After Apple iPhone developers have already had a couple of volleys with hackers who want to run 3rd party applications on the new phone Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, has today let the hacking community know that they can stop, or at least slow down for a few minutes. Jobs has announced that Apple is going to open up both the iPhone and the iPod Touch for third party application development on the device in February of 2008.

Prior to this the only way to get any third party applications on the iPhone was through an “open” platform on the Safari web browser which runs on the device and was still fairly limiting. Jobs attributed the these development restrictions to security issues stating that open development increases risks of viruses. He also states that these security risks are also why it will take until February to release an SDK for developers.