Steve Jobs Originally Dismissed the Idea of an App Store

Buried deep inside Walter Isaacson biography on Steve Jobs is an interesting account regarding his vision of the iPhone, and how its ecosystem would not have included the App Store, had it not been for an Apple board member who pressed the co-founder.

As the story goes, Jobs only wanted Web apps on the original iPhone. In 2007, Jobs said, “The full Safari engine is inside of iPhone. And so, you can write amazing Web 2.0 and Ajax apps that look exactly and behave exactly like apps on the iPhone. And these apps can integrate perfectly with iPhone services.”

“They can make a call, they can send an email, they can look up a location on Google Maps. And guess what? There’s no SDK that you need! You’ve got everything you need if you know how to write apps using the most modern web standards to write amazing apps for the iPhone today. So developers, we think we’ve got a very sweet story for you. You can begin building your iPhone apps today.”

Apple board member Art Levinson told Isaacson that he phoned Steve Jobs "half a dozen times to lobby for the potential of the apps [but] Jobs at first quashed the discussion, partly because he felt his team did not have the bandwidth to figure out all the complexities that would be involved in policing third-party app developers."

Steve Jobs hadn’t always figured everything out on his own, but he could always rely on the immense pool of talent living and breathing within the Apple organization, where anyone with a voice could turn the stubborn CEO around.

Today, the iPhone and iPad App Stores combined have hundreds of thousands of apps that are driving huge sales of both gadgets.