Cydia certainly did not influence Apple's decision: Cydia itself was a reaction to an ecosystem being left behind by Installer, a program whose maintainer had disappeared. However, I actually am fairly certain that Installer did. The timeline actually works for this rather well, when you take into consideration how much of a rush-job the whole SDK was: they pretty much started designing a "for third parties" API--from scratch, leaving Apple's apps built to an entirely different set of UI classes--for 2.x
Meanwhile, the device setup really wasn't designed to run third-party apps, and we were actually able to watch as the software was ripped apart and rewritten to work around those problems. Had you actually been there, in the field, developing for the platform at the time, you might not consider the opinion so naive. I agree, however, that people oft fail to look at how long it takes to accomplish things like this, and somehow take the release date as the point of inception: but here we could actually watch the progress.
Regardless, it might be they had it "on the horizon" (although I'd even question that, after years of talking about this story with people at conferences), but the idea that it was going to happen at that point--sufficiently early and with sufficient unknowns that they actually slipped on their release dates (not thforties slips got much press)--for that first device.. to me that is far-fetched (but I sadly realize that most of my evidence is not transferable).
Meanwhile, the device setup really wasn't designed to run third-party apps, and we were actually able to watch as the software was ripped apart and rewritten to work around those problems. Had you actually been there, in the field, developing for the platform at the time, you might not consider the opinion so naive. I agree, however, that people oft fail to look at how long it takes to accomplish things like this, and somehow take the release date as the point of inception: but here we could actually watch the progress.
Regardless, it might be they had it "on the horizon" (although I'd even question that, after years of talking about this story with people at conferences), but the idea that it was going to happen at that point--sufficiently early and with sufficient unknowns that they actually slipped on their release dates (not thforties slips got much press)--for that first device.. to me that is far-fetched (but I sadly realize that most of my evidence is not transferable).