There's an app for that: Apple's App Store and the invention of the platform economy
On April 24, 2009, someone downloaded the one-billionth application from the Apple App Store. Apple sent a press release. What the company did not mention was that barely two years earlier, Steve Jobs had stood on a stage in San Francisco and told the world’s developers they didn’t need an app store at all.
The scene was WWDC, June 2007. Jobs had just unveiled the original iPhone — no third-party native applications permitted. His alternative: build web apps in Safari. “The full Safari engine is inside of iPhone,” he announced to the audience. “You can write amazing Web 2.0 and Ajax apps… There’s no SDK that you need.” The applause was noticeably polite. A few thousand professional software engineers had just been told to use a browser.
Developer forums filled with frustration within days. By October 2007 — four months after WWDC — Jobs issued a statement walking the whole position back. “We want native third party applications on the iPhone,” it read, “and we plan to have an SDK in developers’ hands in February.” The reversal had taken one summer (Wikipedia). Apple released the SDK on March 6, 2008; developers downloaded it more than 100,000 times in the first four days.
The App Store itself launched on July 10, 2008, alongside iPhone OS 2.0. Five hundred apps on day one, of which 125 were free. Apple’s terms were direct: developers set their own prices and kept 70 percent of revenue. Apple kept 30. There was no negotiation. There was also no alternative — the App Store was the only route onto an iPhone, and Apple reviewed every submission before it appeared.
Within weeks, the iBeer app — which did nothing except turn the phone’s screen into a tilting virtual glass of beer — was reportedly earning its creators between ten and twenty thousand dollars a day (AppleInsider). A small team could ship a novelty app in a week and collect more than most annual salaries in a month. Alongside the novelties, more serious tools — medical references, navigation apps, translation dictionaries — now had a distribution channel that fit in a shirt pocket.
Google’s Android Market launched alongside the T-Mobile G1 in October 2008 with fewer than fifty applications, paid purchases unavailable until 2009. By end of that year it had 20,000 apps; Apple’s store had passed 100,000 (Android Authority). Apple filed to trademark “There’s an app for that” in December 2009 — possibly the most economical sentence ever written about the arrival of a new economic era.
What the App Store built was not mainly a software catalogue. It was an architecture: a centralized marketplace in which a single company collects a fixed percentage of every transaction, controls what may be sold, and owns the only entry point. Microsoft, Google, Sony, and every major platform owner since has replicated this structure in some form. The phone stopped being a device that ran software and became an address — a location through which commerce, communication, and media pass, each toll collected at the same invisible gate.
The SDK had 100,000 downloads in four days. Nine months later, the store had a billion. The gate was already the point.
Sources
- App Store (Apple) — Wikipedia — launch date, initial app count, Jobs’s early resistance to native apps, SDK release timeline, billion-download milestone.
- The revolution Steve Jobs resisted — AppleInsider — Jobs’s WWDC 2007 position, developer backlash, iBeer revenue figures, reversal timeline.
- Android Market to Google Play: a brief history — Android Authority — Android Market launch date, initial app count, early growth into 2009.