The App Store

While the iTunes Store was a near-instant hit in the music space, it didn’t spark the same revolution in video. Originally, use cases for TV shows and movies from iTunes were rather limited — you could watch on your iPod’s tiny screen or on your computer, but Apple didn’t have a straightforward way into taking over the living room. The launch of Apple TV in 2007 helped, but it was famously a “hobby” product for the company for years. Recent revisions and improvements to the store and Apple TV have made it a strong contender for the living room, but it was a while before video was considered one of Apple’s strengths.

If music was a hit and video was more of a slow burn, the launch of the App Store in 2008 is probably best described as a rocket igniting. The June 2007 launch of the iPhone was even more disruptive than the iPod, and consumers quickly clamored for the ability to extend the expensive device’s features beyond the 16 apps Apple included when it launched. It didn’t take long for Apple to get the message. Despite Steve Jobs’ insistence that web apps in Safari would be the ideal mobile solution for developers and consumers alike, Apple announced the forthcoming availability of a full iPhone OS SDK in October of 2007. Over the App Store’s first weekend in July 2008, consumers downloaded a staggering 10 million apps — the familiarity with Apple’s digital marketplace, the abundance of high-quality free selections, and the pent-up demand amongst iPhone owners meant the App Store was an immediate success.

Having a vibrant, third-party app ecosystem became the defining feature for a smartphone

“The App Store changed everything,” said Jeremy Olson of Tappity. “It made selling software so easy that anyone could do it, and it made buying software so simple and affordable that everyone does it.” Part of the App Store’s power was that it leveled the playing field between giant companies and independent developers. “My dinky three-person team has built apps that at certain points in time were some of the highest selling apps on the whole store, dominating all the huge competing brands,” said Olson.

For some developers, the App Store provided a significant financial windfall. “Without much to lose, I founded App Cubby on a $20k loan from family members,” says David Barnard, who was “completely broke” when the App Store launched. “Over the next five years App Cubby grossed well over $1 million.”

Almost overnight, having a vibrant, third-party app ecosystem became perhaps the defining feature for a smartphone — and the lack of one would quickly lead to hard times, as seen in the struggles endured by Palm’s webOS and eventually even the powerful BlackBerry brand. Google, Apple’s main competitor in the mobile device space, certainly took the lesson to heart. Its Google Play market for the Android OS covers nearly all the same bases as iTunes, with vast selections of music, movies, TV shows, books, magazines, and apps.

Side effects

Despite its success, Apple's iTunes has received its share of criticism. Those signature white earbuds delivered poor-quality sound (though they were better than many pack-in headsets of the time). More concerning to artists was the concept of selling compressed files — the quality they had painstakingly crafted was lost in Apple’s 128kbps AAC compression. As for the overall health of the music sector, two years before iTunes launched the labels generated $14 billion in revenue. Sales last year were half of that. Some critics feel that Apple helped strip the value out of music.

Indeed, iTunes hacked away at the dominance of the album as a sales unit and simultaneously tapped into consumer desire to be more selective about the music they owned. Apple’s business model brought back the single, which up until the early 1990s was one of the primary formats for the recording industry. The single all but vanished with the rise of the CD, and music fans were forced to pay for entire albums to get the songs they wanted. Apple unbundled songs, sold them for less than a buck — and paved the way for the CD’s eventual extinction.

The ability to buy nearly any single song without needing to buy the whole album really pushed the concept of the “digital mixtape” into high gear. Music listeners could now easily experience what Apple promised back in 2001 with its “Rip, Mix, Burn” commercial, and playlist curation and sharing has only grown in popularity since then. If you’ve ever spent any time using Spotify, you’ve likely come across all types of user-created playlists in a wide variety of themes — the iTunes Store helped popularize that concept. Plenty of artists didn't like it — AC/DC, Jon Bon Jovi, and Kid Rock were among those that criticized Apple's practices or withheld their songs from the service.

Of course, iTunes wouldn’t still be here if the Store and the iPod hadn’t been easy and fun to use, but Apple nailed both the hardware and the user experience out of the gate. It’s easy to forget a decade later as both the iTunes software and Store have become bloated, but once upon a time iTunes was a far superior option to most other music-management players. There’s no doubt that the iPod’s excellent UI, small size, and solid battery life were a major step forward from the clunky “Jukebox” players of the day that offered high storage capacity but little else.

As someone who grew up dealing with a number of pre-iPod MP3 players, I found the simple experience of buying new music on iTunes and plugging in the iPod to automatically sync new content to be a vastly improved user experience. Even now, just holding the iPod hardware, with its signature shiny, scratch-prone back and then-ubiquitous click wheel, brings back memories of a time when digital music made the huge leap beyond laptop speakers and burnt CDs. And being able to wake up, download a brand-new album you’ve been waiting for, and immediately take it out the door with you made iTunes’ tradeoffs well worth it.