How iPhone has changed tech and gaming

Ten years ago today, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs revealed the original iPhone at the MacWorld keynote. Whilst it’s hard to have an objective view about that event a decade since here are some quotes from journalists at the time. Let’s start with this absolute treat-to-read from former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer:

“There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance. It’s a $500 subsidized item. They may make a lot of money. But if you actually take a look at the 1.3 billion phones that get sold, I’d prefer to have our software in 60% or 70% or 80% of them, than I would to have 2% or 3%, which is what Apple might get.”

Apple’s current market share in the US for their cell phone is around 43%. Microsoft’s is less than 1%.  John Dvorak of MarketWatch shared a similar opinion, thinking Apple should pull the plug on the project altogether:

“Apple should pull the plug on the iPhone…The problem here is that while Apple can play the fashion game as well as any company, there is no evidence that it can play it fast enough. These phones go in and out of style so fast that unless Apple has half a dozen variants in the pipeline, its phone, even if immediately successful, will be passé within 3 months.”

There are a plethora of more quotes to pull from that thought the iPhone spelled doom for the company. In fact, it’s hard to find an opinion at the time that would predict the success the product would have. The closest I could find came from CNET:

“Even if it's a flop — perhaps even more so if it's a flop — the iPhone will change the way mobile devices are designed, whether that's closer to Apple's vision or further away.”

They were right. Not about the flop part, but the fact that iPhone changed computing forever. Below is an image of two Android devices: on the left is a prototype designed by HTC. Codenamed Google Sooner, this is the device many believe Android was initially developed on. No WiFi, no touchscreen, and a BlackBerry-style keyboard. On the right is the first commercial Android phone; the HTC Dream. Not only did it have a much better name, it had a lot more in common with iPhone.

Andy Rubin, a former Apple engineer and the CEO of Android Inc., was in Las Vegas for CES at the time of the iPhone unveiling. He had his driver pull over so he could finish watching the announcement and immediately realized Android’s development would need to be reworked from the ground up. Ten years on, and here are both Apple and Google’s flagship phones: the iPhone 7 and Google Pixel. The similarities are now more apparent than ever, with iOS and Android making up around 95% of all mobile phones.

iPhone would go on to influence computing in general, birthing iPad three years later in 2010. Outlets had similar pessimistic opinions on the viability of Apple’s tablet propositions, but iPad has undoubtedly influenced companies such as Microsoft to build products like the Surface Pro. In 2015, more tablets were sold than traditional PCs.

These portable touchscreen devices have gone on to influence a more specific technology sector: video games. A year after its initial release, Apple gave developers the ability to create dedicated applications for iPhone via the App Store. In September of 2016, the App Store crossed 140 billion downloads with games taking up almost a quarter of those downloads. The next biggest app category is Business at a measly 9.9%.

Whilst many initial iPhone game releases cost money, up front paid content soon gave rise to “free-to-play” and in-app purchases. Neither of these concepts were entirely new, but they were certainly normalized by mobile gaming. Instead of asking money for their games, developers would provide a bare bones experience that users could enhance by purchasing additional content. We as gamers are all aware of this, but some of you may not be aware of some of the details.

Due to the relative ease of developing and releasing on the App Store, a ton of games are available to the platform. As of six months ago, there were over 631,000 titles in the library, with Apple receiving 540 submissions a day. The average price of those games? $0.48. In-app purchases account for almost 50% of all revenue on the App Store with that statistic growing every year. This saturation, particular of apps that cost nothing up front, means a lot of games developed for mobile platforms are in the red. You may say that this doesn’t affect you as a gamer since you’re more a console/PC guy or gal, you’d be wrong. The normalization of free-to-play and in-app purchases has spread to Steam, PlayStation Network, and Xbox Live, with Sony seeing a 50% increase in revenue from “free-to-play” year over year.

iPhone is a miraculous device that millions of consumers take for granted almost every second of the day. It has and will continue to influence computing and gaming, for better or worse. Thinking back to 2007, a year where the best selling phone looked like this, it’s impossible to predict what these industries will be like 10 years from now. With the upcoming Nintendo Switch, it’s clear that gaming’s future is going to become more and more entwined with mobile computing. It’s all very exciting, and it’s all thanks to iPhone.