While Apple hasn’t released any iPhone development tools for creating dedicated software programs that reside and run on the iPhone itself, scores of browser-based apps for the iPhone appeared in the first month after its debut. Why all the effort? The basic hacker impulse–curiosity–says Andrew Jaquith, a Yankee Group analyst.

By the standards of modern software, it wasn’t much. All the program did, after all, was display the words “Hello world!” What set it apart was the fact that it did so on Apple’s iPhone, and that it was created by a group of independent programmers without the blessing of the famously control-freakish company.