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A comment on The walls of Apple's garden are tumbling down. Parent comment

Re:The walls of Apple's garden are tumbling down by wannacboatmovie on Saturday April 27, 2024 @05:20PM (#40183666)
What people keep forgetting is the original iPhone had no App Store. There were no non-Apple native apps. Everything was supposed to be HTML5 web apps. Eventually, they had to convince Steve Jobs that this idea was profoundly retarded, and the App Store (and walled garden) was born. But it wasn't this way at the beginning.

In fact, the original iPhone couldn't even receive MMS messages; rather, the carrier's gateway composed a URL which you opened in Safari to view the picture.

People quickly forget the original 1st gen iPhone was, despite laying the foundation for some great technologies, hot garbage. Apple was still a computer company then, and it showed, as iPhone was a "pocket Mac" with some ancillary phone functions that occasionally worked.

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Re:The walls of Apple's garden are tumbling down by throw0101c on Saturday April 27, 2024 @06:49PM (#40184301)
> What people keep forgetting is the original iPhone had no App Store.

It arrived one year later, in 2008:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App_Store_(Apple)

> People quickly forget the original 1st gen iPhone was, despite laying the foundation for some great technologies, hot garbage.

"Hot garbage" by what metric? Other phones introduced in 2007:

* https://mowned.com/top-mobile-devices/2007

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Mobile_phones_introdu...

The Nokia N95 or RIM Curve 8320 were ranked higher by some folks:

* https://www.mobilegazette.com/2007-review-07x12x12.htm

* https://web.archive.org/web/20071214112358/http://reviews.cn...

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Re:The walls of Apple's garden are tumbling down by xattt on Saturday April 27, 2024 @08:15PM (#40184810)
> It arrived one year later, in 2008

I want to say that this was deliberate. The iPhone was a new product that needed the general population to adapt, and mental models around its use. An App Store at launch would have been hot garbage. Touch apps at that point were shittacular PocketPC apps.

The HTML5/Web Apps recommended by Jobs were also deliberate in order to get developers to move toward formatting sites for mobile.

This was 5D Chess.

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