Apple rewards developers with bricked iPhone

SDK timeout leaves fans up connection creek

Posted in Mobile, 9th April 2008 09:11 GMT

Developers who eagerly downloaded Apple's beta release of the iPhone developer's kit found themselves without a connection this morning, as the package timed out before a replacement was issued.

Developers, of course, shouldn't be using their primary phone to run beta software on - but these days everything is a beta, and few of the hundred thousand people who have downloaded the SDK will be serious enough to have bought a second iPhone just for development purposes.

So this morning they got a rude awakening and a reminder to separate development and daily machines. Or at least they did if they weren't using their iPhone as an alarm clock.

Some managed to revert to an earlier version of the OS, while others are reporting they have managed to install the latest firmware successfully, though all are still waiting for an updated SDK.

One could blame Apple's lack of developer network experience for this kind of thing, but in reality it's more likely to be a mistyped date that could happen to anyone, with a fix usually available within hours.

Or indeed minutes - the iPhone SDK Beta 3 is already available for download.®

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