Apple has been defending tooth and nail the closed ecosystem of its App Store for years. All the applications you install on your iPhone go through this, without an alternative, with the jailbreak less and less present. But when this App Store was born, Apple studied allowing the installation of applications outside of it.
“Are you sure you want to install it?” »
Steve Jobs personally approved the text that users would see when loading an application, since May 2008: pic.twitter.com/GpG8DB13l6
— Kosta Eleftheriou (@keleftheriou) March 3, 2022
Witness a series of e-mails that Steve Jobs and Scott Forstall sent to each other in May 2008, the year of the arrival of the iPhone 3G and the App Store. In them, the two rulers debated how the warning that was about to appear was to be when the user installs an application outside the App Store.
Two options were in play:
- “The ‘Monkey Ball’ app from ‘Sega’ developer is not from the App Store. Do you want to open it?”
- “Are you sure you want to open ‘Monkey Ball’ app from ‘Sega’ developer?”
Steve chose the second, because it’s simplerand step to include it and in the built before the system “hoping” that the rest of the administrators would agree with them. But ultimately it was a futile move, as it was eventually decided that the App Store would be the only way to install apps on the iPhone (if you don’t count web apps, of course).
If this had continued, installing applications on our iPhone would have been something very different from what we know and much less profitable for the services division from Apple. But let’s say it all: it would also have been something much less certain. The App Store isn’t foolproof, but it’s a good one filtered vulnerabilities and threats.
Imagen | Kishore V
