Appillionaires: Secrets from Developers Who Struck It Rich on the App Store

Chapter 5: The First Million

In the summer of 2007, the future Appillionaires were faced with a big problem: The iPhone didn’t do apps.

At launch, the iPhone did not have the ability to install any new software at all — users were stuck with a single screen of simple utilities that Apple bundled with the phone. There was Mail, Calculator, Safari, and others, but it was impossible to add new icons to the iPhone, or remove the existing ones — in fact the very idea of “apps” for the iPhone was entirely hypothetical. The App Store didn’t exist and, as far as the user could tell, the original iPhone was as immutable as a DVD player or television. You tapped a button and the iPhone switched mode, becoming a calculator, a telephone, or a calendar, but the iPhone’s capabilities were limited only to what Apple had prescribed and nothing more. There were, however, hints that something more exciting lurked under the hood.

A Box of Delights

It was already well known that the iPhone was running some variant of Apple’s OSX (the software used on Apple desktop computers) and this suggested that it could be possible to run extremely advanced software on the device. But back in the summer of 2007, exactly what was going on under the hood of the iPhone was a complete mystery to anyone outside the Cupertino campus. Steve Jobs had always said that software was the key ingredient of any great hardware design, but as yet there was no way for users to install new software on the iPhone, or for programmers ...