Simon Willison’s Weblog

Did Apple always plan the (native) App Store, or was it released in response to developer demand?

31st December 2010

My answer to Did Apple always plan the (native) App Store, or was it released in response to developer demand? on Quora

Personally I’ve always assumed that native apps / the App Store was planned from the start, and the “build apps with HTML” thing Steve Jobs originally promoted was intended as a stop-gap measure (and also to mislead the competition). It’s hard for me to believe that a multi-billion dollar marketplace was accidentally created because developers demanded the ability to create native apps. Also, the quality of the APIs discovered by people who jail broke the iPhone suggests to me that a public API was planned from the start.