The App Store Opens

On 10 July 2008, alongside iPhone OS 2.0, Apple opened the App Store. Roughly five hundred applications were on offer; about a quarter of them were free.

The day was historic in two senses.

A Reversal

The first sense: it was the day on which Apple's original position quietly reversed. In January 2007, on the iPhone unveiling stage, Steve Jobs had told developers that web apps were the "sweet solution" for third-party development on the iPhone. No native apps; only what ran in Safari. That was the official line.

But over the following eighteen months reality moved the other way. Requests for capabilities that web apps could not reach—the camera, GPS, the accelerometer—mounted; pressure from the developer community grew. And, perhaps most decisively, the existence of a competing Android platform was becoming a matter of public record. Apple had little choice but to reverse course.

The reversal, however, 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.

70/30

The second sense lies in the revenue split. Seventy percent to the developer, thirty to the platform. In 2008 this was not, as it would later be characterised, extortionate. Compared to physical-package retail or the established PC download channels, the share returning to developers was in fact larger than what most precedents offered. Apple took on distribution, billing, marketing, and updates as a single bundle.

That same 30% would, over the next decade and a half, become the "Apple tax"—the centre of disputes with Epic Games (2020–2024) and the regulatory mechanism around which the European Union built the Digital Markets Act (in force 2024). At opening day, however, almost no voice was raised against the ratio.

The Invention of Mobile Economics

Before the App Store, installing additional software on a phone was, technically and commercially, an exotic activity. Carrier decks of ringtones and wallpapers; small, often dubious download channels for Symbian and Windows Mobile—these were small ecosystems with little reach.

The App Store turned that into "press a button and your iPhone gains a new capability in a few seconds." The act of downloading was, for the first time, given a frictionless mass quality.

Ten million downloads in the first week. Five hundred million in the first six months. Ten billion by 2010.

Related

The 30% revenue split and the dispute with Epic Games will be treated in later timeline entries.