Comment by acdha

I’m sure it was a combination of factors. One thing to remember back then was that Apple’s position was far more tenuous than now - Microsoft owned the desktop and server market, and the established phone companies were deeply entrenched with things like long-term contracts. Apple knew they had to execute very well _and_ that was coming off of experiences like Motorola’s chip business self-disintegrating and Microsoft playing cutthroat with Office and Internet Explorer, all of which left Apple’s senior management highly determined not to lose control of their platform. I don’t think anyone realistically expected the kind of growth we saw on the App Store as much as making sure they didn’t get squeezed by a more powerful competitor.

(To give you an idea of how bad it used to be, Qualcomm’s BREW platform launched with terms for developers like $50k per carrier per app to be listed AND a percentage of your gross revenue – not just the app, everything!)

The performance problems were very real, too, at a time when they were sweating every bit of RAM and CPU but the bigger problem was usability. Android kicked Flash to the curb, too, because while it was technically possible to make it run on a phone with a touchscreen was horrible — even the Android superfans barely talked about it as an advance because nobody liked Flash even if they had their phone plugged into a charger.