The iPhone – why is it so successful?

Adam Lalani M00549948

1 March 2016

University of MiddlesexSchool of Science & Technology

Dubai Campus

CCM4320Network Systems and Services

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Table of contents

Page

Number (s)

Abstract 3

Introduction – Evolution and the Thirst for Bandwidth 4 - 7

The iPhone Release 8 - 9

Reasons for Popularity

A – Marketing and Psychology 10 - 11

B – Operating System 12 - 16

C – User Interface 17 - 20

D – Hardware 21 - 23

E – The App Store 24 - 28

Conclusion 29 - 30

List of References 31 - 38

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Abstract

The iPhone is a result of cumulative selection in the technology and mobile telephone space.

It has helped to drive the continual improvement in wireless data access (both mobile and

Wi-Fi) with its user-driven thirst for bandwidth. When released, its superior hardware blew

away its contemporary competition, in part thanks to psychological-based marketing

techniques, but mainly due to its unique user interface.

The underlying operating system, built on an almost 30 year old UNIX-like kernel, XNU,

gave it a sound basis for continual improvement. The inclusion of the world’s first desktop-

class web browser on a mobile phone made the competition seem dated, and was a key

reason for its initial success. With its well thought out, new, yet familiar, interface and

intuitive touch gesture based method of navigating the device and its applications it was a

force to be reckoned with.

Both built and designed with best practice industrial techniques, it was incrementally

improved with each iteration in order to inspire flocks of new users. The launch of the App

Store filled in the gaps left by the pre-loaded Apple created software led to an explosion of

1.5 million available applications, thus allowing the iPhone to be used for almost every

imaginable scenario possible. All of this had led to Apple being the most valuable company

and brand in the world, and its success will likely continue for years to come.

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Introduction – Evolution and the Thirst for Bandwidth

The iPhone is the apex of a phenomenon often referred to as ‘Cumulative Selection’.

Cumulative selection is the idea that a complex end-product results from a sequence of non-

random steps that originate from ultimately or comparatively simple beginnings. (Dawkins,

1986) Simply put, the iPhone took all the useful incremental changes that had occurred in the

mobile telecommunications and computing space over an extended period of time and

converged them together to create what was a unique device, at the time of its launch.

Johannes Gutenberg, the inventor of the printing press in 1440, similarly recombined existing

technologies when building his device – combining oil-based ink with screw presses that had

been previously utilised for the production of wine and olive oil (Shenkar, 2010) – had those

technologies not already existed, he would not have been able to converge them together to

create what was arguably the most important invention in human history. Therefore, using

this analogy it can be argued that the application of cumulative selection to the iPhone is not

as outlandish as it may have initially appeared to be.

Curwen and Whalley (2014), wrote that changes in technology generally move forward via a

series of generations or part generations. They also note that these changes are achieved

either through better hardware, software, or a combination of the two. Later on in the paper,

this will be returned to during a discussion on incremental hardware and software

improvements.

According to Goggin (2009), the mobile phone is primarily an incremental adaptation of the

telephone, with this adaption process taking almost one hundred years, utilising many

improvements or revisions of increasing complexity beginning with the telegraph, the

reimagining of radio technology, the reworking of voice telephony and finally the future

vision of mobility and portability.

The earliest truly portable mobile phones appeared around 1980, and were severely hampered

by their size, weight and high cost to purchase and use – with handsets often providing

perhaps half an hour of talk time before their batteries ran out (Wicker, 2013). They ran on

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analogue mobile networks which were inherently insecure and allowed for malicious entities

to eavesdrop on telephone calls with great ease, amongst many other deficiencies. (Gardezi,

2006)

In order to eradicate such first generation analogue network issues, the Groupe Speciale

Mobile was formed in 1982, and was tasked with designing a Europe-wide spanning mobile

technology. (History | About Us – The GSMA Foundation) In 1987, as a result of this group,

the specification for The Global System for Mobile communications (GSM) was agreed

upon, and four years later (1991), the very first call using GSM technology was made by

Finland’s Prime Minister Harri Holkeri. (GSM celebrates 20 years, 2011)

Throughout the earlier half of the 1990s, many countries began to adopt the GSM

specification – and this transition from analogue mobile networks to digital networks

provided an increase in radio spectrum capacity. This allowed for the diffusion of mobile

telecommunications to become possible. In turn, this led to the increased usage of that

capacity, and came to be a key reason for the then sudden drastic increase in global

subscriber numbers. (Gruber and Verboven, 2001).

When mobile network usage and penetration increases, so does the investment in network

improvement (Gruber and Koutroumpis, 2011), – this adds strength to the idea that as mobile

device hardware develops (and is adopted by users) to better take advantage of existing

mobile networks, it helps to spur on the improvement in those networks.

Taking this further is the concept of ‘Arms Races’- “An adaption in one lineage…may

change the selection pressure on another lineage…giving rise to a counter-adaption. If this

occurs reciprocally, an… escalation or ‘arms race’ may result” (Dawkins and Krebs, 1979).

This theory, in a technological sense, was later to be confirmed by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple

Inc., during the D: All Things Digital Conference in 2007 when he said “…We're going to

take advantage of some of these investments in bandwidth…” (Block, 2007)

Further credence to the idea is lent by Chen and Zhao (2014), when they suggest that the

anticipated 78% increase in mobile data traffic between 2012 and 2016 is to be driven by

smart devices and their use of the wireless internet. This point is paramount, because initially

it was the mobile networks that had provided the bandwidth that mobile devices had

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cumulatively improved to better consume, and is now the exact opposite – the bandwidth is

having to increase due to the users (and their devices) thirst for it.

The additional available mobile bandwidth actually came about when network operators,

having reached high penetration rates with their mobile voice customers, then looked for

other ways to create revenue growth, leading them to invest in 3G (third generation)

connectivity and thus the updated network infrastructure to support it (West and Mace, 2010).

All of this was presaged by NEC chairman Koji Kobayashi in 1977 when he spoke of the

future convergence of computers and communications – envisaging a future of

telecommunications and (presumably mobile) computing closely entwined, and that this

convergence would go hand in hand with technological improvements in integrated circuit

design. (Rumelt, 2011) Wicker (2013) states that “… the rapid evolution of integrated circuits

… has had a profound effect on cellular hardware…” – it is therefore quite clear that Koji

Kobayashi was very much on the right track, years before the technology had caught up with

his future vision.

Figure 1 – Some milestones in mobile telecommunications

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(Laying the foundations for 5G mobile)

The widespread adoption of the Internet in the latter half of the 1990s began to allow the

possibility of the diffusion and convergence of various technologies that Koji Kobayashi had

predicted many years earlier to become a reality. Organisations created websites and started

to use email instead of fax machines (and to a lesser extent Telex machines). Whilst it is quite

obvious today that allowing large groups of people to collaborate together over vast distances

is absolutely necessary for business growth and change, the underlying technology did not

exist until access to the Internet became prevalent.

Services, such as email, require at least a 2G data connection to allow message delivery to a

mobile handset. So, with organisations adopting widespread email use in the late 1990s, and

the mobile network becoming sufficiently capable of delivering the data to handsets in the

early 2000s, this convergence/diffusion began to take place. Around the same time, in 2003,

the 802.11g wireless network specification was released and became the de-facto standard for

organisations (Lee and Choi, 2008) – developed separately but then later to be cumulatively

selected and then converged to be part of the first iPhone. It can therefore be argued that

untethered data access was a key milestone along the way for the development of

smartphones.

These incremental data access improvements led to the proliferation of a number of devices

that used this bandwidth to deliver more than just telephone conversation content to a user’s

handset. The breakthrough devices came through in late 2003 and early 2004 – the Palm Treo

600 (Morris, 2003) and the BlackBerry 7100t (Segan, 2004) respectively. These devices (for

their time) elegantly put together a package that combined a phone, email, web browsing

(albeit a limited experience) and instant messaging.

By 2007, BlackBerry had become the recognised smartphone market leader, with a

significant installed base mainly in the enterprise space (Vara, 2013). Their devices had

hardware keyboard based designs as a prominent feature of their products. When the iPhone

had been announced at the start of 2007, their company’s CEO Jim Balsillie had dismissed

the iPhone as not likely to be a serious threat or competition to their market share. (Vara,

2013)

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The iPhone Release

The iPhone went on sale on 29 June 2007 and its release was likened to that of a “cultural

event” and a “pivotal event in time” (Pedersen, 2008) People queued all night, for many

hours, to be one of the first to own this new device (Chen, 2009). This was no doubt due in

part to the fact that Apple had marketed the release so well beforehand – six out of ten

Americans surveyed on release day knew it was coming. (Pilkington and Johnson, 2007)

Upon its release, the iPhone already had a head start on its competitors due to Apple’s pre-

existing strengths as a systems integrator. They were already used to creating, designing and

manufacturing their own hardware and software. This, and the ability to take advantage of the

already operational iTunes ecosystem, that had been built around the iPod, enabled them to

be ahead of the others. (West and Mace, 2010)

These competencies have always been at the forefront of Apple’s success historically -

borrowing strategies that had been previously used by IBM, for their mainframes. Apple

operated as a vertically integrated supplier of hardware, computer operating system software

and web services that were built around their hardware/software core like iTunes and iCloud

(Bajarin, 2011) whilst simultaneously encouraging third-party application suppliers for their

equipment (Vecchio, 2004).

In 2007, the mobile internet on a smartphone was, at best, a limited experience. At that time,

telecom operators were operating a ‘walled garden’ approach, offering their own curated

content that often involved additional subscription costs to mobile internet users to access

music, videos and the like. (West and Mace, 2010) In the main, users were loath to pay for

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this kind of content, especially as the ‘wired Internet’ was already providing large swathes of

data gratis. (West and Mace, 2010)

The iPhone soon changed that with its fully functioning ‘desktop-class’ web browser called

Safari. When Apple officially unveiled the iPhone the point that it offered “…desktop-class

email, web browsing, searching and maps…” (Apple Reinvents the Phone with iPhone, 2007)

was hammered home as a massive unique selling point versus competing devices at the time.

In fact, it can be argued that web browsing was the “killer app” for the iPhone because it

could leverage the same approximately 1 trillion web pages already freely available to

existing desktop web users. (West and Mace, 2010)

Goggin (2009) also agrees with this line of thinking, when he states that the iPhone was a

mobile phone that was adapted specifically for the Internet and that has helped to put the

device in the middle of digital culture, computing and the Internet. The incremental

improvements over time with low power consumption integrated circuits had finally made it

possible for designers of mobile phones to use modular designs and architectures that allowed

access to content that had been specifically created for the PC but now on a mobile device –

whilst at the same time this modularity had led to lower costs for development, thus allowing

Apple to enter the mobile phone business despite not having a history in the industry until

their entry (Funk, 2003, 2011).

In February 2008, Google reported that the Apple iPhone was the most popular mobile phone

using its search engine – most popular by a factor of 50! As described by Vic Gundotra,

Google’s head of mobile operations to the Financial Times “We thought it was a mistake and

made our engineers check the logs again.” (Palmer and Taylor, 2008)

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Reasons for Popularity

A - Marketing and Psychology

As previously discussed, after the iPhone had been announced, its release several months

later was hotly anticipated, with customers that were prepared to wait for many hours, come

rain or come shine, to be amongst the first people to own the device. (Goggin, 2009) (Figure

2)

Figure 2 – iPhone queues on launch day (Chen, 2009)

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Such queues and events were commonplace - when the iPhone was launched in Poland in the

summer of 2008, it turned out that Telekomunikacja Polska, Poland’s largest telecoms

operator, had paid young film extras, who looked fashionable, to wait in line for several hours

before the stores opened, in order to attract attention and spread the word to pedestrians that

stopped and took interest in what was happening. (Phoney Queues Used to Spur Polish

iPhone Launch, 2008) What could cause such a frenzy? After all, it was just a phone.

This is where psychology comes into play. Edward Bernays, often cited as the ‘father of

public relations’ (Public Relations Through Time, 2012), and nephew of Sigmund Freud,

wrote in his 1928 book ‘Propaganda’ that “…Modern propaganda is a consistent, enduring

effort to create or shape events to influence the relations of the public to an enterprise, idea or

group… Events and activities must be created in order to put ideas into circulation, in these

channels, which are as varied as the means of human communication.” (Bernays, 1928)

This line of thought is further expanded upon by Adam Curtis, in his BBC TV documentary

series called ‘The Century of the Self’, positing the idea that, in the present day, the business

world uses models developed by Bernays, building upon his uncle Sigmund’s earlier work, to

read into the secret unconscious desires of consumers, in order create and then fulfil their

fetishistic desires, by making products seem as pleasing as possible, so that they are seen as if

they were extensions of themselves and their personalities. (The Rise of the All-Consuming

Self and the Influence of the Freud Dynasty – from Sigmund to Matthew, 2002) (Adams,

2002)

Confirmation (if even needed) was put forward by Mittal (2006), who further developed the

idea that in order for products to become part of a purchaser’s extended self, these products

had to be able to enable the consumer to define their self-worth via the ownership of such

products in the first place, as well defining how these items are ‘embraced’ into a person’s

extended self. For example, the relatively high cost of purchasing an iPhone was not an issue

for early adopters, mainly because that high pricing point was used by the purchasers to show

off their ‘high end techno-social status’ (Arruda-Filho et al, 2010) – like a peacock showing

off its plumage as an advertisement that it is better than another rival peacock.

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B - Operating system

In 1985, Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple, left the company due to board room politics and

intrigue. He launched NeXT – a computer company that would focus on providing high-end

workstations to businesses and the educational sector, with an emphasis on selling these

workstations to universities at a price point that was below competitors such as Apollo,

Hewlett Packard and Sun. (Hormby, 2012)

NeXT created their own operating system to run on these workstations – which was called

NeXTSTEP. NeXTSTEP was built as a UNIX like operating system, containing parts of both

the BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and Mach kernels. (NEXTSTEP Operating

System, 2004) It was one of the earliest operating systems to use a GUI (graphical user

interface) and object orientated programming. (Rodriguez, 2015).

One of the principle designers was Avie Tevanian - he worked on Mach as part of his Ph.D.

thesis at Carnegie Mellon University, from where he was then recruited to work at NeXT as

Vice President of Software Engineering, later becoming Chief Software Technology Officer

at Apple - amongst many other high ranking and prestigious roles he would go on to hold in

the computing industry. (Former Apple Software Chief Avie Tevanian Joins Elevation

Partners as Managing Director, 2010).

When the Mach Kernel project was started, its stated goal was the creation of a microkernel

that could replace the BSD kernel (which was monolithic) – the thought process being that

with the use of a microkernel, as many separate services as possible are moved out of the

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kernel space and into the user space, leaving the kernel as more of a message parsing service

between the different services, hardware, and its drivers, which would provide better security

to the services that are operating within the user space with lower privileges, thus additionally

strengthening kernel stability, so the services running in the user space could be separately

restarted without requiring an entire kernel restart. (Keuper, 2012)

Due to the fact that, at the time of Tevanian’s recruitment, Mach was incomplete, and

therefore deficient, due to its lack of a network stack and a virtual file system, NeXT decided

to take and then merge these components instead from the BSD kernel, the downside being

that because the features copied from BSD were designed specifically to run in the kernel

space, the resulting kernel was thus a monolithic kernel rather than a micro kernel. (Keuper,

2012)

NeXT took 4 years to release version 1.0 of its NeXTSTEP operating system built upon this

hybrid kernel, and whilst its companion hardware, as well as the operating system, were

hailed at the time as revolutionary, NeXT struggled with sales and market share, eventually

folding its hardware division entirely to focus on porting its operating system to other

platforms such as x86-based PCs and Sun workstations. (Webster, 1994) Commercially

NeXT had not been successful, but a NeXT workstation and the NeXTSTEP operating

system was used by Sir Tim Berners-Lee to create the world wide web (Arthur, 2011), the

very thing that years later was part of the value proposition of owning an iPhone and being

able to browse the web as you would on a desktop computer.

In 1996, Apple was looking at replacement candidates for its aging ‘System 7’ desktop

operating system, despite the fact they had a dedicated team of 500 employees working on

their own in house solution, codenamed Copland, which was almost 2 years behind schedule.

(Hormby, 2013) When Steve Jobs became aware of Apple’s search he proposed NeXTSTEP

to executives at Apple, leading to Apple’s announcement in December 1996 that it was

purchasing NeXT, and would use NeXT and its software as the springboard for a new

operating system for the Macintosh. (Edwards, 2010)

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Today, iOS and other current Apple operating systems (such as OS X) are derived from their

NeXTSTEP grandparents, and is again another example of cumulative selection at work. As

already discussed, NeXTSTEP itself was a hybrid combination of both BSD and Mach. The

kernel combination was called XNU (standing for X is Not Unix, even though it was!) and is

the fundamental basis for all Apple operating systems in use today. (Keuper, 2012)

Figure 3 – NeXT / XNU kernel evolution from BSD/Mach from 1988 to 1997 (Singh, 2004)

At the lowest layer of the kernel is Mach, which is responsible for managing processor and

memory usage, offers protected memory, deals with scheduling and a provides messaging

between processes. Above this sits the BSD layer – this provides support for POSIX APIs

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and threads, the BSD process model, UNIX security, file systems and networking (though not

at the hardware device level). (Kernel Architecture Overview, 2013)

The NeXTSTEP environment was comprised of four components which were the Windows

Server, Workspace Manager, Application Kit and the Interface Builder. (Thompson, 1989)

NeXTSTEP used the Objective-C programming language – still in use with both Mac

desktops running OS X and on Apple mobile devices that run iOS - there are even

applications created for NeXTSTEP that have evolved into present day programs like

Numbers (formerly Parasheet), Keynote (formerly Concurrence) and Pages.(Foresman, 2012)

The Application Kit component contained a collection of pre-built objects that could be used

to build software for the NeXT workstation – many of these became part of what is now

known as the AppKit framework – which was used to reduce repetitive coding that is often

part of the development of applications, that Apple later transformed into Cocoa (on OS X)

and Cocoa Touch (on iOS). (Foresman, 2012)

There are in fact so many parts of NeXTSTEP that are still in use today on Apple’s current

operating systems to write about here, it could be a paper in itself. What can be stated, is that

it is quite possible that without their acquisition of NeXT, there would not be an Apple as it is

known of today. NeXTSTEP was clearly an operating system far ahead of its time when one

considers that almost 30 years after its initial release it is still at the heartbeat of some of the

most wildly successful hardware ever created.

So, how is all of this put together? As shown in figure 4, iOS is comprised of four abstraction

layers – the Core OS, Core services, Media and Cocoa Touch layers. The Core OS contains

the kernel (XNU – comprising of Mach and BSD) that has been previously discussed as well

as handling, inter alia, device drivers and power management (Core OS Layer, 2014). The

Core Services layer contains important system services that are utilised by applications –

including but not restricted to, access to features like location services, block objects (used

for C and Objective C coding), data encryption and application file sharing (Core Services

Layer, 2014). The Media layer is tasked with handling graphics, video and audio (Ahmad et

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al, 2013). Finally Cocoa Touch contains the frameworks that are vital for creating and

designing iOS applications (Cocoa Touch Layer, 2014) as well as supporting multitouch

events and controls. (Tarkoma and Lagerspetz, 2011)

Figure 4 – the four abstraction layers of iOS (How to relate UIKit, Core Image, Quartz 2D,

and the various frameworks in IOS? 2012)

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C - User Interface

It has been demonstrated that there is a solid foundation and basis (as well as ‘cumulative’

historical lineage) to the XNU kernel that is used by iOS. However, when the iPhone was

announced, touch screen devices were poorly designed and most of them required a stylus to

be used for effective operation, something that was highlighted during the iPhone keynote

speech made by Steve Jobs in 2007:

“… Nobody wants a stylus. So let’s not use a stylus.

We’re gonna use the best pointing device in the world. We’re gonna use a pointing device

that we’re all born with – we’re born with ten of them. We’re gonna use our fingers….”

(Transcript iPhone Keynote, 2007)

Thus, the touch gestures that are today ubiquitous were born, or were they? Whilst at the time

they were revelatory, the combination of hand gestures on a multi-touch surface had been

proposed by a PhD student called Wayne Westerman in his thesis entitled Hand Tracking,

Finger Identification, and Chordic Manipulation on a Multi-Touch Surface (1999).

Westerman had come up with the idea after he had developed carpal tunnel syndrome and

wanted his proposed technology to help others with hand disabilities. (Reyes, 2013)

Westerman and another colleague, John Elias, formed a company, named FingerWorks, to

market the technology to their target audience, which Apple then purchased in 2005, and a

significant proportion of Apple’s multi-touch patents that have been subsequently filed have

named Dr Westerman as the primary inventor. (Kim, 2009)

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Figure 5 - iPhone touch gestures (Smith, 2012)

So once a user has a way to directly interact with an iPhone without using traditional physical

keys or buttons, the user interface displayed had to make sense to a new user that would be

using such a device for the very first time. Steve Jobs was a keen proponent of

skeuomorphism, which is “An object or feature which imitates the design of a similar artefact

made from another material” (skeuomorph – definition of skeuomorph in English from the

Oxford dictionary) because “…it made software easier for normal people to use – more

approachable and immediately familiar” (Carlson, 2014). Thus, the icon for the calendar

application looks like what a real calendar would look like, the icon for the camera

application looks like a camera lens and so on and so forth.

By 2010, it had become increasingly critical for a mobile device to provide a positive user

experience (Tarkoma and Lagerspetz, 2011) and whilst the combination of the old

(skeuomorphism) and the new (touchscreen) was a successful blend, competitors such as

Windows Phone had upgraded their user interface to have a much stronger emphasis on the

user experience thanks to its modern interface and clean looks. (Tarkoma and Lagerspetz,

2011)

Apple decided to revamp the user interface in use on the iPhone, tasking their Chief Design

Officer, Sir Jonny Ive, with the overhaul. Ive, having already successfully designed products

like the iconic iMac (Kosner, 2013) decided that now that smartphone users were used to

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using touchscreen devices, the familiarity of skeuomorphism was no longer an important

facet of the user interface. (Hein, 2013)

Sir Jonny, as well as his mentor Steve Jobs, were followers of Dieter Rams, an industrial

engineer that worked for Braun designing products that later inspired many Apple products

like the iPod and the iMac. (Jaroslaw, 2014) Rams had formed what became known as the

‘Ten Principles of Good Design’ (Good design | About Vitsoe) – as shown in figure 6

Figure 6 – Dieter Ram’s Ten 10 Principles of Good Design (Weinlick, 2014)

These ten principles inspired the overhaul of UI for iOS 7, and the move away from what was

becoming the dated original user interface for the iPhone. A comparison between the two is

shown in figure 7.

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Figure 7 – a comparison of iOS 6 and iOS 7 homescreens (Comparison of the iPhone’s home

screen on iOS 7 v/s iOS 6 – Newlaunches, 2013)

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D - Hardware

The idea of convergence has previously been alluded to. However, true and ground-breaking

convergence had not been possible prior to the iPhone’s release due to hardware

impediments, even though ill-fated attempts had been made with such devices as Nokia’s

9000 and IBM’s SIMON as far back as 1997 and 1992 respectively. At that time, both the

device makers and the intended users of the devices did not fully appreciate or understand

what the devices were expected to deliver, (West and Mace, 2010) and these products were

failures.

When Apple released the iPhone it was patently obvious that the hardware was superior to its

contemporary competition. To start with, it had a modern and futuristic look, with a minimal

amount of hardware buttons – almost everything was controlled by using the touchscreen.

Most touchscreen devices of the time required a stylus to navigate through menus and screens

on applications. Using a stylus presented many problems, especially the fact they were easy

to lose, not difficult to break and needed to have a secure housing within the device for the

stylus to be stored. (Lee et al, 1985)

The touchscreen was not only important in terms of what it could do from a hardware

perspective, it extended beyond that – being able to use a touch screen iPhone in a store pre-

purchase also allowed the consumer to gain ‘prior knowledge’ by becoming familiar with

how it is used, as well as then enabling the propagation of that information to their peers

thanks to their positive tactile experiences with the device, creating a ‘positive hedonic

contagion’ (Filho et al, 2010).

Apple’s main smartphone competitor, at the time of the iPhone’s release, was Research In

Motion’s BlackBerry smartphone family. These devices had hardware keyboards, whereas

the iPhone provided its on demand, on screen touch keyboard for users to type upon. This

meant that when the keyboard was not required, the available screen real estate was much

larger versus a comparable sized BlackBerry – making it a perfect web browsing device and

ideal for watching videos.

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Another vital improvement over the competition was on-board storage, as well as Wi-Fi

connectivity. The BlackBerry Curve 8300, released in May 2007, had no Wi-Fi and a meagre

64MB of storage – although this could be expanded up to 4GB with a microSD card

(BlackBerry Curve 8300 – Full phone specifications). In comparison, the original iPhone

came with Wi-Fi and either 4GB or 8GB storage on board, with the 4GB model replaced by a

16GB model in September 2007. (Apple iPhone (Original/1st Gen/EDGE) 4, 8, 16GB Specs)

The availability of much more storage allowed users to store (and of course later retrieve)

their music, photographs and videos on the iPhone, in a way that had previously not been

possible.

Whilst many other smartphones offered a simple point and shoot camera, the iPhone, in its

many iterations, was to become the world’s most popular camera (Hall, 2015). Starting out

with a far from inspiring 2 megapixel lens and unable to record video, the current iPhone at

the time of writing, has a 12 megapixel lens that can also record 4K video. (Heisler, 2015)

The iPhone as a camera, is a phenomenon that has not abated despite strong competition from

others with, on paper at least, better lenses.

The theme of cumulative selection, and incremental improvement runs throughout this paper,

and the hardware of the various iPhones that have been released all incrementally improve

over the generation they have replaced, subtly adding additional features, improved hardware

in terms of screens, connectivity and the camera lenses. (Heisler, 2013) (Fleishman, 2013)

This can be well seen in figure 8 which compares the first six iPhone models.

These incremental changes has led to the iPhone becoming a convergence device in just the

way that was envisaged by Koji Kobayashi – probably being responsible for the killing off of

entire standalone market segments for GPS/Sat Nav devices, point and shoot cameras as well

as even Apple’s own iPod.

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Figure 8 – a comparison of the first six iPhone models, to better show the incremental

improvements made (iPhone Evolution, 2012)

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E - The App Store

Now that customers had purchased an iPhone, there had to be a substantive reason for them

to continue owning one, as well for others to be convinced to go out and buy one. Funk

(2011) argues that for there to be the materialisation of a substantial amount of mobile phone

users it is dependent on those users being offered both well-suited content and applications,

even when they were actually not part of the consumer’s initial expectations. This would

allow for the iPhone’s functionality to be extended past that of what was its contemporary

competition. (Watkins and Walter, 2009)

Enter the App Store, announced by Apple on 6 March 2008 (Miller, 2008). The App Store

would allow third party developers to create applications that went beyond the scope of the

built-in Apple created software and plug the missing gaps in functionality. At the same time

as the announcement, a software developer’s kit was made available by Apple that enabled

anyone to create an application for the iPhone (Block, 2008) – the response was nothing short

of staggering. Apple’s tagline “There’s an App for That” (Van Grove, 2010) led to a surge of

applications being created, the idea being that there will likely be an app that could do

anything a user could imagine when they search the App Store.

As pointed out in the beginning of this section, Apple were looking to create substantive

reasons to convince new customers to buy an iPhone. Yoon et al (2010) put forward the idea

that Apple’s main purpose behind the creation of the App Store was to drive sales of the

iPhone via the sale of applications and their contents. Apple would be able to sell more

phones due to the substantial number of third party applications created, without even having

to invest a penny. (Watkins and Walter, 2009)

Further to that, is that the App Store model also removed the age old problem of ‘uncertainty

of demand’ – meaning that there is no stock to hold that might lose value or relevance. The

onus is thus on the app developer to create an application that might become popular, not on

Apple.

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Prior to the launch of the App Store there were no other applications available beyond the

ones preloaded with the device. Mitchener (2009), had put forward the argument that once

users became accustomed to using their new device and its touch user interface “…it is the

App Store that will (then) allow users to personalise their iPhone’s capabilities…”

Even if the idea of the App Store may have appeared to be new in 2008, it actually was not.

In the winter of 1992, software with limited functionality, was released on a quarterly CD-

ROM catalogue for NeXT computers - which was called the ‘Electronic AppWrapper’.

(Wyatt, 1994) Users then had the opportunity to test the software, and if they wished to

purchase the full version they would press a buy button that would send an automated email

from the CD-ROM with their credit card details, and receive an unlock key in return that

would enable the full functionality of the program. (Carey, 2015)

However, such a delivery method used by the Electronic AppWrapper can be regarded as old

hat. Traditionally, these kinds of methods were time consuming and with the case of mobile

devices would often require a user to first download the application on a desktop PC, transfer

it to their device with a cable, and only then actually install the software – instead

applications can be sought out on the device itself, and subsequently downloaded and

installed at the touch of a button – much faster, and with greater ease. (Want, 2010)

On 10 July 2008, the App Store went live when Apple pushed out an update to the iPhone’s

iOS operating system. The early, free of charge, most downloaded applications centred

around social media or chatting – specifically AIM, Facebook and MySpace, whereas the

paid for bestselling apps were mainly games – Super Monkey Ball outselling its nearest

competition by a factor of three to one. (Arrington, 2008) Some developers looked at ways

that apps could harness the new and exciting features of the iPhone 3G – like iPint,

downloaded 6 million times between July and October 2008 alone, which used the iPhone

3G’s addition of an accelerometer. (Wrenn, 2008) – see figure 9

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Figure 9 – the iPint app in action (Wrenn, 2008)

Within a few months, the competition followed Apple’s lead. Google announced their

Android response, which was then called the Android Market (Shankland, 2008) and

Research In Motion followed suit shortly thereafter with the announcement of their intention

to launch their very own BlackBerry App World store (Perez, 2008). There can be no

coincidence – these were both launched to counter the giant step forward that Apple had

taken.

The App store made Apple a facilitator, providing millions of their customers with the ability

to use/purchase applications created by programmers the world over, in their very own

marketplace that they controlled – benefiting all concerned – Apple, the programmers and the

paying customers (Wicker, 2013).

Page | 26

According to Seraj and Wong (2014), on a mobile screen with reduced real estate compared

to larger devices, a well-designed application should ideally consider how fast a user can read

the content that is on the screen whilst attempting to reduce the number of touches or number

of attempts to scroll on a given app screen, as well as consistency of where the buttons are

located on each app page.

In a most thorough and in depth study carried out over twelve months (Rahmati et al, 2012) it

was discovered that 62% of apps installed by users on their iPhones were subsequently

uninstalled, indicating that users liked to try out apps that they later decide they dislike and

then remove. The same study also showed that a small number of apps form a major

proportion of the participants usage – roughly 90% of all app usage comes from the top 10

most used, of which 40% is from the most used application. This trend is similarly reflected

in terms of web sites that are browsed.

The same study also significantly informs that paid apps tend to have a shorter lifespan on

their users handset, as often the user quickly establishes that they dislike the app they have

paid for and would then uninstall it, having lost money in doing so.

According to research performed by Gartner Inc. in September 2013 (Lunden, 2013), the vast

majority of application downloads (91 percent or 83 billion downloads) were for free of

charge applications. The same Gartner research pointed to the likelihood that by 2017, paid

for applications will be eclipsed in revenue by freemium applications. The freemium

approach allows for the user to download the app free of charge with limited functionality or

perhaps with full functionality but for a limited time frame – with an in-app purchase

unlocking the restricted content (Monetize Freemium Apps).

The previous paragraph has demonstrated that sales of freemium apps will soon overtake the

sales of standard paid for apps. Interestingly, this situation was foreseen by Esther Dyson, in

an article she wrote for Wired Magazine in July 1995 “While not all content will be free, the

new economic dynamic will operate as if it were... content (including software) will serve as

advertising for services such as support, aggregation, filtering, assembly and integration of

Page | 27

content modules…The likely best course for content providers is to exploit that situation, to

distribute intellectual property free in order to sell services and relationships. The provider's

vital task is to figure out what to charge for and what to give away - all in the context of what

other providers are doing and what customers (will grow to) expect.” (Dyson, 1995)

Paid for and unlocked freemium apps are an investment beyond the cost of a smartphone and

a network data plan. Once paid for, the user is generally entitled to receive updates to these

applications until such time as the developer stops updating them. This introduces the concept

of ‘ecosystem lock-in’ (Hoffmann, 2012). Once locked-in by such methods, the likelihood is

that the user will continue to either use their existing device or purchase another one from the

same manufacturer to avoid re-investing to get their apps on another platform. Apple is one

such example of this concept successfully being executed.

As of July 2015, Apple’s App Store contains 1.5 million apps (Number of apps available in

leading app stores as of July 2015, 2015), and has a cumulative number of downloads that is

estimated to be 100 billion (Cumulative number of apps downloaded from the Apple App

Store from July 2008 to June 2015 (in billions), 2015). It can safely be assumed that the App

Store has been a resounding success.

Page | 28

Conclusion

Successful products need to stand out and be different to the rest of the competition in order

to win business, gain market share and then retain that share – Apple was primed for the

iPhone/smartphone explosion because they already had an extendable platform in place (the

iTunes store) that allowed for the subsequent launch of the App Store (Watkins and Walter,

2009), and because their device was unique in a mobile phone market saturated with boring

and uninspired devices. It has also been argued (Diduck, 2011) that the iPhone took existing

markets, like phones, email, web browsing and the iTunes store and bundled them together as

an effective package, when others up to that point had not.

The aforementioned markets, fused together, led to many stabs at creating a crossover device,

with Research In Motion’s BlackBerry handsets being the flag-bearer of the time (Curran and

Leker, 2009). Whilst BlackBerry did a great job of fusing a phone with messaging

capabilities (email, BBM etc.) it lacked the desktop web browsing experience that made the

iPhone the smash hit that it was. By the time Research In Motion released a touchscreen

device, Apple had already moved forward again with the launch of the App Store – keeping

the competition at bay and forcing them to play catch-up and announce their own application

storefronts.

It has been discussed how the effective use of publicity gave Apple the propulsion and

momentum driven start that they needed when the iPhone was released, using the techniques

developed by Edward Bernays. However, if the product was not built using best industrial

design practices that were pioneered by Dieter Rams it would not have elicited the

unilaterally positive response in consumers, in that they had to obtain one for themselves.

The App Store made owning an iPhone even more worthwhile, and better assisted Apple’s

ability to lock-in consumers to their ecosystem, thereby increasing the likelihood that they

would buy more iPhones in the future, evangelise the iPhone to those that did not own one

and also be more likely to buy other Apple products – for example iPads, MacBooks or iPads.

Thanks to the proliferation of 1.5 million available apps on the App Store, users have realised

that owning an iPhone is a gateway to almost every imaginable usage scenario of their

smartphone possible. One does not need to carry a separate camera, music player or

Page | 29

navigation system when leaving their home in the morning – they are already carrying a

device that can do all of that and even more. One such example is the ability, today, to use an

iPhone as a secure credit card terminal. (Angeles, 2015)

The well-designed user interface – most deliberately thought out, with its proliferation of

skeuomorphs so that the unfamiliar became familiar, and its later Sir Jonny Ive driven

subsequent facelift, enabled the smooth operation of the world’s first real breakthrough mass

production touch screen device - built on technology and ideas that Apple had acquired along

the way – but could never have been executed by their initial creators, for example Dr Wayne

Westerman, in the way that Apple had executed them.

All of this was built upon an operating system kernel initially released in 1989, by NeXT,

who despite failing to be a profitable business, in part possibly due to the NeXTSTEP

operating system being too far ahead of its time, has been shown to be the foundation upon

which all Apple products today are built upon. Without the NeXTSTEP operating system

there would not be the iOS operating system as we know it today, nor would there be the App

Store as we know it today – thanks to its precursor the Electronic AppWrapper.

Along the way there have been several visionaries who have foreseen what was to come –

people like Koji Kobayashi, who predicted the convergence of technology and telephony, and

Esther Dyson, who foresaw the rise in free and freemium content. The ideas executed by

Steve Jobs during his time at NeXT ultimately led to making billions of dollars for Apple and

their shareholders. These unique characters have all contributed to the rise of the smartphone.

No doubt, in the future there will be others who will be able to presage what is yet to come.

Today, Apple finds itself as the world’s most valuable company – more valuable than Coca

Cola, McDonalds and Marlboro combined (Richter, 2015). All of this is built upon the

iPhone, which is responsible for 69 per cent of Apple’s revenue (Richter, 2015). Of course,

nothing can last forever, but with the lay of the land being as it is at the time of writing, this is

unlikely to change in the near future.

In the opinion of this author, the iPhone has been a revolutionary device, and until such time

as another revolutionary device, brought upon by cumulative selection and all that has come

Page | 30

before, comes in to play, Apple’s profitable reign at the vanguard of the smartphone

revolution is therefore set to continue for the foreseeable future.

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