A new era begins…

A Back in June 2007, the imminent iPhone was a central theme of Apple’s WWDC keynote. “Now, what about developers?” asked Steve Jobs, to cheers from the audience. The answer didn’t impress them so much. “The full Safari engine is inside of iPhone, and so you can write amazing Web 2.0 apps… There’s no SDK that you need.” Hmmm.

A software development kit (SDK) – to make real apps which ran independently – was what developers really wanted.

Colleagues like marketing chief Phil Schiller had lobbied for native apps, but, applying his principle that “focus means saying no,” Jobs preferred to perfect the hardware. (Back in January, the unit he’d demo’d live at Macworld Expo had been a ‘smoke and mirrors’ mock-up.) And he didn’t relish the idea of software outside his control messing with the carefully designed user experience.

The way Jobs put it, conceding a change of heart four months later, was that “the most advanced phone ever” would be a target for malware, so although there would be “native third-party applications on the iPhone,” it would be “less than totally open.” Promised for February, the iPhone SDK arrived on 6 March 2008. The idea of a mobile software marketplace wasn’t entirely new. Microsoft’s Windows Mobile had 18,000 applications for stylus-based handhelds. Phone giant Nokia, with its Symbian OS, was credited by Jobs with pioneering digital signatures to tie apps to developers. PDA maker Palm claimed 30,000 active users of its SDK. But the iPhone, already selling in the millions, had a different order of mass-market potential, and Jobs knew that to capitalize on this, coding for it had to be as easy as possible. Apple’s Xcode tools, available with a $99 annual registration, made it relatively cheap and simple to create Mac software. Fortuitously, the iPhone’s operating system was closely based on OS X. It might not have been that way. Legend has it that Jobs set up a competition to decide whether the iPhone would be a smarter iPod or a smaller Mac. User interface designer Scott Forstall led a team downsizing OS X, while iPod creators Jon Rubinstein and Tony Fadell worked on expanding the music player’s operating system. The Mac option won. Had it not, native development could have been severely constrained – and the iPhone might have been overtaken.

Paranoid Android

In 2005, Google had bought a company called Android, co-founded by Apple

alumnus Andy Rubin. They, too, were working on a Unix-like mobile platform, but their prototype was half-screen, half-keyboard, and all on the wrong side of history. The multitouch iPhone sent them back to the drawing board.

But by September 2008, an Android phone emerged, followed in October by the Android Market, mimicking the three-month-old App Store.

Like Apple, Google would give 70% of the price of each paid download to the developer, saying the remaining 30% would cover costs. Apple aimed to turn a profit, but that mattered less than selling more iPhones. At first, Android was too clunky and amorphous to match the iPhone’s consumer buzz. But by 2010, Apple was suing HTC over a device that felt too similar, and Jobs was telling biographer Walter Isaacson: “I’m going to destroy Android. I’m willing to go thermonuclear war on this.”

Google CEO Eric Schmidt resigned from Apple’s board over the conflict of interests. “I want you to stop using our ideas,” Jobs told him over an angry coffee in Palo Alto – to little avail. The platforms would continue to compete.

At your fingertips

Easy access was key to the App Store’s appeal. Like tracks on iTunes, apps could be downloaded on a Mac and synced to your iPhone, a cumbersome process. But the App Store was also available over Wi-Fi on the iPhone itself (and, with a £12.99 software update, on the new iPod touch).

With 500 apps available, you could quickly browse games, art or music tools, office software, educational titles and more, free of charge or for a few dollars, paid automatically through your iTunes account. With no file manager, just rows of icons, everything was easily accessible, and whatever you saw you could tap or swipe. It all felt breathtakingly new, yet immediately familiar.

In this nascent market, almost any kind of app might succeed, and a fast-growing and enthusiastic user base magnified that success.

“It was a huge deal for me,” recalls developer Simon Oliver, whose tilt-and-tap game, Rolando, became an early hit. Lucas Pope (@ dukope), who came to the platform later with Helsing’s Fire (marketed by Angry Birds’ original publisher Chillingo), was similarly impressed. “There was nothing like it. Apple’s developer tools were light years beyond anything I’d used before.”

Apple frameworks such as Core Animation gave developers a head start. Third-party aids, though, weren’t welcomed. Many online games were written in Flash, Adobe’s scriptable motion graphics format, which suited designers who didn’t code. Publishers also saw it

as a route to magazine apps. But Jobs was adamant that iOS would never support it.

Engines that can be used to write native code, on the other hand, have played a big part in App Store history. Rolando used the Box2D physics engine; Epic’s Unreal engine has powered titles from 2010’s Infinity Blade to current blockbuster Fortnite; and Ustwo’s gorgeous Monument Valley is one of many iOS games made with Unity.

The protection Jobs had promised was achieved by human testers approving each app. While technical checks mostly made sense, censoring content proved trickier. ‘We will reject apps for any content or behavior that we believe is over the line,’ warned Apple’s guidelines. ‘What line, you ask? Well… we think that you will know it when you cross it.’ But the line hasn’t always been clear.

Judge and jury

After a Pulitzer-winning cartoonist’s app was embarrassingly rejected as ‘mean-spirited,’ an exemption was made for ‘professional political satirists,’ prompting amateurs to wonder if they had free speech, too. In 2010, a cull of overtly sexual apps removed any mention of ‘boobs’, yet left Sports Illustrated’s lucrative ‘sizzling hot’ bikini shoots intact.

In 2014, Pope submitted an iOS version of Papers, Please – an already much-discussed game casting the player as a border official. It was rejected for an incidental depiction of nudity.

“The concept of vague rules being interpreted by an overworked inspector met a certain harmony with the app submission process,” he says now, wryly. Apple relented, but HappyPlayTime, Tina Gong’s educational app about female masturbation, stayed banned.

Apple also has a benchmark for minimum functionality, but that hasn’t prevented some notably trivial hits. Phone Saber made lightsaber noises when you swung your iPhone, while iPint showed beer you could ‘drink’ by tilting. I Am Rich, which displayed a misspelt motivational message, cost $999.99 and was removed by Apple after one day – after eight people had bought it. Two requested refunds. After iFart topped the App Store charts, a rival, Animal Farts, was released by Phillip Shoemaker – the man hired by Apple to run the App Store approvals process.