"The world of telephony had never seen anything like it"

On the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the App Store, The Wall Street Journal -in partnership with The Information – just shared a interview with Steve Jobs dating from August 2008 offering to its readers both the audio file and the written transcript. In this interview given for the first month of existence of the store, the latter evokes his vision of the application store, comparing the App Store to iTunes.

"[…] The App Store is on iPhone what iTunes is for the iPod. Just as with the iPod, which we have improved through an Internet service to bring content, we will do the same with the iPhone. We are improving it with an Internet service to install content directly on the phone. Since we are already bringing music content to the phone via iTunes, we will now bring applications.

For the anecdote, Steve Jobs then evoked the "incredible at the time" figure of 50 new applications per day. He then returned to the role of Cupertino in the moderation of applications subject s, insisting on inappropriate subjects such as pornography or respect for copyrights .

" We did not expect it to become so big. The mobile industry has never seen anything like it. To be honest, the computer industry does not have either. [rires] 60 million apps downloaded in the first 30 days One-third of the downloads on iTunes in the last 30 days exploded the charts.

When Steve Jobs talks about the future of the App Store, he hopes that one day he will be able to represent a billion-dollar market . But last month, Apple announced that $ 100 billion had been paid to developers.

" Downloads are fast and reliable, it's the same system as iTunes. Customer reviews, purchase in one click, like for music and others. Nobody has ever reproduced iTunes in five years. It will be even more difficult for the App Store because it is built in the same way.
We think strategically that it is a hell of a deal. How is it possible ? We have more than 1,500 apps on the App Store today. We thought the developer contribution would slow down, but it is accelerating.

To conclude the interview, Steve Jobs amused himself with the journalist Nick Wingfield detailing the applications on his personal iPhone: from Yelp to the New York Times via Bloomberg, stating in passing be a fan of Sudoku of which he would become an expert.

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