Your Habits Make You
Apple Inc turned 50 this week, and it has been illuminating.
For one thing, David Pogue's book Apple: The First 50 Years apparently contains a very interesting timeline about applications on the iPhone:
Steve Jobs' original plan was that, just like Apple had written Maps and YouTube for Google, it would assemble "the largest development team in the history of the world, to build as many apps as you can as quickly as possible".
Scott Forstall both arranged for the covert development of app, sandbox and profile infrastructure, as well as talked Steve off the idea of killing jailbreaking and letting it be as long as it was just a fun community experiment.
Indeed, it was Steve catching wind on the latest app developments that ultimately made him change his mind on officially supporting app development, at which point Scott could unveil his skunkworks and presumably shave months off the effort.
In retrospect, the idea of Apple producing all the apps for the world is a bit like the old story about Boris Yeltsin visiting a typical grocery store, or the many variants about Soviet or Chinese officials visiting big western cities and demanding to meet the person in charge of bread production.
In a free society, in a functional community, in a world where creativity and utility both flourish, great apps come from everywhere and necessary utilities (which may or may not hew to various degrees of UI excellence) are numerous. For instance, pull-to-refresh as a gesture was invented by an independent community member and adopted by Apple.
Within 7 weeks of the first iPhone's release, from a dead cold start, the first game had been written, and within 10 more weeks, there was enough stuff out there to impress the person ultimately responsible for what was already there that this would all go better if only everyone could do it themselves.
Apple has had a bipolar attitude towards developers for at least the last 40 years, never quite deciding whether we are indispensable or insipid. Recency always blurs perspective, but it seems to me to have reached a less and less nuanced nadir.
At times like this, history can be inspiring in its reminders. Slots and modularity once saved the Macintosh - desktop publishing was a killer app, but a more capable platform gave those applications the ability to truly shine, securing its foothold in a world where the previous (and then still current) cash cow, the Apple II, was about to start fading from relevance. And dollars to donuts say that the iPhone, for all its advances, would have been a shadow of its current success if Apple had continued to produce every single app - make a home screen of your most important apps, and I doubt Apple would not have wanted to write all of them themselves, nor been any good at writing many of them.
Apple is at its best when the openness of the Woz strain is coupled with the determination and focus of the Jobs strain. As Marco Arment notes, these are tools, which benefit from being unfettered.
Here's to another 50 years, and here's to the crazy ones. 🥂