Ten years ago, Apple co-founder and then-CEO Steve Jobs understood that smartphones were going to be a big deal. And he realized software would be an important part of that.
With 20/20 hindsight, it’s easy to dismiss that vision. But Jobs was talking in August 2008, a year after the release of the first iPhone, and only a month after the iOS App Store debuted. Most people had flip phones, and PCs dominated the computing landscape.
Apple’s co-founder was speaking with Nick Wingfield, who at the time was a reporter for The Wall Street Journal. “I think there are a lot of people, and I’m one of them, who believe that mobile’s going to get quite serious. There’s services you can provide with mobile that obviously are not relevant on a desktop, such as location-based services integrated into your application. They can be mighty useful and we’re just at the tip of that. That’s going to be huge, I think.”
Steve Jobs understood apps were the key
Even when George W. Bush was in the White House, Steve Jobs understood the importance of apps. “The phone of the future will be differentiated by software,” he told the WSJ.
When he was speaking, the App Store was such a new thing he felt the need to explain it. Perhaps even justify it. “The App Store is to iPhone like iTunes is to iPod. Just like with the iPod, where we enhanced it with an internet service to bring content to it, we’re doing the same thing with the iPhone.”
Back then, the huge success of the iTunes music store seemingly turned the iPod into a license for Apple to print money. In 2008, there was no way to know whether the App Store would do the same for the iPhone. It’s turned out OK: the company’s revenue from iPhone sales in just the first quarter of this year totaled $38 billion, and it generated $9 billion for selling apps and other services.
And the App Store even started out strong. There were 60 million app downloads in the first 30 days, and Jobs estimated developers were submitting about 50 new titles a day. Fast forward ten years, and there are over 2 millions iOS titles available.
“The mobile industry’s never seen anything like this. To be honest, neither has the computer industry,” Steve Jobs remarked.
