With over 500,000 apps in Apple's App Store and over 18 billion downloads to date, it's hard to imagine the late Steve Jobs — didn't want native third-party apps mucking up the iPhone, but that was the original plan. It's a good thing Jobs didn't trust his gut on that one, because the App Store made the iPhone huge.
Revealed in Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs biography and revealed by The Huffington Post, Jobs originally wanted the iPhone to run only WebApps through the device's Safari Web browser.
Thankfully, a dude on Apple's board was able to convince him otherwise:
Apple board member Art Levinson told Isaacson that he phoned Jobs "half a dozen times to lobby for the potential of the apps," but, according to Isaacson, "Jobs at first quashed the discussion, partly because he felt his team did not have the bandwidth to figure out all the complexities that would be involved in policing third-party app developers."
So, you see, while Jobs might have been considered a visionary by lots of people, he was far from a super genius. He might have inspired the creatives around the world to "think different" but he was still human, and he couldn't always predict the future.
Those who are worried about Apple's future shouldn't. The company's in good hands with CEO Tim Cook, senior vice president of industrial design Jonathan Ive, senior vice president of product marketing Philip Schiller, senior vice president of iOS Software as well as the rest of the Apple board. Together they are Apple.
Steve Jobs was just Apple's most well-known poster boy, and boy was he good at his job.
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The Huffington Post, via 9to5Mac
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