Yes, the app store was genius. We'll see how the 30% shakes out in the long term, with the recent revolt from Epic etc, but creating a platform on top of your software/hardware vertical integration is a decent monopoly play that creates sustainable revenues.

What's funny is how much friction and persuasion it took to get them to actually do the App Store. Steve was hellbent on WebApps and I hope the history books recognize how much influence jailbreakers had in shifting the discussion to native apps

https://youtu.be/8Vq993Td6ys?t=32

That's super interesting, thanks for the video! Perhaps they understood that there might be resistance to native ("small market" at the start) and so looked for something that could help the transition?

More likely, they knew the hardware couldn’t really run much more.

The first iPhone had 128MB of RAM and ran at 412 MHz, underclocked from 620 MHz (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone_(1st_generation) ), and there was disbelief that what they showed could be built at all at the time with the advertised battery life.

They likely also didn’t want to commit yet to an API for third-party apps, as they didn’t know what was reasonable there.

I was under the impression Steve was (rather unhappily) forced into this position because of the state of native apps by launch. Can't remember where I read this or I'd gladly link it.

I agree with you, I'd be amazed if Steve "Control Freak" Jobs would have wanted an open app ecosystem.

> Yes, the app store was genius.

Meh. make was genius. Makefiles were genius. pkg_install and pkg_add were genius. PMS was genius. RPM was genius. FreeBSD's ports tree is genius. pkgsrc is genius. Like nearly everything Apple ever did, AppStore is not at all original, not remotely the first, not by over a decade. It is really no different from any other binary package manager. It is Brew for iOS.

It's exclusive, with a gatekeeper, and no workaround. It just works. It has payment processing built in.

Like most Apple things, they weren't the first. Their genius isnt being first, it was spit polishing things to be simple for the masses. Over the years, they have lost a bit of that vision and turned googly with new products not quite replacing old products (how many times has photo sharing and backup been redesigned) but comparing the whole suite to components is a bit unfair.

As others have said, the genius of the app store isn't the technology (as you rightly point out, the technical problems have been solved for decades). The genius of the app store is in the business model: Make and market a device with unlimited demand, give third parties only one way to reach such a large market that they're willing to pay you 30% (while drastically lowering technical barriers to entry), and raise the barriers-to-exit so high for users that nobody ever leaves the ecosystem. Rinse, repeat, profit.

Nothing you listed has a competent GUI. For a mass market product that is everything.

How about Cydia, which predated AppStore by 2 years?

it amazes me that people still seem to think that the app store was some reactionary response to jail breaking and not a calculated move. the iPhone was launched in June 2007, the app store in July 2008. Apple did not build an entire developer SDK and software marketplace within 1 year as some afterthought. those wheels had been in motion before we knew what the iPhone was.

if Apple had launched the app store with the iPhone, it would have had no where near as big of an impact as it did by waiting just a year. they created the demand first.

and no, Cydia was launched 5 months before the app store.

I was suggesting nothing of the kind. But certainly it wasn't the other way around, either.

My only point is that the AppStore is not the Second Coming. It is and it only is a package manager. Just like all the others that came before it. And nothing more. It is not some searing example of genius. It is one package manager among countless. That it includes a payment system is an irrelevant detail.

What Apple did that is amazing is creating a community of developers out of nothing and gave them excellent tools to create software for their platform. It seemed overnight that the ocean of Windows applications, mostly due to obsession with backward compatibility, was no longer all that special.