Speculation continues about how far Apple is along in its quest to balance two potentially conflicting goals: making it easy for iPhone developers to build and distribute applications, and making it difficult for those applications to break the iPhone or introduce malware. An authorized Apple SDK was due originally to be released in February; now the word is that perhaps it will be released at an event on the Apple campus in Cupertino, CA, next week.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who originally made the February promise, is known to dislike pushing release dates, but getting this one right is strategically so important for Apple that rumors are circulating that next week's announcement may only be of a further slight delay, to mid-March say.

Kevin Hoffman, Editor-in-Chief of SYS-CON's iPhone Developer Journal and Summit Chair of the iPhone Developer Summit being held in New York 19-20 March 2008 at AJAXWorld Conference & Expo 2008 East, puts it very bluntly:

"What Apple stands to lose from screwing up the release of the SDK and the entire legal iPhone development environment is immeasurably more than what they stand to lose by waiting a couple more weeks to get it right."