Google’s SDK Hearts iPhone SDK

by Eric March on March 21, 2008 at 11:30 am

These are very interesting times to be involved in mobile platform development. We are on the brink of not just one, but two new major mobile platforms, an event that doesn’t come around very often at all. It is fascinating then to watch the interplay between two giant rivals competing for market share and how they handle the competition. In an interesting move, the latest version of Google’s GData Objective-C Client Library (part of Android’s SDK) has added support for — wait for it — the iPhone SDK.

“Perhaps you want your iPhone software to send photos to a Picasa Web Albums account, or keep a journal of phone calls automatically in Blogger. Maybe your iPhone application accesses a database of information from a Google Spreadsheet or from Google Base. With the Google Data APIs Objective-C Client Library, creating software for these tasks is straightforward.”

“If you are writing iPhone software, just drag the “GData Sources” group folder from the GData project file into your iPhone project, and use the GData APIs as you would when writing a Mac application. ”

Of course, when you think about it, it makes sense. Google has a huge vested interest in the development of applications that can work with its own assets, such as Google Apps, so adding support for such things to the iPhone’s SDK would take priority over Android exclusivity. Still, it’s interesting to see Google play nice with Apple, even though their motives are hardly altruistic.

(Source: iPhone Atlas)

Posted in SDK, iPhone 2.0