When the iPhone first came out there were no native apps. Only web apps. There is no way people would be making this much money if Apple hadn't opened up the platform.

In fact, I seem to remember that people were pretty much immediately complaining that there was no (official) way to bring third party apps to the iPhone (except for web apps).

If I remember this was also a major criticism: Some other phones at the time could install third party software, the iPhone could not.

However, despite the ability of installing third party apps existing in many phones, that never really took off before the iPhone SDK came out.

(Also, the iPhone did have a relatively slow start. It sold well and along with what Apple was publicly stating as its goal, but it took a generation before the phone really did take off like a rocket.)

> If I remember this was also a major criticism: Some other phones at the time could install third party software, the iPhone could not.

> However, despite the ability of installing third party apps existing in many phones, that never really took off before the iPhone SDK came out.

To be fair, though, the iPhone was also being compared against the PDA market of the time, where 3rd party apps had existed for a decade or more. In that regard, the iPhone was a partial step backwards (at the time). It gave all the connectivity a PDA user could want, but none of the apps that they were accustomed to. The PDA use-case was also why people thought it couldn't work without a stylus. For 15 years that's what PDAs had and it worked pretty well. The change in UI was significant for people making comparisons to that market, and not just the Blackberry market (which, at least all the ones I ever saw, relied more on the built-in keyboard than a stylus, did they ever have a model that used a stylus?).

I've heard some claims recently (perhaps true) that Jobs didn't want third party apps, but at the time the interface was so obviously suited for apps that I assumed that they simply hadn't had time to put together what was needed for third parties to build apps. At the time they talked about web apps, but it felt like stalling, then a year later the app store launches.

It's true (apple fanboy here, I remember it well). He was adamantly against them. If you look around, he did a whole keynote where he tried to present web apps as just as good as native apps-- it was ridiculous.

He'd been dead wrong before as well: just a few years before the iphone, when people wanted to see an ipod with video capability, he said nobody would ever want to watch video on a mobile device.

It really bugs me that apple makes these "nobody would ever want" proclamations and then reverses itself without saying, "we goofed". The next one coming is 5+ inch screens for the iphone. They'll make no mention of the fact that they criticized large screen phones before ("look, my thumb goes from corner to corner!"). Oh well.

> It really bugs me that apple makes these "nobody would ever want" proclamations and then reverses itself without saying, "we goofed".

Apple doesn't like to tell people what it's doing. So if they say "We're not doing X", it might mean they're not doing it. Or, it might mean that they are doing it, and don't want anybody to know yet.

With the iPod Video, they ixnayed it in public up to a few weeks before they released it.

In the case of the App Store, it seems pretty obvious that Apple intended to let developers write apps for it, but the APIs weren't stable enough to have 3rd party developer depend on them. So they stalled for a year, depending on superior hardware to keep momentum going until the OS settled down some.

You're right.

I see that differently. Designer Steve didn't want to make things that didn't work nicely, and salesman Steve always sold what he had.

If the original iPhone had supported apps, it probably would have run them a bit better than most most other phones of the time, but it still would have run them badly.

[IIRC, there also was the issue that time to market meant there was no SDK at the time; it wasn't even clear how apps would be kept separate from the OS. Even if there were a clear idea about it, I somewhat doubt Steve would have allowed apps on version 1. The risk of apps interfering with the user experience on that hardware was just too great]

Whatever the reason(s), there was no support for apps at release. So, salesman Steve sold the idea that users wouldn't want apps, just like he sold the idea that users wouldn't want to look video on their iPod. And both were, when he said it, not untrue for the average consumer (that video would have been a low-contrast postage stamp that you would have to transfer to your iPod at home. Sure, some people would do that, but it wasn't ready for the masses yet). Nowadays, he would probably say nobody wants Google Glass, too.

Are you sure about that? Sounds like something Apple would say about a product they don't offer, right up until they offer it. Just like they mocked non-iPad sized tablets until they released the iPad Air.

It doesn't mean Apple or Jobs believed any of it, just that they'd say anything to pretend competitors were clueless. It seems very un-Apple to say "yes, X feature is a good idea, our competitors have it but we weren't able to deliver it for this product cycle".

My first iPhone was a 3GS. I don't remember its predecessors as being especially compelling. In fact, I bought a Treo likely after the original iPhone was available. It's also worth noting that the iPod, for all its seeming inevitability in retrospect, was just another MP3 player until about the 4th generation. In general, the ecosystem aspect of Apple was underappreciated by most because the concept just didn't exist in mobile (or, for that matter, consumer) devices at the time.

Also when he wrote "it is too early to start dumping your Nokia shares." they were about $20 so losses to date ~62%. Still investing would be easy if you could travel back in time.