[Samuel_Michon]

iPhone was released on June 29, 2007. The iPhone SDK was made available in March of 2008. The App Store opened on July 11, 2008.

If Apple really only started working on the public SDK and the App Store after consumers started buying iPhones, they did it at a superhuman speed.

[chc]

It's not as though the public SDK was a totally new thing. It contained some new components, but AFAIK most of it was existing stuff that they just hadn't released an SDK for (heck, a lot of it was stuff the iPhone inherited from OS X). All the awkwardness surrounding the SDK's actual release — for example, the neverending, absurdly restrictive NDA that seemed to flummox Apple's own community reps — really did feel like a rush job. I find it a little weird to think that Apple didn't intend to release the Cocoa Touch SDK after touting it so highly, but it did kind of feel that way.

And the App Store was just an extension of the iTunes Store. Adding a section to your existing online store in one year is not exactly breakneck speed.

[masklinn]

Apple had obviously already developed the tools (most of them being extension of the OSX tools) and some (or many) of the APIs (again most of them being extensions/rethinks of the existing OSX APIs) for their own internal use.

A year later, things still felt pretty awkwardly rough.

[snowwrestler]

They diverted extra developers to those projects, which ended up delaying the upcoming OS X release.

[Samuel_Michon]

True! I'd forgotten all about that.