I was at Apple in SWE at the time. While three months for public APIs was a tight schedule, a lot of the frameworks already existed and it was shoring up publi

I was at Apple in SWE at the time. While three months for public APIs was a tight schedule, a lot of the frameworks already existed and it was shoring up public access to them. Apple tends to dog food their own stuff for a while before making it public. The iOS 1 apps were using common APIs even if they weren't public. The early iOS APIs were pretty limited and were typically a subset of everything in a framework. Subsequent releases added to public APIs or released new revamped APIs for the same purpose. So it's not like Jobs was asking for years worth of work in three months, maybe just six months of work in three months.