John Gruber, probably one of the most popular Mac bloggers, says:
Despite the fact that the iPhone SDK terms explicitly state that “No interpreted code may be downloaded and used in an Application except for code that is interpreted and run by Apple’s Published APIs and builtin interpreter(s)â€, Sun announced that they plan to develop a JVM for the iPhone SDK. Eric Klein, vice president of Java marketing for Sun.
Now, John rubbishes the notion and, based on what we’ve seen, rightly so. An iPhone JVM would potentially permit individuals to bypass the App Store and populate their devices with inferior Java applications but there’s nothing in the SDK terms that would actually Sun Microsystems. They’re not going to start out by writing the code for the JVM using the SDK. They’d go straight to Apple and they’ll ask the hard questions.
- Can we write a JVM and get access to the device to do so.
- Will you allow the JVM to be listed on the App Store
I don’t think it’s impossible but it’s incredibly unlikely.
FWIW, John, we all call the iPod touch the ‘iTouch’ so cut them some slack. They’re just trying to get down with the hep cats.