The 10th anniversary of the App Store It's been a few weeks now, but analysis firms and specialized vehicles from around the world continue, each in their own way, paying tribute to the advent that changed the global technology landscape. Yesterday was the turn of the The Wall Street Journal, who decided to do it possibly in the most interesting way: reliving an interview with Steve Jobs in August 2008, a month after the store was launched.
In the conversation, Jobs commented that he did not expect the size of the success that the App Store would achieve with just a month of existence; at that time, users had downloaded apps more than 60 million times, a number that seems absolutely irrelevant today, but was impressive in 2008.
We didn't expect it to be this big. The mobile industry has never seen any of this. To be honest, neither is the computer industry. [Laughter] 60 million app downloads in the first 30 days. 30% as large as music downloads from the iTunes Store in the past 30 days, this is a record.
[] I wouldn’t trust any of our predictions because the reality has so far exceeded them that we’ve been reduced to mere viewers like you, watching this incredible phenomenon and trying to do our best to help people create their apps and put them in the store.
The legendary executive also spoke a little about the applications he had downloaded on his iPhone, citing names such as Yelp, New York Times, Anatomy, Bloomberg, Sudoku and Facebook. using.
Jobs still compares the App Store to the iTunes Store, which today seems absurd considering that the app store has grown in a way that it has become a giant music store front, almost completely supplanted by music services. streaming.
We think that the App Store is for the iPhone like iTunes is for the iPod, in which we improve a product with an internet service to bring content to it; we are doing the same with the iPhone.
We are improving it with an internet service to bring content directly to the phone. In this case, as we are already taking the content from the iTunes music store to the phone, we will also bring applications.
We think the result is exactly the same strategy as the iPod. Improve the device with content delivered over the internet. In addition to iTunes, we can wirelessly deliver content to your device without a PC. We can update apps automatically. It's all on the shoulders of iTunes.
At one point in the interview, Jobs even called Eddy Cue, who at the time was one of the heads of development at the App Store to check how often the download and revenue statistics were updated for developers. Cue then replies that daily, and Jobs boasts of offering this tool to all developers, "not just the big ones".
In the end, the executive, with his old ringtone, made a prediction that became certain:
I think a lot of people, including me, who believe that the mobile environment will get very serious because there are things you can obviously do, mobile devices stay with you all the time, but there are services that you can offer on them that are obviously not relevant on a desktop, as location services integrated into your application. They can be very useful and we are only seeing the beginning of this. It will be a huge thing, I think.
Jobs was Jobs. The entire interview, in text and audio, can be viewed on the WSJ but, unfortunately, only by newspaper subscribers.
via MacRumors
