As mentioned, the iPhone App Store opened on July 10, 2008 with over 500 apps, including iEnvision from Open Door Networks. Even Steve Jobs grossly underestimated the degree to which the App Store would be instrumental in distributing the Future, predicting there would ultimately be thousands of apps.
In the first year alone, the number of apps in the iPhone App Store increased by a factor of 100 (from 500 to 50,000). The number of apps from Open Door also increased by that same factor (from 1 to 100).
How did Alan’s one-employee company (shout out to Charles) create that many apps so quickly? Divide and duplicate. iEnvision, based on Envision for the Macintosh, included a number of web-based “shows” in various categories.
When it became clear how successful the $9.99 iEnvision app was (almost all day-one apps were), a quick follow-on was to break out each of the main categories into $0.99 apps of their own. And thus the first five “Envi” apps were born (shout out to Paul).
Those five Envi apps were even more popular than iEnvision (especially at only $0.99 each). So we kept going. We would pick an interesting category from the web (there were quite a few) and make it into an Envi app. We got the process down to the point where each app might just take a day or two. Sometimes we could even break one interesting category (like art) into a number of different apps.
Soon we had over a hundred Envi apps!
So by mid 2009 the number of Envi apps increased from 1 to 100, while the total number of apps in the App Store were increasing from 500 to 50,000. But 2009 was just the beginning.
There are now about 2 million apps in Apple’s App Store, not to mention the whole $1 trillion app economy that resulted from the industry’s adoption of the App Store model.
And how many Envi apps are there? Open Door Networks’ successor, Art Authority LLC, currently has three apps in the App Store. What happened?