Amaya Toman When the App Store first launched in 2008, Steve Jobs gave an interview to The Wall Street Journal. His editors decided to publish both the audio and the written version of the interview on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the Apple app store. However, the content is only available to subscribers, the server MacRumors but he brought an interesting lift from it.
The interview took place in August 2008, a month after the launch of the App Store. Even then - so soon after launch - Steve Jobs was frankly surprised by the success of the app store. He himself stated that he never expected the App Store to be "such a big deal". "The mobile industry has never experienced anything like this," Jobs confided at the time.
During the first thirty days, users managed to download 30% more applications from the App Store than the number of songs downloaded from iTunes in the same period. In his own words, Jobs had no way of predicting how many apps would be uploaded to the App Store on a particular date. "I wouldn't believe any of our predictions, because the reality has far exceeded them, to the extent that we ourselves have become astonished observers watching this amazing phenomenon," Jobs said, adding that the entire team at Apple tried to all developers help get their apps onto the virtual desktop.
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In the early days of the App Store, Apple was often criticized for high app prices. "It's a competition," Jobs explained. "Who was supposed to know how to price these things?". According to Jobs, Apple had no guidelines for app pricing or for developers. "Our opinions are no better than yours because this is just so new."
Steve Jobs was trying to figure out how the App Store could continue to grow in the future as sales of the iPhone and iPod touch grew. The idea that it could be a billion-dollar business was completely fulfilled by the App Store. In July of this year, developers earned a total of more than 100 billion dollars thanks to the App Store.
"Who knows? Maybe one day it will be a billion-dollar business. This doesn't happen very often. 360 million in the first thirty days - in my career I have never seen anything like this in software," Jobs confided in 2008. At the time, he was frankly surprised by the huge success of the App Store. At the time, he also stated that the phones of the future will be differentiated by software. He wasn't too wrong - apart from features and design, the operating system is one of the main things that decides when buying a new smartphone today.
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