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Steve Jobs on the App Store in 2008: 'We Didn't Expect It to Be This Big'

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Following the launch of the App Store in 2008, Apple CEO Steve Jobs sat down for an interview with The Wall Street Journal.

In celebration of the recent 10th anniversary of the App Store, The Wall Street Journal today published both the audio and transcript of that interview, where Jobs shares his view on the future of the App Store and the future of Apple.

stevejobsappstore.jpg

The interview took place in August of 2008, a month after the launch of the App Store. Even back then, just after its debut, the App Store's success surprised Jobs, who said Apple hadn't expected the App Store to "be this big." "The mobile industry's never seen anything like this," he said.

Within 30 days, users had downloaded 30 percent as many apps as everybody in the world downloaded songs from iTunes during the same period of time. Jobs said he could not even predict how many new apps would be uploaded by a particular date given the App Store's wildly popular debut.
I would not trust any of our predictions because reality has so far exceeded them by such a great degree that we've been reduced to spectators just like you, watching this amazing phenomenon and just doing our best to try to help everybody get their apps done and get them on the store.
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In the early days of the App Store, Apple was criticized for high app prices. "It's a competition," said Jobs. "Who knew what to price things at?" According to Jobs, Apple didn't have advice for developers on pricing either. "Our opinions are no better than yours because this is so new."

Jobs went on to mull how the App Store could grow in the future as people adopted the iPhone and the iPod touch, speculating that it could be a billion dollar marketplace, which Apple has significantly exceeded. As of July 2018, developers have earned more than $100 billion from the App Store.
Who knows? Maybe it'll be a billion dollar marketplace at some point in time. This doesn't happen very often. A whole new billion dollar market opens up. 360 million in the first 30 days, I've never seen anything like this in my career for software.
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Jobs said that he didn't expect the App Store would be a big profit generator, with Apple instead launching it to add value to the iPhone. Jobs was wrong, though, and Apple's services category is the size of a Fortune 100 company, largely on the strength of the App Store. In Q2 2018, for example, services brought in $9.19 billion and the App Store set an all time revenue record.

While Jobs was surprised by the success of the App Store, it didn't stop him from declaring that the "phone of the future will be differentiated by software," a prediction that has largely come true. Today, many high-end smartphones share similar features and designs, with software - iOS and Android - as one of the main factors that people take into consideration when choosing a device.

The entire interview with Steve Jobs is well worth listening to and can be found over at The Wall Street Journal.

Article Link: Steve Jobs on the App Store in 2008: 'We Didn't Expect It to Be This Big'
 
Article Link
https://www.macrumors.com/2018/07/25/steve-jobs-app-store-interview/
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StrangeNoises

StrangeNoises

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i remember watching one of the first presentations to developers on it, and he said there weren't going to be third party apps on the iphone, or rather, they would be webapps, and talked about support for them to *look* native. Even through a video stream you could tell the atmosphere in that room got very cold. After all it's not as if people hadn't been writing Symbian apps for years, running apps on a phone wasn't actually a new thing, and it was shocking if the iPhone wasn't going to allow it. The reality distortion field definitely flickered. Not very long after, the app store was announced. That was one he got wrong. But he could tell when he got something wrong, and was able to turn the ship around onto a new course.
 
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Hrududu

Hrududu

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az431 said:
Steve Jobs was a visionary and what Apple needed after the Gil Amelio debacle, but the best CEO Apple has ever had is Tim Cook.
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Gil was actually better for Apple than most people give him credit for. He began the slim down of the product line, purchased NEXT (bringing Jobs back) and kept Apple from being sold. Spindler on the other hand..
 
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m0sher

m0sher

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He wasn’t perfect but he sure was passionate about his products that he created in his garage.

I appreciate the Apple stores for the AppleCare service I get, if I need repair on my iPhone. I’ve used them a couple times and it was well worth it when I had to.
 
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QCassidy352

QCassidy352

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While Jobs was surprised by the success of the App Store, it didn't stop him from declaring that the "phone of the future will be differentiated by software,"
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So true. As excited as we all get by new hardware, the hardware race ended some time ago, and everybody won. You can get a fast, attractive, high quality device with a great camera from tons of manufacturers these days (and have been able to for some time now). Software is by far the more important differentiator.
 
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VulchR

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I am somewhat surprised that Jobs didn't understand that people would want to use their CPU's (and the phones sensors) to their fullest advantage. That seemed obvious to me the first day the iPhone was announced.
 
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bbednarz

bbednarz

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btrach144 said:
Must not have been that important of failures if nobody remembers them anymore...
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People remember the good about the past and the bad about the present. Look at the thread when the iPod first came out and all the people who were up in arms over it. People tend to look at the past with rose tinted glasses. I am sure once Cook is gone the same will happen with the next CEO.
 
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Frank Dalton

Frank Dalton

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bbednarz said:
People remember the good about the past and the bad about the present. Look at the thread when the iPod first came out and all the people who were up in airs over it. People tend to look at the past with rose tinted glasses. I am sure once Cook is gone the same will happen with the next CEO.
Click to expand...

Speak for yourself. I thought Spindler and Amelio were terrible. I was pretty happy with Jobs both at the time and in retrospect. My opinions haven’t changed. And, now, I can’t stand Cook, though it took me many years to come to this conclusion. I didn’t hate him from the outset.
 
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inkswamp

inkswamp

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StrangeNoises said:
i remember watching one of the first presentations to developers on it, and he said there weren't going to be third party apps on the iphone, or rather, they would be webapps, and talked about support for them to *look* native. Even through a video stream you could tell the atmosphere in that room got very cold. After all it's not as if people hadn't been writing Symbian apps for years, running apps on a phone wasn't actually a new thing, and it was shocking if the iPhone wasn't going to allow it. The reality distortion field definitely flickered. Not very long after, the app store was announced. That was one he got wrong. But he could tell when he got something wrong, and was able to turn the ship around onto a new course.
Click to expand...

He didn't actually get it completely wrong and he was talking to a room full of people who couldn't get their heads around the whole vision he was presenting. It's really unfortunate because Apple had actually put a lot of effort into supporting webapps running on iOS as discrete programs. Coded properly, webapps are nearly indistinguishable from a regular app on iOS. A web app can have its own icon on the homescreen. They launched separately from Safari without any of the browser controls visible, and Apple provided a budding API to accomplish many of the same things native apps could do. I still use Dark Sky's web app for weather forecasts to this day.

Of course, web apps aren't going to work for more resource-intensive needs (games for one) and that's where Jobs got it wrong, but for apps with lighter resource usage, web apps were probably the better way to go.
 
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