The Past, Present, and Future of Building on Apple — John Gruber, Daring Fireball

Arrived a month after a first-mover mileage log with a Windows Phone-style UI. Built a native app that followed iOS interface paradigms for a phone-only use case (logging gas and mileage in the car). John Gruber linked to it on Daring Fireball in fall 2008; Gruber says he picked it because it was a phone-first idea that would make no sense on a Mac.

Apple had not approved David's developer account before the App Store launch. WWDC 2008 slides listed Apple evangelists' email addresses, so he emailed about five of them; John Geleynse replied and called him.

When starting the company in 2008, before the App Store launched, bought a second iPhone (too nervous to jailbreak his own), jailbroke it and installed the ~500 jailbreak apps to learn what apps could do and what developers were building.

Wrote a business investment thesis to his parents and uncle arguing the App Store removed the costs of hosting a store, bandwidth and payment processing; they invested and he founded the company in April 2008.

After launching the Mac with MacWrite, MacPaint and MacDraw, Apple stopped bundling them in 1986 because they competed with third-party developers, and in 1987 spun them into the Claris subsidiary to keep them at arm's length. For roughly 1986-1996 the Mac shipped with very few first-party apps (no built-in address book) so those categories stayed open to third parties.

Apple made Guy Kawasaki its first software/developer evangelist in the 1980s to promote the Mac to developers. Before the iPhone boom, Apple gave away WWDC tickets and begged developers to come; at WWDC 2008 evangelists put their email addresses on slides asking for feedback.

Apple TV games were limited to the Apple remote so developers would not require a game controller, echoing the 1984 Mac keyboard shipping without arrow keys to force mouse-driven apps and Vision Pro launching without motion controllers. Controller support came about three or four years later on Apple TV and two years later on Vision Pro (PlayStation VR controllers).

'App Store 2.0' (2016, announced by Phil Schiller): subscriptions opened to all apps; commission on a subscription drops from 30% to 15% after the first year; app review sped up from 7-14 business days to 24-48 hours; App Store Search Ads launched as a paid acquisition channel; old and low-quality apps purged.

Apple charged $129 for Mac OS X upgrades (people lined up at stores for them) and $5 for iOS upgrades, then made OS upgrades free. Being free let Apple default users to automatic updates installed overnight a couple of months after each .0 release.

Per Gruber's reading: Apple released Vision Pro in 2023-2024 as an 'enthusiast kit' at $3,500, funding about 1,000 software engineers, to have about five years of UI paradigms, input, content and third-party apps in place before a compelling mass-market AR device arrives around 2030.