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Apple Celebrates '5 Years of the App Store' With Poster Sent to Reporters
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Nice posterAll for something Steve Jobs initially likely didn't want.
Just speculation, but I think Apple was much more concerned with iPhone OS 1.0. Web apps were a temporary holdover billed as the future only to make iPhone appear as a complete experience. Then for iPhone OS 2.0 Apple focused heavily on a developer platform and app store. Notice the original iPhone's apps were not web apps, but native, fluid experiences. Native apps were the iPod video of the iPhone age.
That's the way Apple would have one believe they meant it to be but I'm not so sure. This great blog, stratėchery has an excellent analysis of the App store. It's worth a read. BTW, I have nothing to do with this blog
I was seriously going to put "first public DL outside of apple"..but figured what I meant would have been understood. Guess not.
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I can't really remember the web apps in 1.0. I'd like to play around with iOS 1 again to realize how far we've come in the 5-6 years. It's truly amazing.
How do you know that? Because a few people on an Apple forum said they want one means the demand is high?
There's a key part here that you're missing:
When the iPhone was originally released, Apple was only aiming for 1% of the market. They were prepared for the iPhone to be to phones what Macs are to computers - a really nice one that a small percentage of people are willing to pay for. With such a small market, few developers would be willing to develop apps that only worked for the one device. But tons of developers would be willing to make their web apps support the iPhone.
When it turned out that the iPhone blew away their expectations and captured 30+% of the market, Apple decided that they had a large enough market that tons of developers would develop apps for it exclusively.
I suspect that had the iPhone never captured the market it did, Apple wouldn't have ever allowed native apps for it, and that instead they'd just have put together some kind of "web app gallery" similar to the ones they have/had for Safari plug-ins and Widgets, where they make it easy to find good web apps that have been specially tailored for the iPhone.
Probably a reporter or developer, then.
I can't recall the launch of the app store very well anymore, but I remember I downloaded the first iOS SDK months before the app store went live. I played around with it then but it would be 3 years from then before I'd make an app that I would consider to be of high enough quality to sell it with my name attached.
So, like I said, it was probably a reporter or developer, as they likely had access to the store so that they could test it out when it was in a beta state, or review it a few days before launch, much like iOS 7 is in a beta state now, after Apple R&D had already tested it internally for a few months but still before anyone in the general public.
Apple should now relax their rules on apps. Why not have more adult genre apps? simple to keep children off it, any account assigned to anyone under 18 can't download it.
Interesting. But that's only because Apple had a big enough market share to go it own way...
Although, to a previous post, i also agree that web-apps should have been true too.
While i understand it would then be native HTML5, a big leap forward over anyone doing anything like this at the time, Apple probably made its fair share by 'going with the rest"
However, if HTML5 web apps was possible, there'd be a huge gap no one would be able to fill.