Rogue Amoeba has filed bug reports for many of the iPhone SDK’s limitations, including:
- Allow applications to be installed at the user’s discretion, not Apple’s
- Allow applications to run in background on iPhone
- A MediaPicker API for accessing the iPod music files is needed
- Add option to allow iPhone applications to access entire filesystem
- Allow iPhone applications to access the host computer when docking
- Allow iPhone applications to access the docking port
I filed one myself requesting the ability to run in the background, which is a critical requirement for the product I plan to develop. Since it spends most of its time sleeping until it gets a timer event, it uses no CPU time at all until it wakes up every few hours to check in with a server and then goes back to sleep (Apple is concerned that background apps would waste CPU time and shorten the battery life).