So writes Daring Fireball's John Gruber in a piece that examines Apple's (AAPL) policy toward inviting anyone outside the company to add functions -- from widgets to ring tones -- to the iPhone. He deconstructs Jobs' public statements on the subject, and then cuts nicely to the chase.

In January, for example, Jobs told Newsweek's Steve Levy:

“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.”

Which, as Gruber points out, is ridiculous. Plenty of other mobile phones offer third-party apps and they've yet to bring a phone network down.

Then at All Things Digital last week Jobs told the WSJ's Walt Mossberg:

This is an important tradeoff between security and openness. We want both. We’re working through a way… we’ll find a way to let 3rd parties write apps and still preserve security on the iPhone. But until we find that way we can’t compromise the security of the phone.

I’ve used 3rd party apps… the more you add, the more your phone crashes. No one’s perfect, and we’d sure like our phone not to crash once a day. If you can just be a little more patient with us I think everyone can get what they want.

That doesn't make sense either, because if the iPhone runs OS X in protected memory, one bad app is no more likely to crash a phone than it would be to crash a Mac.

Why, Gruber asks, doesn’t Jobs just say what he means?

"The simple truth is that Apple is committing to nothing because that allows them to keep all of their options open. They’re promising nothing because they don’t have to promise anything – the iPhone needs neither additional publicity nor higher expectations....

"The main reason Jobs might want to delay allowing third-party software to run on the iPhone isn’t technical (bringing down the phone network or crashing the phone), but aesthetic. Let users grow accustomed to what true iPhone-style apps feel like to use, and they – the users – will demand that developers write true iPhone-style apps when development is eventually opened up, in the same way that Mac users demand true Mac-style apps.

"Downplaying the prospects for third-party app development in the meantime is a way of under-promising and over-delivering. By setting initial expectations that there might never be third-party software for iPhone, any future support for third-party apps will be treated as good news. Software projects often take longer to complete than expected; look no further than Leopard.

"If the official ship date for an iPhone SDK [software developer's kit] is “never”, it can’t be late."

From Daring Fireball "Wherefore Art Thou iPhone SDK?" Photo courtesy of Gizmodo.