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Comment by RodericDay | Hacker News Reader

> This actually goes back to Steve Job's original vision for the iPhone. He didn't intend there to ever be 3rd party apps for the phone, because he saw the internet as being the perfect platform for them.

Do you have a link that lays this out in more detail?

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The most succinct quote from Jobs is:

    There’s no SDK that you need! You’ve got
    everything you need if you know how to
    write apps using the most modern web
    standards to write amazing apps for the
    iPhone today.

The full quote and the video in which he said it can be found here: http://9to5mac.com/2011/10/21/jobs-original-vision-for-the-i...

And then you can hear the sucking void of silence of a response from the crowd and a few months later an sdk was out.

Well he changed his mind more often and quickly than you can say "magical thinking". Still, better to seem certain when speaking to investors, developers and other get-rich-quick types.

On the other hand: it's okay to be wrong if you can admit that you're wrong, it's okay to change your mind, and, of course, circumstances can change.

It was a crowd of Apple Mac OS X developers though, with a great deal of expertise in Obj-C, not the web, so it shouldn't be taken as an objective verdict on whether it was a good strategy or not.

I think it was inevitable. And probably planned for a second release too. Not that web APIs were lacking, but purely from performance perspective. By then, web was designed for 2GHz/2Gb desktop, not a 200MHz cpu from a dvd player.

From Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs:

>He didn't want outsiders to create applications for the iPhone that could mess it up, infect it with viruses, or pollute its integrity

http://www.theverge.com/2013/7/10/4507930/the-revolution-wil...

Then why did Apple launch Mac OS X instead of something like ChomeOS?

Chrome OS is to Linux what iOS 1.x was to Mac OS.

Because it was 1999-2001.

We don't really know what Steve was thinking, we only have what he said when there was no alternative. Clearly he realized at some point how much apps and an app store could benefit the platform. It might have been long before he said this. In reality it took some time to make the SDK usable by third parties.

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