Chapter 8. All About Apps
When you get right down to it, the iPhone is a computer. It’s got memory, a screen, a processor, WiFi; It runs a variant of Mac OS X. But during the first year of its existence, people couldn’t write new programs (apps) for it. Apple didn’t allow it.
Apple said it was only trying to preserve the stability of the phone and of the AT&T network. It needed time to redesign the iPhone operating system, to create a digital sandbox where all those loose-cannon non-Apple programs could run without interfering with the iPhone’s “real” functions.
During that year of preparation, new programs appeared on the iPhone, all right—but in forms that most ordinary iPhone fans didn’t bother with. There were the semi-lame “Web apps,” which were little more than iPhone-shaped Web pages, and there were hacks.
That’s right, hacks. The hacking community learned to “jailbreak” the iPhone, using special software tools to open it up (metaphorically speaking) and shoehorn their own programs onto it, violating their warranties in the process.
Finally, though, Apple threw open its doors to independent programmers by the tens of thousands, and in July 2008, it offered a simple way for you to get the new iPhone programs they wrote: the iPhone App Store.
Welcome to App Heaven
“App” is short for application, meaning software program, and the App Store is a single, centralized catalog of every authorized iPhone add-on program in the world.
Nothing like the App Store had ever been attempted before. ...
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