iPhone favors small deployments

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iBall and iChain
The first barrier to iPhone fleet deployment is the inescapable necessity of iTunes. An online music store client that communicates opaquely with offsite servers is not likely to be part of your standard desktop and notebook build. It's not going to be IT's first choice as a central device configuration terminal. Yet either the user or IT must run iTunes to activate each phone, a tedious interactive process. Only iTunes can be used to back up, restore, or update the firmware or install custom applications on an iPhone. Apple issues iPhone firmware updates frequently. They are effectively mandatory, and each firmware update requires updates to iTunes and the iPhone SDK as well.

If you come from the BlackBerry or Windows Mobile world, activation is a foreign idea. These devices can deploy without ever touching a desktop. The closest they come to activation is enrollment with a mail or collaboration server. User applications can be shipped over the air and installed directly on the device. Firmware updates are few, and I have yet to see one classified as mandatory.

Another barrier to iPhone fleet deployment relates to custom applications that are common in enterprises. From a consumer or individual perspective, the iPhone SDK makes all things possible. From an enterprise perspective, iPhone just doesn't play well with others. It is not possible to port, without completely rewriting, any mobile application you're currently using, with the only exception being HTTP hosted apps with browser front ends.

iPhone has no J2ME or Flash implementation, nor does it support background processes that, for example, maintain connections with middleware for application-specific push, presence, or notification. Apple announced plans to host a notification service to address some of these issues, but it never materialized. Even with that, the most any developer could hope for is that an external notification would trigger an application into the foreground, which a user might find disruptive. Because applications have no access to the iPhone's status bar (which comes and goes in any case), there's no way to indicate a pending or missed communication.Continued...