Steve Jobs was initially opposed to apps | Hacker News Reader

Steve Jobs was initially opposed to apps

engadget.com

7 pointsdanso8 comments

  "Jobs at first quashed the discussion," Isaacson writes, 
  "partly because he felt his team did not have the bandwidth
  to figure out all the complexities that would be involved
  in policing third-party app developers.

Looking at all the policy difficulties the iPhone App Store initially had, I think we can safely say he was right about that.

They still have serious policy issues.

Case in point: a friend of mine needed to transfer ownership of an app from a third party to himself. Apple dragged this on for months, and it has been a constant stream of emails and 3-way phone calls. In the end, their Final Solution was this: he had to create a second LLC, add the third party as a "member" of this new company, get state documents certifying the existence of this LLC and the membership status of this third party, and a notarized letter from the third party authorizing the transfer.

The most recent issue was that Apple kept deleting the transfer request form because the name of his second LLC was too similar to the name of his first (seriously, Apple?).

Absolutely none of this is a technical problem; the whole reason he decided to go through this fiasco was to avoid breaking the upgrade path and losing all his reviews and stats (not to mention forcing his customers to lose data). Obviously, there is some switch that an Apple employee can tick that transfers apps from one developer account to another.

Contrast this to the Android Market's transfer process, which boils down to both developers sending an email to Google to authorize a transfer.

Umm.. I am pretty certain he actually went on public record about this back in the 1st gen iPhone days. I recall that the only thing that was in doubt was if his justification was honest or was he just trying to appease AT&T.

When he said to just write Web apps instead of native apps, I thought that was just spin to delay criticism until the native SDK was available.

The headline and much of the Engadget article seem to complete ly mischaracterize the quote from the book. The quote (and history) indicates that he postponed opening up for third-party developers, not that was "opposed" to the idea.

By the time the book comes out all the content will be all over the internet. Shouldn't these posts have some kind of spoiler alert?? Some of us want to read the actual book.

No shit. It's very unlike Steve Jobs to suggest using other products with his own. That's like admitting their products are insufficient.

They must admit their products are insufficient pretty often (just from recent OS releases):

* Twitter integration

* Yelp and Wolfram Alpha to provide responses for Siri

* Gmail/Yahoo Mail/Exchange email & calendar integration in iOS and Mac OS X

* Google/Bing/Yahoo as integrated search engines in Safari

Fact is that Apple prefers to do things in-house where possible, but if they see it in their interests to integrate something else, they will. Pride (or hubris) has nothing to do with it.

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