another app, or several other apps also use, these other apps, now no longer recognise that file so they crash. So let’s say you’re fortunate enough to be able to see which app caused these changes and then you uninstall it, this won’t cure the problem because the shared files are left behind in their unrecognised state, your other apps will still crash.

Let’s not forget that these apps are being built by anyone and everyone. Amateurs in their bedrooms are making apps that, could quite possibly render other apps useless and it’s not their fault. I mean, how can they know if another bedroom developer is building an app that will want to make it’s own version of a file that their app also uses? So I’m not blaming the developers, this is Apple’s problem…The apps themselves have little or no awareness of one another so it is up to the OS to ensure that they don’t replace crucial versions of files with their own. But I’m not blaming Apple either. Let’s not forget it took Microsoft like 6 or more versions to free windows of these issues and to all intents and purposes, they’ve not succeeded 100% to this day so for Apple to have as few issues as this and only be on Version 2.0 of the OS is still quite an achievement. As Pirillo, himself, said in that video; this software is not yet mature… we have to expect bugs like this. If we don’t we’re just being unreasonable.