Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Apple’s huge iPhone mistake”.
A portion of this video is sponsored by givewell, a widescreen ipod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone and a breakthrough internet communications device. The most successful apple product of all time isn’t this. I think it’s something that you wouldn’t think about. I’M a nerd and i embrace my nerd dance and i spend a lot of time imagining what would have happened in the tech world if things had veered in different directions. Think of it as the tech multiverse and you think about apple’s most popular platform. They have right now, their most popular product, so to speak, it’s the app store, but apple kind of fell backwards into the app store. If you remember back in 2007, when the original iphone launched, it was all about web apps. So what would the world look like if steve jobs didn’t give in to a third-party app store? What would the tech space look like and before i get there just a little bit of history? So if there weren’t supposed to be like apps as we know them right now like what was there, you can write amazing web 2.0 and ajax apps that look exactly and behave exactly like apps on the iphone. I think perhaps we all forget – or maybe you don’t remember – that the iphone was a really simple phone. The original iphone there were a ton of features missing.
There are obviously no third-party apps, but even simpler, there was no mms, there was no video recording. There was no copy and paste i can go on and on the phone was a very basic phone that did only what apple wanted it to do, but instead of opening it up and letting third-party sort of just have at it, like android did apple and steve Jobs initially leaned into web apps, leveraging sort of the really revolutionary the time mobile, safari browser and the new features that were you know around in 2007, like html5 and apple, really did a great job implementing this for what it was. Not only could you do things like bookmark websites and then sort of even have them transform themselves into apps or icons on your home screen plus web apps were able to tie into the safari apis, so you could call phone numbers get location, even though the app Itself wasn’t native so, but that that wasn’t enough developers, let’s say weren’t jazz, about developing what was generally referred to by them as silly web apps uh they wanted more and apple ultimately gave in the app store, is going to be the exclusive way to distribute iphone Applications directly to every iphone user and it was released in 2008 and obviously i think it did pretty well and the app store is arguably the reason.
The iphone or the ipad were successful as they are and were the iphone hardware was great and it was fun to use especially compared to other phones on the market, but you actually did with it. Wasn’T all that different from every other phone, but the apps really changed that so now, obviously, you’ve got access to games utilities, creative apps, all running natively, on on your phone, but as i tend to do i like to kind of wonder what the world would be Like if the web model had succeeded in the tech world, obviously what, if apple, really put all their eggs in that web app basket or just what? If steve jobs didn’t give in. So i think first, the iphone would be way slower to get adopted and one of the main reasons development was embraced with it was because the app store was a new revenue model.
If you made an app for the iphone, you could share in 70 of that money, and it was an easy platform to try. Plus the iphone was still a very popular phone at the time, so it made sense to develop for one device rather than a bunch of different phones that were on the market and had their own app stores. And it’s in a lot of ways. Still a similar story today so backing up to what, if, if apple, never created the app store, it’d be really hard to monetize your web app. That’S obviously the motivation behind a lot of these development houses really have to rely on ads, and it probably would work fine for some of the bigger names out there.
It certainly wouldn’t have been like the wild west bonanza that ended up being and in turn, i think less people would probably get less excited about the iphone. I do think, however, that web apps that were created would probably start to get more popular and sort of, as other phones started, to run. These advanced browsers, obviously like android and windows phone that came around these web apps, would automatically work on those phones and the popular apps would work everywhere, not just on the iphone so that world garden that apple has tried really hard to cultivate and build. Uh would have some strong cracks in it, since the software portion would be missing, and because of this, it can be pretty easy to see a world where software like windows phone might have actually succeeded, and this was some of the best software when it came to Ui, but the main reason that it didn’t stick around was lack of apps.
If i had all the apps of the iphone on a windows phone, i can tell you that i probably would have used windows phone, and i don’t think i would have been alone there and aside from the iphone, the app store has become a model for just A ton of apple projects and, of course, obviously the ipad leaned heavily on the app store when it was released, and that became the most popular tablet in the world and the sdk model of the app store has been expanded to a ton of other areas. Too. We’Ve got health kit watch kit ar kit home kit. These are all sort of development platforms that stemmed from that app store.
So there are obviously a lot of apps to choose from and all those apps are awesome, but none of those apps are going to help make the world a better place like this. Video sponsor givewell is setting out to do. The company spends over 20 000 hours. Each year researching charities and they choose to back those cherries and they pick incredible charities things for health, for poverty, for water and hunger, things that are sort of universally needed uh in the world. So i was pretty excited to partner with them. So there. Obviously, there are a lot of charities to choose from and you could certainly make your donations directly to them, but the benefit of going through givewell is they’re, constantly doing research and tracking these charities, seeing which ones are closest to hitting goals that can actually have tangible Impacts and that’s where they’re donating that money to at that minute, like i said 20 000 hours a year, are spent targeting each charity seeing how close they are, so i can sort of get the most tangible benefit for the dollar.
I think one of the most important things to know here too, is that givewell is not taking a cut of your donation if you’re donating 20 bucks that charity is going to get uh your full 20, so giveaway is actually matching the first 250 bucks that get Donated from this video, which is awesome, if you feel you’re in the mood to give this holiday season – and you have the means to do it – hit the link down below and use code john rettinger now i know a lot of you might not remember the original Iphone it came out in 2007. Maybe you were little were not born, but it was a giant deal at the time again. This is pre-android. The competition looked so antiquated compared to what this was now. That was all fine.
We talked about that at length, but the next iphone the iphone 3g that got the app store. I remember waiting in line for that phone. I had the new version of what’s called iphone os at the time on my original iphone and the very first app i downloaded from the app store was. This goes to show how long ago this was aol, instant messenger, and it was a huge deal to see another icon on the phone. It seems so commonplace right now, but that was a giant deal and you think about things right now. What seems like a giant deal? It’S going to seem so commonplace in 10, 15 years and the things that jump up, i think, are foldables. That’S going to be something that we’re going to see a lot of, or at least different designs, whether it’s going to be rollable foldable a bendable, whatever it ends up being, i think that’s something that’s going to be totally commonplace. It’S going to be interesting to look back and see. What’S new now is going to be expected in a few years, whatever that is the original iphone and the app store set the stage for the modern smartphone world and whether you’re on team apple team, android or just don’t care. You got to pay homage and respect to the og device that laid the foundation for everything that we’ve got now in the mobile world.
Think about all the things you do on your phone right now and i’d imagine. Most of them are app-based whether you’re on iphone or android. It doesn’t matter whether it’s games photo editing, video editing, social media, those are all third-party apps and if apple hadn’t made this change, if web apps had kept going and sort of been the de facto thing, it would be interesting to see what features wouldn’t have been There, the world has been changed by the app store in a very real way, and it’s hard to imagine what the world would look like without it, and i’m sure the answer is that some other company would have created it and apple’s iphone just wouldn’t be as Popular as it is, but it’s still hard to think that steve jobs, original version of the iphone without an app store, almost succeeded, and i think the tech world wouldn’t have been the same. .