First iPhone Unveiling: Apps, Anniversaries, and Evolution

The original iPhone was a bundle of compromises held together by its interface. Its EDGE data was slow even by 2007 standards, its camera could not shoot video and it could not send picture messages. What it did offer was a screen you operated with your fingers, pinch-to-zoom, a desktop-class web browser and visual voicemail, which let you choose which messages to play. Rivals such as BlackBerry and Nokia sold far more phones that year, but the interface was what they would spend the next five years trying to match.

Apple’s first answer to developers in June 2007 was web apps: software that ran inside Safari. Jailbreakers were already installing native apps on hacked iPhones, and in October 2007 Jobs published a letter promising a software development kit. It arrived on 6 March 2008, and the App Store opened on 10 July with 500 apps. Developers kept 70% of each sale; Apple handled payment, distribution and review.

The effect was immediate. More than 10 million apps were downloaded in the first weekend and one billion by April 2009. A phone bought in 2008 could gain new functions every week, and the model was copied by Google’s Android Market the same year. The same rules later drew antitrust cases, Epic Games’ lawsuit in 2020 and the EU’s Digital Markets Act, which in 2026 also delayed Siri AI in Europe.

2026 has been the iPhone’s busiest year in a decade. In January Apple and Google said Gemini would help power Apple’s future models. In April Apple named John Ternus to succeed Tim Cook, who had led the company since 2011. In June it unveiled Siri AI, the assistant it had promised two years earlier, though not for EU users at launch. In September Ternus introduced the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone Duo, Apple’s first foldable, which goes on sale on 23 October from $1,999 in more than 70 countries including India.

The foldable answers rivals such as Samsung, which have sold folding phones since 2019, much as the iPhone 6 answered large Android phones in 2014. Whether it changes the market as the first iPhone did is a question its first year of sales will start to answer. The next date to watch is 9 January 2027, the 20th anniversary of the unveiling.

The first iPhone was not the first smartphone, the first touchscreen phone or the first phone on the internet. Its significance lies in how Apple combined those ideas into one tightly integrated product and then, with the App Store in 2008, let outside developers keep extending it. Every later milestone, from the Retina display to Face ID to Siri AI, built on that platform.

Nearly twenty years after Macworld 2007, the iPhone is changing shape for the first time. The next chapter will be judged, as the first was, by whether it makes everyday tasks simpler.