Apple is facing fresh calls to open the iPhone as new evidence emerged of the technical and legal challenges developers face putting their software on the device.
Delegates attending the Office 2.0 Conference have voiced concern over the iPhone's closed architecture, lack of developer tools, and the fact its version of Apple's Safari browser lacks common web plug ins they said needlessly complicate the process of porting software and online services to the device.
And it's not just Web 2.0 start-ups making the noise. SAP, the world's largest supplier of business applications, has pitched in, saying Apple gave the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) as the reason it can't install its software on the iPhone.
SAP had hacked its code onto an iPhone as a proof of concept, which is now on hold.
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TJ Kang, chief executive of hosted Office suite ThinkFree backed Moore saying he knew hosted providers who'd wasted two man months porting their online spreadsheets to the iPhone, because of deficiencies in Apple's Safari browser.
According to Kang, AJAX struggles, JavaScript crashes and only simple HTML can run properly. The problem is iPhone's Safari doesn't use the same architecture or plug-ins as Safari for the desktop. "Software developers are finding... even though our AJAX based applications run in Safari, we have to make a lot of modifications to make it run well on the iPhone browser," Kang said.
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