Apple is working on solutions that will help developers get more face time on the iPhone, but there are currently no plans to offer a “true” iPhone SDK that would allow developers to create native apps, a source at Apple has told Ars.

The company is currently planning a handful of updates to Safari and the iPhone that may appease some of the common complaints about developing for the device. For example, Apple is currently jamming on adding offline storage capabilities to Safari—something that would rival Google Gears in being able to serve up web applications locally without having to access the Internet. Our source says that the project is entirely for the iPhone: “The entire purpose of all this work is to make the iPhone ‘SDK’ (WebKit) more usable,” our source told us. Because of this, the SDK will remain web-based, he said, with the applications remaining constrained to HTML, CSS, and a nice splash of lemon-scented AJAX.