The App Store Opens

On 10 July 2008, Apple opened the App Store. Apple's own press release that day describes the opening stock: "more than 500 native applications will be available on the iPhone's App Store when Apple's iPhone 3G goes on sale tomorrow." More than 125 of them were free.

The dates are worth keeping straight. The App Store opened on 10 July (through iTunes 7.7); iPhone OS 2.0—the iPhone 2.0 software—shipped on 11 July, and the iPhone 3G went on sale the same day. The store opened the day before the phone, not with it.

The day was historic in two senses.

A Reversal

The first sense: it was the day Apple's own stated policy was abandoned. But the policy being abandoned was not stated at the original iPhone unveiling on 9 January 2007. It was set out five months later, at WWDC on 11 June 2007, where Jobs said: "We have been trying to come up with a solution to expand the capabilities of iPhone by letting developers write great apps for it, and yet, keep the iPhone reliable and secure. And we've come up with a very sweet solution." The sweet solution was web apps running in Safari. Apple's press release the same day carried Jobs saying that "Our innovative approach, using Web 2.0-based standards, lets developers create amazing new applications while keeping the iPhone secure and reliable." No native SDK: that was the official line.

Over the next nine months reality moved the other way. Demand for capabilities web apps could not reach—the camera, GPS, the accelerometer—kept rising; the jailbreak community grew; developers pushed back openly. On 6 March 2008 Apple announced the iPhone SDK and the App Store, and the position was reversed.

The reversal was thorough. Rather than simply permitting third-party native apps, Apple decided to funnel every developer through a single distribution channel that Apple itself ran. Purchase, update, billing, and revenue split were consolidated into one infrastructure—structurally avoiding the fragmentation and piracy that had defined PC software distribution. The power to decide what could be distributed at all was consolidated in the same place.

70/30

The second sense lies in the revenue split. From the 6 March announcement: "Developers set the price for their applications—including free—and retain 70 percent of all sales revenues." Seventy percent to the developer, thirty to Apple, with a $99 annual fee to join the developer programme ($299 for the Enterprise Program).

In 2008 this was not, as it would later be characterised, extortionate. Compared with physical-package retail or distribution through a carrier's own deck, the share returning to developers was larger. Apple took on distribution, billing, delivery, and updates as a single bundle.

The 30% became the "Apple tax" only once mobile had moved to the centre of the economy.

• August 2020 — Epic Games sues. The 2021 district-court ruling largely rejected the antitrust claims but enjoined Apple's anti-steering rules, which forbade pointing users to payment options outside the app. In January 2024 the Supreme Court declined both sides' appeals. On 30 April 2025 the same court found Apple had wilfully violated that injunction and barred it from charging any commission on purchases made through steered links.
• November 2020 — Apple announces the App Store Small Business Program, cutting the commission to 15% for developers earning up to $1 million a year, effective 1 January 2021.
• The EU's Digital Markets Act entered into force on 1 November 2022, became applicable on 2 May 2023, and set a March 2024 compliance deadline for designated gatekeepers. With iOS 17.4 (6 March 2024) Apple permitted third-party app marketplaces—in the EU only.

On opening day, almost no voice was raised against the ratio.

The Invention of Mobile Economics

The App Store was not the first distribution channel for phone software. In Japan, NTT DoCoMo's i-mode (1999) had already built billing and revenue-sharing for official sites at a scale of tens of millions of subscribers. Handango and similar independent storefronts served Symbian, Palm, and Windows Mobile. What was new about the App Store was not its existence but its absence of friction and the size of the population it reached.

One icon on the device; over the air; a few taps; seconds later the phone does something new. Downloading became, for the first time, an ordinary mass gesture.

Apple's own announcements track the speed.

Philip Schiller on that first weekend: "The App Store is a grand slam, with a staggering 10 million applications downloaded in just three days." These are all Apple's own numbers—but the progression of the orders of magnitude is itself the record of what was happening.

Related

• The original iPhone — where the web-app policy started
• iPhone 3G — the same week as the App Store
• i-mode — official distribution before the App Store