Last week marked 15 years since Apple started selling the original iPhone. The Wall Street Journal‘s Joanna Stern interviewed former and present Apple executives and they discussed the original iPhone launch, the early days of the App Store, and more in a follow-up story published this Friday.
One of the most interesting things about this story is how the original iPhone changed Apple’s culture, as employees couldn’t put their phones down during meetings.
“The culture changed inside of Apple when we were able to be always-on and always messaging and checking things,” said Tony Fadell, a former Apple senior VP at the time who left Apple in 2008 to start Nest, the thermostat innovator now owned by Alphabet. “We had a glimmer of the impact but I didn’t know what it would be when the phone went outside of Apple.”
Then, a year later after the launch of the original iPhone, with the iPhone 3G and the creation of the App Store, Greg Joswiak, Apple’s senior VP of worldwide marketing, thought the App Store would get 50 apps for its start, which would have been great. Not only did the numbers exceed Apple’s expectations, but by April 2009, 25,000 apps a week were being submitted for approval.
“We thought maybe we would get 50 apps, we’d be feeling pretty good as a nice little start,” Greg Joswiak, Apple senior vice president of world-wide marketing, told me. “We had 500.”