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Comment by FootballMuse | Hacker News Reader

Yet. They also didn’t allow you to create or install third party apps on the first iPhones too

Er, like the vast majority of phones at the time. It only took them one more year to prepare and release both a dev kit and an App Store that revolutionised the industry. One year.

Vast majority of phones before 2007 supported J2ME apps, it simply wasn't much useful without 24/7 internet everywhere.

J2ME was an utter nightmare, I know because I worked in telecoms back then. Mobile app development as an utter shitshow in 2007 with no signs of it getting any better.

It just seems weird to complain that the company that made mobile apps mainstream "didn't allow it" earlier. The only reason they delayed a year is because the SDK wasn't publication ready yet. They hadn't even finalised the APIs yet and they were still very buggy at the launch of the first phones. We know that from interviews from former employees, the iPhone OS changed hugely between launch and the second phone a year later. A lot of the internal apps were extensively rewritten. Not a great time to push third party development.

Heck, when Jobs gave the first demo he had to execute a very specific sequence of actions because otherwise the phone would crash.

You’re absolutely right that the phone wasn’t ready for 3rd party apps on day 1, at least to Apple’s standards.

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