Apple’s App Store changed the software world 15 years ago

Article Hero Image AppleInsider may earn an affiliate commission on purchases made through links on our site. On this day in 2008, the still-new iPhone

gained an App Store, destroyed selling software in boxes, made apps cheaper — and is now mired on controversy. Software used to cost hundreds of dollars and if you didn't

pick it up at a retail store, you had to wait to be posted to you got it posted to you. And in either case, it came in a sometimes huge box, plus you then had to schlep through

feeding disks or CDs into your machine. That box size would be down to the manuals and we can lament the demise of a really well-written manual. But otherwise the change the

App Store brought is so night and day, so clearly the right thing to have happened, that anything before it seems quaintly historic. Plus even if you have never used the

iPhone's App Store, you naturally know how it works. That's because all software, for all devices, is sold and delivered in the same way. You find it online, you pay online,

it is downloaded straight to your device and you can use it right away. It's not as if there weren't any downloads before the App Store, but this is another case of Apple

coming along late and doing something the way nobody else did. And doing something the way everyone immediately copied. If it's hard now to believe just how patiently Steve

Jobs had to explain all of this when introducing the App Store in 2008, it's probably harder to believe how much he was originally against the idea. But then it's easier to

believe just how much the App Store has become controversial since its launch. Ask a user and they might like the store, or they might not, but they probably don't even think

about it. Yet ask App Store competitors and this Apple service must be destroyed — and today it looks like that could just happen. What Steve Jobs wanted — developers to

only write apps that ran on the web No need for an App Store The original iPhone shipped with 15 apps and its front screen tantalized with clear space for more. Steve Jobs

never specified what other apps could go on that iPhone home screen, but he did very adamantly specify what couldn't. It could not be apps in the way that the 15 stock Apple

ones were made and installed. There could not be third-party apps like that, and the way he span this, developers should be grateful. "The full Safari engine is inside of

iPhone," Jobs explained at WWDC in 2007. "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