Does the iPhone support Java?

Does the iPhone support Java?

No. The iPhone will not support Java applications of any kind. Steve Jobs has been quoted as saying "Java's not worth building in. Nobody uses Java anymore. It's this big heavyweight ball and chain."

We can't disagree with the last part of Jobs' scathing remark, but stating that Java doesn't get used anymore couldn't be farther from the truth - especially in the world of mobile devices.

In any event, the iPhone will not offer Java support.

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Comments

anakie replied on

Steve Jobs has to be the stupidest genius to walk on this earth. there is nothing that rules the mobile world like java all mobile phones support java...'It’s this big heavyweight ball and chain' give me a break... the iPhone has 4Gb of space, JavaME2.0 uses like 20Mb at most. Anyways who gives a sh*t. its soo obvious Apple wants people to only use stuff thats on the itunes store... what a greedy company.. i thought microsoft was greedy but Apple just took the ..'apple' (pun intended)

Anonymous replied on

Nobody cares if your puns are intended.

Anonymous replied on

agreed. and its cake not apples.

Anonymous replied on

LOL . fuck, reading all these nerdy comments is funny enough , but the 'its cake not apples' really did it for me. now lets all take turns making fun of my post shall we? go nerds go

Anonymous replied on

I totally agree. In fact not just these, but some of the comments in a lot of other places in general [cnn,youtube] are really funny . Quick entertainment :P .

Anonymous replied on

guys the topic is can we install java apps on Iphone or not.... please stick to the point ... I want java on my Iphone is any body in the room can advice is it posible or not?..... not will not make sence as everything is possible on this mother earth.... so any genius know anything about it please share....

Thanks & Reagrds,
Naresh Rathod

Nobody cares replied on

Nobody even cares of your reply.

Anonymous replied on

I don't think Jobs is stupid really.
I own an IPhone and my comment on it is "Its sexy, glitzy, overpriced and short on the features".
I think that a very accurate description of it.

Looking at the whole architecture of the device, you can sum it up in one word: CLOSED.
You do it Apples way or it isnt done.
Thats what drives me (and a lot of other people) absolutely nuts, here we have a unix like operating system and its CLOSED.

Apples philosophy is hinges around tightly controlling its products so they get a cut of everything.
Thats not a really bad business model.
Thats also why Apples margin of every machine sold is a lot higher PCs.
its also (one of the reasons) why more PCs are sold :)

People want Java on the IPhone.
Jobs does not.
The people WILL get what they want and Jobs is not going to stop that from happening.

Anonymous replied on

That's what I think. People will eventually get java or any other thing they want to develop with running on the iphone. Let's have a look at the mono guys and the mono touch initiative (c#.net for the iphone).

I really hope apple fails in favor of android. Their business model is really everything they hated back in 1984. They in fact became the big brother itself.

Mr. Jobs seems to be stuck in the 80's with his business strategy. We will eventually see flash, java and whatever in the iphone. Give it 1 year for android to really take off from mobile phone and tablet sales, adding to that announcement of google tv and tv sets running android. The ecosystem of tools, developers, applications, cloud services linked to android is going to be huge soon. And you know what: it will be free and it will be open. Google is the only company now on stage that can replace the classy apple symbol with a small stupid green robot as the symbol of what is cool and techy.

Anonymous replied on

This things really caught my attention... and you're right about that.. pretty soon android will take its place in the market.. and for java, java is good and fully featured you even do everythin on 8 and there are many possibilities for java... i am a java developer but uses other language but i find java as the best and beautiful language.. developers knows what api is unstable.. and find a alternative...java was good.. so fools dont say anything about the things that you dont know.. please try to research before giving such statement..

4mer_Ranger replied on

The iPhone is great new device but they need to unlock it's potention by not being greedy and supplying us with the appropriate software.

tclNJ replied on

Steve's disparaging remark about Java is probably better translated as "we tried Java on the iPhone and it ran like crap on this processor, in no small part due to the UI overhead it has to deal with" rather than "Java is crap."

At least that's how I take his remark, as there is no other justifiable reason NOT to have Java on this device... the absence of Java and Flash is just crippling for the stuff I'd like to do on the iPhone that requires me to be able to launch Java appplets - i.e. stuff I need to get work done in internal systems.

I so want the iPhone to be the perfect mobile device for me, but no Java and no Flash make it pretty much no deal.

I've heard Flash is coming... let's hope a Java VM and plugin is at least coming to Safari on the iPhone as well.

Anonymous replied on

I can't believe that we don't have the option of installing it if we should choose...I can't access the full potential of the device....I have wi-fi in my place of work, and it would be really nice to check my work emails, etc, while doing simple things (taking a S@$! for example) however, do to no Java, I can't get past the verification for the wi-fi.. (any ideas)....
I assume that this will be the case with most "free" wi-fi spots as well....

Anonymous replied on

Unless they severely restrict java and flash it would allow people to effortlessly sidestep apples business model, which is "drive people to the iTunes store." This lockdown is nothing new... Apple has always been a communist state operating inside a free market economy(, which is why the loopy, frenetic devotion of the artsy, hippie set has always cracked me up... ) Jobs is still operating under the old fear that allowed apple to thrive in the 80s..."don't lose control of Apple products the way IBM lost the PC market. IBM succumbed to the pressure of the free market...IBM suffered but the world benefitted. Jobs is about money and control.

Written from my iPhone.

Anonymous replied on

Sadly this is true. A pity they weren't a bit more properly communist in ideals, you know like looking after everyones needs rather than themselves; seems to me they've taken fascist control element of Stalinism and combined it with Capitalist corporate greed to create... well... another Microsoft.

I was once happy that Mac OS X seemed to be open to open source collaborative models, but the iPhone well and truly killed that hope. Me; bring on the anarchist-communist Linux ;-)

Current owner of an iPhone and a Macbook (which admittedly wins in the design takes, marginally), probably moving to a Ubuntu based latop and an Android based phone :)

Posting from a XP machine.

Anonymous replied on

My OWN homepage uses java so I can not view it from my $500 phone......

Anonymous replied on

I have supported desktop computers and currently manage a server farm and there are few things that I hate more than Java. I feel that Java is poorly documented (not a single good source, too much scattered documentation), is a frankenstein type technology, and a dinosaur. I have never been an M$ fan as I am a Mac guy, but I would design systems in .Net over Java any day. I am fine that there is no Java on this phone.

Anonymous replied on

I'm on my iphone right now and I would just like to say that for it to be advertised as the first phone with no watered down view on the Internet I think that withought java it really contradicts that statement and I realy wish that someone finds a way to run java on it.

Anonymous replied on

Managing a farm (even a Server-type one) doesn't qualify you to know Java. I am an expert Java engineer, and have not heard crap like that for a while - "java is poorly documented, dinosaur, frankenstein, etc.". Java is very well documented (if you know how to read Javadoc or a Java book, you'll be fine). Java beats C++ and other older generation languages in both clarity and power while minimizing human error (like C pointer/memory leaks, if you know what I mean). It is not a collection of "body parts" put together to create the monster, like many browser-driven initiatives, but a strongly typed and elegant, very scalable and fast (at current JDK level) technology, used anywhere from smart cards, mobile phones to enterprise "farms". Don't make a fool out of yourself by talking about what you know very little about - seems like your Java knowledge is at a level of running an JDK installer.

Anonymous replied on

Thank you for that post!!!!!!!!!
Especially for the documentation part!

Anonymous replied on

well, try java.sun.com and look at the latest J2SE/J2EE documentation... Can't be much more single-source...

Anonymous replied on

Okay, here goes:

"Java is poorly documented" - odd, considering I learned to program in the language using nothing but JavaDocs from the Sun site itself. Each API method is completely documented, and the vast majority of it includes full examples. So either you're just a hater, or you looked someplace really screwed up for documentation. If you want an example of some truly world-class effed up documentation, try checking out Ruby. Now THAT sucks.

"Frankenstein type technology" - okay, you got me on this, I have no idea what that means. If it's because it's a virtual-machine based platform, then I'd like to know how YOU would implement "write once, run anywhere". Besides, if it's SUCH a terrible idea, why did Microsoft do the same thing with .NET (and I believe very early versions of VB, ut I may be wrong on this point).

"a dinosaur" - you mean like the entire heritage of Mac OS X (i.e. Unix)? Or do you mean like that language that Apple uses (you know the one ... C/C++/Objective-C)?

".Net over Java any day" - well, that's a case of personal preference, really. I find .Net apps are absolutely ugly beyond words, and they never look even vaguely the same between operating systems (and I don't mean they look too "native" - I mean the layouts are just complete garbage between them). Also, from my personal experience, roughly 75% of all .NET apps do NOT run on any supported OS, but almost certainly Windows-only - which begs the question why bother with an "interpreted" language which ONLY runs on a single OS? Overhead with no gain = pointless.

"I am fine that there is no Java on this phone" - and that is completely fine. I am NOT fine with it, hence my personal preference to not buy Apple-anything (and no, I'm not a M$ guy either). However your comments on the platform don't gel in the real world, sorry mate. :-P

Buy Essay replied on

The iPhone, however, restricts you to that weird ObjC "Smalltalk thinks it is C" concept language which C++ basically took over 20 years ago. And on top of that, the official SDK's crippled on what you can or can't do Buy Essay

Gallomimia replied on

I have been researching how Cocoa and Obj-C work in order to learn programming on my mac. The same technology has been brought to the iPhone in the form of CocoaTouch. My first language was java.

My understanding of this technology is that the Obj-C code and NIB files are very loosely compiled and run through a sort of "interpreter" at run time, which seems to be very similar to the Java-VM concept. While there is not the solid compiled .jar the system software in the eye of the user behaves the same way, with the machine to run the software requiring a runtime environment properly configured and installed in order for any programs written for Cocoa to run.

So, is this competition between the Java run-time environment and Cocoa run-time environment, or is there a legitimate reason for the iPhone to not support java?

Or perhaps it's because competing devices use java to allow software to run, and Apple wants to dominate the mobile device market in a similar way Microsoft dominated the desktop environment some decades ago?

Anton replied on

You are fool. You talking about things that you know nothing. IBM software product line are build ob Java, Oracle Fusion is build on Java. In software world they are much more that Apple. Apple is greedy, it want to pin us to it's proprietary solutions.

Vijays Sohra replied on

This cant get more ridiculous. Not allowing third party(read j2me) apps simply make it useless apple makes good softwares but the more variety of apps we can use the more popular a product is. Time for Mr.Jobs to rethink his strategy.

Anonymous replied on

Update: After receiving access to the iPhone and iPod touch through Apple's SDK, Sun microsystems says it will release a version of Java for the two Apple deviced. The decisions was made just a day Apple announced its SDK plans.

Anonymous replied on

I really hope to see a Java VM on the iPhone. My company develops games for mobile phones and we purposely stayed out of developing for the iPhone because of its low market penetration. By developing in JavaME, we can tarket over 90% of the handsets in the hands of consumers (world-wide). JavaME not only runs on "Java" but also on Symbian OS, Windows Mobile, etc.

From a developers point of view it makes little sense to develop for the iPhone. Within the US, we also do games for BREW so that we can target Verizon (approx. 30% of US Market). With such low market penetration, it makes little sense to spend developer resources porting applications to the iPhone.

Java would change that.

Orion replied on

I really hope NOT to see Java on the iPhone!

Games? Most of the people use this as a phone and organizer, not as game console. If I want to play games I'll get dedicated device for it. Also serious game developers would not look into Java, as it is too SLOW for anything.

Java is even slower than .NET, talking of which it is much more organized and easier to develop in to.
So if anything that doesn't run native code, .NET instead of Java, would be better choice for the iPhone, and I believe is coming in form of Silverlight.

I wonder why someone would choose Java for new development, it is only around to support existing systems... Unless someone cleans up Java, I don't see how it is going to survive as one of the major development platforms for much longer.

Anonymous replied on

Oooh... like it seems you've never developed J2EE apps. dot-net basically copied over the same stuff, the only reason .net is faster on Windows systems is because it's integrated to the OS, .net uses MSIL (the MS version for bytecode).

Most apps I know that make my smartphone work are made in Java, and tons of organizer apps are also done in that. So it isn't just the gaming industry thats being left out, dude! Most developers use C/C++ and/or Java for application development, and mobile Java gives the advantage to do Java clients integrating to an existing J2EE application, say, a corporate one? That's what smartphones are SUPPOSED to do, extend your office into your mobile, not just play nice video & mp3's. The iPhone, however, restricts you to that weird ObjC "Smalltalk thinks it is C" concept language which C++ basically took over 20 years ago. And on top of that, the official SDK's crippled on what you can or can't do. Oops!

Make no mistake, the true reason for no Java support on the iPhone is because Java apps can't be tied in to the "iTunes store". Opening up Java support would mean you could circumvent that restriction.

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