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Comment by sp332 | Hacker News Reader

There were no apps because they assumed everyone would use websites. Which is still mostly what I use my phone for (although I have an Android).

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I do not believe this to be true at all. The App Store opened in July 2008, just over a year after the initial iPhone was released. That means that likely had to at least be on the Apple product roadmap well before the iPhone was even released.

Yep, my recollection (from stories on-line) is that there was a debate within the team between launching with 3rd party apps or limiting most third parties to web apps. That debate was settled when they realized that they wouldn't be able to get an app platform up and running before the launch anyway.

True, but it isn't clear how much Jobs foresaw vs how much it grew beyond control. There are a few things that obviously cannot be done in a website and some are things apple cannot control.

If I recall correctly, the debate was more about whether the apps would be built with web technologies (JavaScript, HTML, etc.) presumably running in some sort of wrapper, or if they would be built with a more traditional platform language.

He explicitly said in the iPhone launch that the intended way to create apps for the iPhone was to make a website:

> The full Safari engine is inside of iPhone. And so, you can write amazing Web 2.0 and Ajax apps that look exactly and behave exactly like apps on the iPhone. And these apps can integrate perfectly with iPhone services. They can make a call, they can send an email, they can look up a location on Google Maps.

> And guess what? 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. So developers, we think we’ve got a very sweet story for you. You can begin building your iPhone apps today.

I remember a lot of jokes in the Mac developer community at the time about what a "sweet story" this was. It seemed like the public SDK was a response to jailbreak apps being more popular than the intended "iPhone Web apps."

funnily enough there were webapps that jailbroke your ios device with ease

I'm not debating that he said that, I'm just suggesting that it was a marketing ploy, either to buy the teams some time to iron out the details with the app store, or some clever product strategy to release the app store later (which was hugely popular when it did come out)

...but then I don't know, I wasn't there.

One driver was the huge popularity of jailbroken apps. I think whether Apple wanted or not that they had to put a official AppStore out. The demand for 3rd party apps was insane.

It's hard to will a platform into existence without distribution for it. For all they knew at launch, iPhone would flop as many new products do. Adding platform development into that risk directly hurt the chances of the product's success. But once it was evident that the product would succeed and could become the distribution mechanism for a platform, it made sense to open the internal SDK they already had for the built-in apps and turn it into a platform.

Correct. This was referred to in John Carmack's remembrance:

"Steve first talked about application development for iPhone at the same keynote I was demonstrating the new ID Tech 5 rendering engine on Mac, so I was in the front row. When he started going on about 'Web Apps', I was (reasonably quietly) going 'Booo!!!'."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17066846

Actually websites were supposed to be the app basically. Safari would be the container etc... But then they decided to go native instead and take a 30% cut.

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