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I have this conspiracy theory that I half believe: it was all a ruse. Apple knew that there would be huge pushback against a walled garden appstore with Apple

by kijiki 7y ago

I have this conspiracy theory that I half believe: it was all a ruse. Apple knew that there would be huge pushback against a walled garden appstore with Apple in absolute control, and huge pushback on them taking a 30% cut. So they started with "just write web apps". But of course, they also inexplicably made the first iPhone 2G only! Flagship phones that shipped many months before the iPhone had 3G. Why cut that particular corner, and not any others in their otherwise $$$-is-no-object new wonderphone? You can do a much better job hiding low bandwidth and high latency in a native app, especially since app assets get downloaded once (probably over wifi) at app install time. So by essentially making app developers beg for access to their native platform, they radically reduced the anger at their wildly locked-down appstore and their 30% cut. And it seemed a little suspicious how quickly they were able to deliver a 3rd-party SDK and developer documentation.

joachimma 7y ago
Wasn't Palm taking a 80% cut in their glory days? (My google skills fail me) I heard developers saying that 30% was a great deal at the time.
- NeedMoreTea 7y ago
  I think it was Handango that set the 30% expectation. They were the first with such a high cut I think, and was among the first app sites for most of the PDAs of the time. 30% was pretty offensive after years of shareware.
  - Theodores 7y ago
    But then apps cost pennies compared to the software we were used to. Office cost many hundreds of dollars and I regularly paid £400+ for PC programs that did just one thing. £350 for Photoshop was a steal. But then apps came along costing a small handful of dollars. They also did things you could not do on your PC due to the connectivity, the camera and the sensors. Everything changed when it came to price expectations.
- irq 7y ago
  No. Virtually all PalmOS software sales were either direct via dev’s web site, or via palmgear.com, which was a sort of app store for its time. They were not affiliated with Palm the company or its entities. Absolutely no platform DRM whatsoever, and all apps were basically “side loaded” onto devices, regardless of origin.
chongli 7y ago
they also inexplicably made the first iPhone 2G only! This has been one of the go-to plays in Apple's playbook since the very beginning. Steve Jobs was always opposed to Macs having any form of user-upgradable parts [1]; he wanted people to buy a brand new computer every time theirs became obsolete. As it happens, this occurred almost immediately after the Mac 128k's launch (almost no 3rd party apps supported it). The first generation iPhone was an exact repeat! [1] https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Diagnostic_Port.txt&characters=Steve+Jobs https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Diagnostic_Port....
- fuzzfactor 7y ago
  Yes, like Microsoft, once they had established themselves as an engineering company with consumers of not-fully-developed product, they were then able to exploit the anti-reuse/recycling angle more lucratively than their engineering.
flomo 7y ago
It was a very thin ruse, but there's no real conspiracy theory required. The original iPhone was a beta product rushed to market to make everyone else look "last gen". The final APIs, SDK, store infrastructure, and so on was simply not ready. And yes from day 1, rumors were a SDK was coming.
geofft 7y ago
> And it seemed a little suspicious how quickly they were able to deliver a 3rd-party SDK and developer documentation. How much of this is explained by needing an SDK and developer documentation for internal apps? (That is, had Apple not built an App Store, it would have been all the more important to make sure Mail, Maps, Safari, the built-in YouTube app, etc. were high-quality.) In part I'm curious if the engineering culture was that reasonable-quality docs were expected for internal developers.
- kijiki 7y ago
  Never worked at Apple specifically, but every place I've worked had little to no docs on internal tools. The expectation was that you'd go ask the person who wrote it, or absorb the tribal knowledge as part of on-boarding. There was even low-level resistance to folks who tried to document the ambient knowledge to help out new employees. Also, keep in mind, in the timeframe that is relevant here, the only apps were Mail and Safari. Apple making Mail a native app from the start was another tell that "you should just build web apps" was disingenuous.
  - geofft 7y ago
    Weren't YouTube and Maps also part of iPhone OS 1.0?

by kijiki 7y ago

joachimma 7y ago

Wasn't Palm taking a 80% cut in their glory days? (My google skills fail me) I heard developers saying that 30% was a great deal at the time.

NeedMoreTea 7y ago
I think it was Handango that set the 30% expectation. They were the first with such a high cut I think, and was among the first app sites for most of the PDAs of the time. 30% was pretty offensive after years of shareware.
- Theodores 7y ago
  But then apps cost pennies compared to the software we were used to. Office cost many hundreds of dollars and I regularly paid £400+ for PC programs that did just one thing. £350 for Photoshop was a steal. But then apps came along costing a small handful of dollars. They also did things you could not do on your PC due to the connectivity, the camera and the sensors. Everything changed when it came to price expectations.
irq 7y ago
No. Virtually all PalmOS software sales were either direct via dev’s web site, or via palmgear.com, which was a sort of app store for its time. They were not affiliated with Palm the company or its entities. Absolutely no platform DRM whatsoever, and all apps were basically “side loaded” onto devices, regardless of origin.

chongli 7y ago

they also inexplicably made the first iPhone 2G only! This has been one of the go-to plays in Apple's playbook since the very beginning. Steve Jobs was always opposed to Macs having any form of user-upgradable parts [1]; he wanted people to buy a brand new computer every time theirs became obsolete. As it happens, this occurred almost immediately after the Mac 128k's launch (almost no 3rd party apps supported it). The first generation iPhone was an exact repeat! [1] https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Diagnostic_Port.txt&characters=Steve+Jobs https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Diagnostic_Port....

fuzzfactor 7y ago
Yes, like Microsoft, once they had established themselves as an engineering company with consumers of not-fully-developed product, they were then able to exploit the anti-reuse/recycling angle more lucratively than their engineering.

flomo 7y ago

It was a very thin ruse, but there's no real conspiracy theory required. The original iPhone was a beta product rushed to market to make everyone else look "last gen". The final APIs, SDK, store infrastructure, and so on was simply not ready. And yes from day 1, rumors were a SDK was coming.

geofft 7y ago

> And it seemed a little suspicious how quickly they were able to deliver a 3rd-party SDK and developer documentation. How much of this is explained by needing an SDK and developer documentation for internal apps? (That is, had Apple not built an App Store, it would have been all the more important to make sure Mail, Maps, Safari, the built-in YouTube app, etc. were high-quality.) In part I'm curious if the engineering culture was that reasonable-quality docs were expected for internal developers.

kijiki 7y ago
Never worked at Apple specifically, but every place I've worked had little to no docs on internal tools. The expectation was that you'd go ask the person who wrote it, or absorb the tribal knowledge as part of on-boarding. There was even low-level resistance to folks who tried to document the ambient knowledge to help out new employees. Also, keep in mind, in the timeframe that is relevant here, the only apps were Mail and Safari. Apple making Mail a native app from the start was another tell that "you should just build web apps" was disingenuous.
- geofft 7y ago
  Weren't YouTube and Maps also part of iPhone OS 1.0?