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
