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Comment by josh2600 | Hacker News Reader

It was Web Apps only originally and that was the battle call from Apple. It wasn't until GeoHot (and others) rooted the phone and we got app stores like Cydia that Apple really started to care.

It was with the launch of the iPhone 3G when they came out with the SDK + App Store and it was a really well executed coup.

Do you know how you got software on your phone before the iPhone? Getjar or side-loading (with a proprietary cable almost no one had with apps that would sometimes hard break your phone).

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The biggest kickers for Apple were:

a) Sensible means of payment, no need to setup credit card processing, do deals with carriers etc for developers. Oh and no carrier lockdown on installing applications.

b) Macs going x86 based so you could develop for Windows / Linux and Apple all on the one box.

Basically Apple managed to make it possible for small dev shops to work on the iPhone without spending huge amounts of cash AND get money from consumers.

Is there anything published that shows the true history of Apple's intentions for developer support and on the iPhoine and when in time?

Jailbreakers like to take credit but the App Store launched so relatively soon after the iPhone it's hard to believe it wasn't in the works from the beginning. A year to create all that tooling and polishing the APIs and building the store infrastructure seems on the mark.

It's hard to pinpoint exactly when Apple changed their minds, but Jobs was very clear in the original iPhone keynote that the Web was the intended development platform for the iPhone and that not having an SDK was a strength — no hints about a native SDK in the near future or anything. Here's a good article showing Apple's original stance, with additional information from the Steve Jobs biography: http://9to5mac.com/2011/10/21/jobs-original-vision-for-the-i...

This is the same Steve Jobs who said there would never be an iPod that did video about a year before they did so.

They may have had the app store model planned out from the start for the next version of the iPhone, but didn't want to talk about it when releasing the first version because that would highlight the shortcomings of the existing product and cut into sales. But you still have to have an answer to the question of how you make software for the new product, so they say build web apps.

I believe they had the appstore and sdk planned all along, but couldn't get it ready in time.

Rather than saying, "we will have an sdk too, sometime", they played it off as intentional, and continued working on it silently. There is just no way they built it all in the single year from the release of the iphone.

Well, yeah, nobody thinks they built it all in a single year. The SDK largely just publicized a subset of Apple's existing private APIs that they used to make their own apps. Foundation, UIKit, etc. — that stuff was already there, but you couldn't use it without jailbreaking your phone. Here's an article running down all the stuff that was included with the original iPhone, from almost a year before the SDK was announced: http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2007/07/16/iphone-os-x-archite...

Obviously, most apis themselves were done at the iphone launch, and wouldn't take much more work.

The rest, all the infrastructure needed to have a working app store would be a much more substantial project. It is this part that would be difficult to build in a single year, and would have had to be in the pipeline when Jobs made his statement.

Apple already had the iTunes Store and a lot of very mature associated infrastructure. The App Store was built on that, and a year sounds like a pretty generous estimate for the project.

The best source I know of on early iPhone is the Nitin Ganatra episodes of the Debug Podcast [0]. He was in charge of the early iOS apps from before the iPhone shipped so he talked about those days. Those podcasts and the ones he did with Don Melton (former head of Safari team at Apple) are all excellent for getting insight into behind the scenes at Apple.

[0] http://www.imore.com/debug

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