[HN Gopher] Cocoa Touch apps (2007)
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Cocoa Touch apps (2007)
Author : tomhoward
Score : 141 points
Date : 2021-06-03 15:56 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| tiahura wrote:
| So macOS is finally getting touchscreen support? Awesome.
| powersurge360 wrote:
| Not sure if this is a joke, the emails refer to iPhone and it's
| original sdk. Originally, to develop for iPhone, you had to
| settle for making web apps.
| justinator wrote:
| Well the iPhone shipped with native apps. You, as a
| developer, just couldn't make them yourself. So my question
| what is, and wasn't there when it come to the internal SDK
| and what needed to be built out? I guess exactly what
| Bertrand lists lol. One of those things would be seen as a
| miracle to ship in that timeframe.
| jaywalk wrote:
| Nothing shipped in that timeframe. It was announced, and
| that was it.
| justinator wrote:
| Good thing I didn't say that anything shipped then, huh?
| ;)
| mortenjorck wrote:
| _" Let's protect the user, by keeping control of [...] which
| entities can distribute apps (implies: signing infrastructure,
| policies, etc...)"_
|
| Imagine an alternate universe where this foundational goal of the
| iOS SDK was interpreted just a little more loosely, with
| something closer to MacOS notarization, and an App Store that had
| to compete just like the Mac App Store.
| jeromegv wrote:
| Easy to imagine it. It's the google android play store
| situation.
| philistine wrote:
| I beg to differ. From my understanding, Google does not
| notarize apps from outside the Play Store and therefore
| cannot revoke apps outside the Play Store from launching.
| Apple can and does do all those things on macOS.
| nso wrote:
| Play protect
| grishka wrote:
| Of course. Google doesn't exactly own your device -- you
| do. You're free to disable all preinstalled Google apps,
| including Play Store. I prefer to not have my devices
| backdoored by manufacturer.
| dkarras wrote:
| And it just... sucks. So many avenues for exploitations for
| average developers that I'd never trust and install a 3rd
| party app on such a device that I carry around with me every
| day. Sure, Apple model is far far from perfect but the only
| solution I can think of for such a personal device.
| sneak wrote:
| There are far more Android devices being shipped and used
| in the world than iOS devices. In a purely marketshare-
| based view, Android is winning.
| dkarras wrote:
| ...and I wasn't disputing that. Of course, Android the
| operating system has more market share.
| asddubs wrote:
| Hard disagree. First thing I do on any new android phone is
| install a third party app: f-droid. the play store is
| impossible to navigate because it's flooded with ad-laden
| crap and overly permission-greedy dodgy apps. f-droid (for
| those who aren't familiar, it's an app store for open
| source applications) is an excellent way to get away from
| that and get apps that are basically guaranteed not to be
| user-hostile.
|
| not to mention that app stores impose censorship on the
| sites that offer apps there. if you're an art platform you
| aren't allowed to show anything that even just vaguely
| hints at nudity (and I'm not talking about just outright
| porn here)
| kevincox wrote:
| > I'd never trust and install a 3rd party app on such a
| device that I carry around with me every day.
|
| I don't run any third party apps either. But I like that I
| am welcome to do so. In the past I have installed apps from
| third party developers that I trust and am the better for
| it.
| dkarras wrote:
| I want to install apps though (and I actually do). Just
| those that makes economic sense for developers so that
| they won't want to resort to scams and even if they
| decided to, they wouldn't be able to. Apple's ecosystem
| provides that. I do run 3rd party apps on my Apple mobile
| devices and accept that there are reasonable vetting
| procedures at the human and OS level to protect my
| privacy and protect my device from malware. Android model
| unfortunately does not provide that, that's why I
| wouldn't install such apps in such a device.
| myko wrote:
| How does that make it suck?
|
| Like, just don't install those apps. Easy.
| dkarras wrote:
| What do you mean by "those apps"? I'm talking about
| potentially ALL apps. I want to run apps on my device.
| That's why I bought it.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| This only works if you never interact with anyone ever. A
| lot of your security depends on people in your network
| not installing random crap and the past 25 years of
| computers have shown that it is sufficiently easy to
| social-engineer people into downloading and installing
| random crap.
| thrower123 wrote:
| At least it's not the Amazon store. That place is scary, not
| to mention derelict. My Kindle Fire probably needs a pi-hole
| in front of it to make sure it's not hitting anything other
| than the Kindle APIs...
| afro88 wrote:
| The most amazing part of this for me is the goals were set before
| they started, and they delivered on them. The goals didn't
| change, they didn't pivot, it didn't agile it's way slowly into
| something else.
|
| Clear vision, and what they delivered took over the world.
| pier25 wrote:
| Jesus they had 3 months to do it.
| giantrobot wrote:
| I was at Apple in SWE at the time.
|
| While three months for public APIs was a tight schedule, a lot
| of the frameworks already existed and it was shoring up
| _public_ access to them. Apple tends to dog food their own
| stuff for a while before making it public. The iOS 1 apps were
| using common APIs even if they weren 't public.
|
| The early iOS APIs were pretty limited and were typically a
| subset of everything in a framework. Subsequent releases added
| to public APIs or released new revamped APIs for the same
| purpose.
|
| So it's not like Jobs was asking for years worth of work in
| three months, maybe just six months of work in three months.
| seidoger wrote:
| It ended up being more like 5[0], but still a crazy crunch.
|
| [0] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2008/03/06Apple-Announces-
| iPh...
| avgsizedpigeon wrote:
| Suddenly all my deadlines seem to be not as tight as I thought
| they were before.
| [deleted]
| refulgentis wrote:
| I _deeply_ appreciated a recalcitrant Serland's "Let's do it
| right this time, rather than rush a half-cooked story" was
| followed immediately by Jobs' "Sure, as long as its ready in 12
| weeks"
|
| Of course, history shows it wasn't _actually_ rolled out till
| June (modulo direct 3P relationships Apple did earlier), but
| good to know managers are always managers and FAANG is always
| FAANG, 90% of the work gets done _in spite_ of the lack of
| planning
| vbsteven wrote:
| Crazy indeed. Although I assume at that point they already had
| large parts of the SDK implemented for native internal apps and
| much of those 3-6 months have been spent on public
| documentation, signing infrastructure etc.
| chc wrote:
| Yeah, people had already been using the private APIs on
| jailbroken phones. That's still a pretty ambitious timeframe
| even just to get out all the supporting infrastructure,
| though.
| swiley wrote:
| Man, it would be nice if we could go back.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Man, that is a classic "Jobs" reply.
|
| Detailed, well-reasoned email, acknowledged by a curt one-
| sentence reply.
|
| But that only happened in email. I don't think Jobs liked the
| written medium. He could talk up a storm. One of the best
| declarative public speakers I've ever heard (but not an
| "emotionally eloquent" one, like many preachers).
| jimbokun wrote:
| I also found Bertrand's email concise and to the point while
| still being very informative.
|
| Covered all the bases, without requiring a PowerPoint or some
| long drawn out document to make his case.
|
| The whole thing is 7 sentences but lays the foundational
| principles of the App Store that persists to this day.
| mperham wrote:
| I'm a solo entrepreneur. Curt, one line emails are the only way
| to scale email when a lot of customers need my time.
| doteka wrote:
| Don't think that's as much a "Jobs" reply as just a general
| senior management necessity.
|
| With the amount of "important" emails you get in a position
| with any kind of responsibility, writing thoughtful elaborate
| responses to each and every one would leave you with no time to
| do your actual job.
|
| So you communicate the core message clearly and bluntly, and
| move on to the next fire.
| Firebrand wrote:
| I think a good example of this would be Tim Cook's email to
| Phil Schiller on why the Mac's App Store wasn't taking off,
| which was revealed during the Epic Games v Apple trial: https
| ://mobile.twitter.com/benedictevans/status/139681157744...
|
| Cook sees the fire, gives a brief thought, and leaves it to
| Schiller on Christmas Eve to figure out why it started and
| how to fix it.
| gregsadetsky wrote:
| I think that you meant to post the following URL -- https:/
| /twitter.com/benedictevans/status/1396811577442045953
|
| Unfortunately, it was truncated in your post
|
| Cheers and thanks for the reference!
| DeusExMachina wrote:
| Also, I don't see what other information was needed here. He
| was the CEO, he was not supposed to get into implementation
| details. He gave a green light and left them to do their job.
| jjice wrote:
| I've grown to really like short responses, assuming they give
| enough info to answer the question. I think that a lot of us
| run into a subconcious thing where we feel like we need to
| say more, but most of the time we won't. I've been practicing
| recently, and it makes things so much faster and less
| tedious.
|
| I think I originally picked this up from professors, because
| I'd write a well thought out response (an unreasonable amount
| of time spent on it), and the professor would respond with
| all the info I'd need in two sentences.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| Jobs's reply in this case a bit asshole-ish though, not
| just curt. Characteristically so, but as much as I admire
| the guy I don't admire that quality.
| aaronbrethorst wrote:
| I just realized that more time has elapsed since the iPhone
| launched (about 14 years: 2007 - 2021) than had between when Jobs
| returned to Apple and the iPhone launched (about 11 years:
| 1996-2007). Yikes.
|
| Also, the three month deadline helps explain why the iPhoneOS SDK
| was such a mess when it first launched.
| lalos wrote:
| He was leading NextStep right before for ~12 years, iOS SDK is
| built on top of that effort (NSString - Nextstep string)
| aaronbrethorst wrote:
| NeXT, and here's some more fun history on that: https://web.a
| rchive.org/web/20150824224400/http://www.cocoab...
| atonse wrote:
| Also didn't they debut it in the spring either way? I remember
| something like that. Or maybe it was 2.0
| wayneftw wrote:
| People on HN have repeatedly said to me that Apple _actually_
| originally intended for web apps to be the only apps for the
| iPhone, forever.
|
| I never believed it. Glad we have some evidence that that was
| never the case.
|
| _Clearly web apps were a stop-gap until they got their SDK
| done._
| trimbo wrote:
| How is "never the case" derived from this email? This email was
| sent after iPhone shipped and doesn't say anything about
| shipping Cocoa Touch as a goal before this point.
| wayneftw wrote:
| You think Apple planned to run forever with just web apps at
| any point during the development of the iPhone?
|
| No. _Clearly_ web apps were a stop-gap until they got their
| SDK done. They always planned on having an app store and
| pushing web apps to the side once they got their gatekeeping
| mechanism in place.
| rgovostes wrote:
| This claim is directly contradicted by this e-mail exchange
| from October 2007, the very e-mail exchange in which they
| decided to move forward with a native app SDK. The iPhone
| was announced in January 2007, a full 9 months earlier, and
| was in development for a few years before that.
|
| If they "always planned" the App Store, why would Bertrand,
| one of Steve's direct reports, be writing as if this were a
| brand new idea?
|
| One of the original iPhone's "killer features" was a full,
| desktop-equivalent web browser in the days of the "mobile
| web" and WAP. They invested significant engineering effort
| into making it performant, adding UI affordances for
| zooming and panning around pages that couldn't fit on a
| 3.5" screen, and so on. It's completely believable they
| thought this solution was enough for third-party apps.
| wayneftw wrote:
| OK, so you think an email that starts with "Fine, let's
| enable Cocoa Touch apps" is presenting "Cocoa Touch apps"
| as a new idea?
|
| Please. It's an idea they'd obviously been discussing.
|
| There is no way in hell that Apple, a company that has
| always, always, always kept very tight control over their
| platform ever actually planned for web apps to be the one
| and only type of app for the iPhone.
|
| > One of the original iPhone's "killer features" was a
| full, desktop-equivalent web browser
|
| Nobody is disputing that. Of course they needed the
| web...until they didn't - and they absolutely planned the
| switch from web apps to native apps from the get go.
| Anyone who actually believes otherwise - I've got a
| bridge to sell you.
|
| Looks like I underestimated the amount of stockholm
| syndrome surrounding this company though. Oh well - enjoy
| your dystopian new world order!
| bellyfullofbac wrote:
| Ah yeah, the deluded (you) thinking everybody else are
| the insane ones.
|
| If you look back at that time period, the "Fine!" surely
| came about because iPhone jailbreakers had extracted the
| API from the apps and were making their own Cocoa Touch
| apps and sideloading it onto the iPhone. "Let's enable"
| sounds like they decided to open it up to the public, if
| your theory about stop-gaps is correct I would've
| expected the wording to be "Fine, let's enable CT apps
| _early_. ". The rest of the email also talks about the
| jail which is the app store, which seems to be a rough
| concept of "What we need to make this happen", rather
| than something that they've been preparing in the
| background.
|
| It looks more like you're having a stockholm syndrome
| with your own "knowledge".
| mcphage wrote:
| > is presenting "Cocoa Touch apps" as a new idea?
|
| Cocoa Touch apps wasn't a new idea, since that's what all
| of the Apple-developed native iPhone apps used. What's
| new to this email is getting approval for enabling 3rd
| parties to write & release them without jailbreaking your
| phone.
| shellac wrote:
| Seems like clear case that is _was_ the case, unless Steve
| Jobs liked to ensure his intended features were very secret
| indeed, and delivered late.
| myko wrote:
| The email shows literally the opposite of what you suggest
| [deleted]
| bena wrote:
| How does this contradict that?
|
| The original iPhone was release in June of 2007, this confirms
| that the decision to release an SDK was in October of that
| year. With the announcement to the public being a couple of
| weeks after this email.
| Uehreka wrote:
| They did intend that. This email is Bertrand relenting and
| saying "Fine, let's enable apps that aren't web apps." Here's
| what they told developers when the iPhone was released (months
| before that email): https://youtu.be/vKKISOnOCaw
| jaywalk wrote:
| I would argue that this email actually somewhat bolsters the
| claim of web apps only, so I'm not sure how you believe the
| exact opposite.
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