Your Phone Is A Computer. So is your toaster, your alarm clock…

Steve Jobs has announced that the iPhone will be getting its own SDK by February. Why is it taking so long, you may ask? Well, there’s a very simple explanation for that, which I can do best by quoting from Steve’s press release.

It will take until February to release an SDK because we’re trying to do two diametrically opposed things at once—provide an advanced and open platform to developers while at the same time protect iPhone users from viruses, malware, privacy attacks, etc. This is no easy task. Some claim that viruses and malware are not a problem on mobile phones—this is simply not true. There have been serious viruses on other mobile phones already, including some that silently spread from phone to phone over the cell network. As our phones become more powerful, these malicious programs will become more dangerous. And since the iPhone is the most advanced phone ever, it will be a highly visible target.

This surprised me – I thought the fact that the iPhone is effectively a programmable computer was widely known, and that if it’s a programmable computer, it’s automatically susceptible to viruses.

Obviously, I was wrong.

These days, computers are everywhere. They’re in your toaster (for controlling how brown you want the toast), in your TV (for decoding the digital signals), in your alarm clock (to allow for complex alarm patterns), and, thanks to the wonders of RFID, in your drink can, in your clothes, in your DVD, and so on.

Now, by and large, these chips are safe (except for RFID, which I will go into at a later date) because they have no external input unless the devices are physically disassembled and then connected to an input device. And the virus can’t spread unless there’s a connection between the machines, either physical or wireless. Mains power doesn’t count.

However, a phone makes things more complicated. This is because a phone communicates with other phones (through the GSM cell network) and, in cases, to normal personal computers (when accessing WAP web sites, and when using Bluetooth).

Because these phones are programmable using the same languages as computers (Java in particular), this makes phones susceptible to viruses in Java. If a virus is written in the iPhone SDK language (which I would assume will be Carbon or Cocoa, Mac OS X’s main programming languages), then it can easily infect the phone and others around it (if it’s programmed to spread).

The only ways to stop these viruses are to close the platform entirely (using only the manufacturer’s apps) or to build safeguards into the programming language (or SDK in this case). That is what Apple are quite rightly doing.

But, in the end, the bottom line is… you can’t escape the computer.