Was I surprised about the news? Yes. More for its timing rather than Steve Jobs’ actual admission that we’re going to get a development kit for the iPhone.

When the iPhone was released in June, and even prior to that, with its initial announcement, much was made of using Web 2.0 technology as a way of providing reliable, secure applications to run on the iPhone without compromising the integrity of its mobile features. I praised this change of direction signalling the move to ‘everything online’. It’s the future, trust me.

Now with the news of the SDK comes another thought: Apple planned this all along. By initially disappointing traditional software developers, the iPhone got more press. People talked about it more on blogs. Furthermore, it pleased web developers who saw it as a great opportunity to develop or re-imagine the burgeoning web application market. It was no accident: witness the development and release of Safari for Windows – a pre-requisite for testing such applications for those without an iPhone. This also served to emphasise the differences between Safari on the iPhone and other mobile web browsers.

Opening up the iPhone to developers now brings in (perhaps) the original target: Mac developers. There’s a third target too: developers of existing mobile phone applications. Members of this group aren’t necessarily Mac users or developers, thereby providing another excuse / reason to switch. The biggest hurdle to switching platforms is the cost of the SDK and the framework / API of the target architecture. In the case of Mac OS X, the SDK is free, bundled as part of every shipped version, and the framework is beautiful.

By not announcing the iPhone SDK at its launch Apple created another market and showed the rest of the mobile development community that there are plenty of other things to develop besides a zillion Today screens.