iPhone applications would be dangerous. At least that it the position of Apple's CEO Steve Jobs when he told Newsweek:

“You don’t want your phone to be an open platform,” meaning that anyone can write applications for it and potentially gum up the provider's network, says Jobs. “You need it to work when you need it to work. Cingular doesn’t want to see their West Coast network go down because some application messed up.”

This could easily have been in competition for silliest statement of the year had Jim Gibbons not already won the award.

On the other hand, maybe it is a sign that everybody should drop Cingular. Their network is already in use by Treo Smart phones, Windows Mobile phones, and PC cards plugged directly into laptops. All of these devices run applications written by third party developers not by Cingular or Apple, yet the network survives. Come on Steve end the Apple Developer Lockout.