[sjwright]

Do we know that to be true? It seemed to me like they pulled the public SDK and App Store together much faster than they could have if it were a last minute change of direction.

And it further seemed to me that had Apple let developers write apps from day one, the quality of apps would have been far worse, with many developers basing their iPhone apps on the designs and logic flows of their existing Blackberry/Windows CE apps.

Looking back on it, I think they did—whether by design or by accident—exactly what they should have done.

[simonh]

It wasn't a last minute change of direction, they had about a year to put the DK and app store together. I believe the final decision was made shortly after SDC in 2007.

They couldn't have released an SDK in 2007 though, it simply didn't exist every system app was essentially put together by hand as part of the system and debugged and tested alongside the OS. At least that's what it sounds like from the interviews I've seen with developers on the project.