Those of us who are old remember the day Steve Jobs promised to “make history” by opening speech of the original iPhone in 2007. And we’ve already talked a lot about how history was made that day, but what’s been forgotten is that The original iPhone disappointed much of the developer community.
And many revolutions were presented at the event: the multi-touch screen, the interface of the first “iPhoneOS” and the model of what we now consider an essential device in our lives. But this device, in January 2007, was a completely fenced garden. Untouchable. Fortunately, the bug was fixed, but too late for some.
A closed revolution
The first operating system, “iPhone OS”, had its application icons fixed, on a black screen background. They could not be reorganized, but the information given by Steve Jobs and which did not please the developers at all is the following. there was no way to develop applications.
If you wanted to develop something, you had to limit yourself to web applications that users had to open via a web address and Safari. At that time, there was a lot of talk about HTML5, but developers hoped to be able to work on native experiences. And Jobs closed that door a few minutes after the presentation ended.
iOS public betas are the best example of this
Time has shown that this was a mistake.. And fortunately, this error was resolved in just a year, because with the arrival of the iPhone 3G, the second version of the iPhone OS 2 was presented with its development kit. And with that, the concept of the App Store which ended up becoming a business worth hundreds of billions of dollars.
Take the Vision Pro for example. Even though these mixed reality viewers landed on the North American market with few features, Apple has not stopped providing tools to developers, improve the ecosystem and update the operating system
And that’s without mentioning the OS betas, which They were available to users up to eight months before the Vision Pro arrived. at the stores. That is to say, the company has learned its lesson and this is rarely the reason why you will not be able to update to iOS 18 before a long period of testing, internal testing and a long beta process.
An older version of this article was originally published on 06/25/2023.
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