Chapter 5: The First Million
In the summer of 2007, the future Appillionaires were faced with a big problem: The iPhone didn’t do apps.
At launch, the iPhone did not have the ability to install any new software at all — users were stuck with a single screen of simple utilities that Apple bundled with the phone. There was Mail, Calculator, Safari, and others, but it was impossible to add new icons to the iPhone, or remove the existing ones — in fact the very idea of “apps” for the iPhone was entirely hypothetical. The App Store didn’t exist and, as far as the user could tell, the original iPhone was as immutable as a DVD player or television. You tapped a button and the iPhone switched mode, becoming a calculator, a telephone, or a calendar, but the iPhone’s capabilities were limited only to what Apple had prescribed and nothing more. There were, however, hints that something more exciting lurked under the hood.
A Box of Delights
It was already well known that the iPhone was running some variant of Apple’s OSX (the software used on Apple desktop computers) and this suggested that it could be possible to run extremely advanced software on the device. But back in the summer of 2007, exactly what was going on under the hood of the iPhone was a complete mystery to anyone outside the Cupertino campus. Steve Jobs had always said that software was the key ingredient of any great hardware design, but as yet there was no way for users to install new software on the iPhone, or for programmers outside of Apple to create it.
It was also clear to many developers that the iPhone was the most advanced pocket-sized computer ever produced — and certainly the first mass-market touchscreen device with a UNIX operating system (a favorite of the hacker community). With the iPhone, Apple had inadvertently created super-powerful hacker bait. Coders all over the world could not wait to get inside and figure out what made the device tick. Within days of its launch, the race was on to crack the iPhone.
Hackers all over the world decided they would attempt to provide iPhone owners with a set of tools to allow them to unlock their iPhones and install third-party software. This jail-break community operated in a grey area outside Apple’s control.
Their success in opening up the iPhone to indie programmers would ultimately shape the future of the App Store.
Several of today’s hit iPhone games began life as unsanctioned apps — games like Tap Tap Revenge — and the Appillionaires owe much of their success to this pioneering few who dared tinker with their expensive new iPhones to install software. At the time, the work of these hackers seemed little more than a curiosity, but it would ultimately change everything, giving developers an early taste of programming for what would later become the world’s most profitable smartphone platform.
Without any instructions from Apple, or official documentation for the iPhone hardware, a disparate band of hardcore programmers tasked themselves not simply with designing apps for the iPhone, but with reverse-engineering the iPhone’s operating system so that these apps would run. Although today’s iOS programmers have hundreds of pages of Apple manuals and a vast online community to help them create software, these early pioneers were operating blindly, using experience and guesswork to decipher exactly how the iPhone’s software had been put together. When the iPhone first launched it wasn’t even possible to boot up the device without authorization from ATandT, let alone install software. The hackers would have their work cut out for them.
The Boy Genius
The challenge to unlock the iPhone caught the eye of George Francis Hotz — known online as Geohot — an 18-year-old electronics prodigy from Hackensack, New Jersey. Hotz had grown up in the homebrew hacking community and was fanatical about electronics, particularly robots. Hotz recalls that he had even dismantled an Apple II out of curiosity when he was around five years old.
George Francis Hotz, or Geohot, was the young hacker who laid claim to figuring out a way around the iPhone’s restrictions.
SOURCE: Reproduced with permission of George Francis Hotz © 2011 George Francis Hotz.
Answering machines, vacuum cleaners and television remotes were rarely safe around Hotz. He could not resist the urge to disassemble and tinker with their electronic innards. For years before the iPhone’s launch he had been building and entering his homemade creations into science fairs. In 2004, aged just 14, Hotz had entered his project, “The Mapping Robot” into the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, winning a Regional Award of Merit for “young technical and gifted students,” and scoring him an interview with Larry King. This was a small taste of the media coverage that would come to dominate Hotz’s later life; public attention he would eagerly embrace.
A year later, Hotz entered his robot “The Googler” into the same fair, this time reaching the finals of the competition. This robot was followed by a string of bizarre and technically imaginative projects, including one called “Neuropilot” in which Hotz attached sensors to his head to monitor the electroencephalography (EEG) signals emitted by his brain.
Neuropilot was a home-built sub-$8,000 device that allowed Hotz to investigate his brain using home-built hardware together with free software from the OpenEEG project. The OpenEEG group is a collective that allows hobbyists to get involved in neurofeedback or EEG biofeedback training. This neurofeedback process that Hotz explored is described on OpenEEG’s website as “a generic mental training method which makes the trainee consciously aware of the general activity in the brain [and] shows great potential for improving many mental capabilities and exploring consciousness.”
It was in this same spirit of inquisitiveness and invention that, in the summer of 2007, Hotz set his sights on the ultimate prize: to unlock the iPhone. This would be one of the first steps in allowing the device to accept apps designed outside Apple.
In retrospect, it’s tempting to frame Hotz’s motivations as ideological. When he later hacked the PlayStation 3, he claimed “information wants to be free.” But with the iPhone the decision was less philosophical, and rather more practical: Hotz was on a T-Mobile phone contract, but the iPhone only allowed ATandT subscribers. Hotz simply wanted to use the iPhone with his existing contract. As he puts it, “the [T-Mobile] termination fees were insane” so he did what any other self-respecting hacker would and decided to crack open the iPhone. This was a task that would take Hotz more than 500 hours of work over his summer vacation in 2007.
“There were nights I would go to sleep at nine in the morning and then wake up at four in the afternoon,” Hotz told Marketplace. The process of unlocking the iPhone was arduous and complex, but as he got further into the project he found he could not stop.
“If it was just about using it with T-Mobile I wouldn’t have done it,” Hotz said later in a live interview with CNBC. “But this was fun. I became obsessed with unlocking this phone.”
His solution to cracking the iPhone was like something straight out of a school science fair project. It involved wires, soldering irons, and customized software. When news of his success hit the media, Hotz was invited to physically dismantle the iPhone in front of millions of Americans watching the evening news and demonstrate his hack. To a world that has largely forgotten how to change the oil on their cars, let alone reverse-engineer a printed circuit board (PCB), this was an extraordinary sight. Holtz showed a bemused newscaster how he shorted two contacts on the iPhone PCB to enter the iPhone’s test mode and then used customized software to trick the device into accepting SIM cards from any network. Hotz had created the ultimate science fair project, a project far more popular than any robot. In the process, he had become the most famous hacker in America.
“I would love to have a talk right now with Steve Jobs,” Hotz announced to the live CNBC audience. “Man-to-man, that’s the kind I like.”
Steve didn’t call.
Hotz’s plan now was to put the unlocked iPhone up for auction on eBay, but within hours pranksters had driven the price up to $99 million, forcing the auction to be abandoned. Hotz quickly changed tack, offering the phone on his blog. The posting was picked up on by Terry Daidone, co-founder of CertiCell, a mobile-phone repair company based in Kentucky. Daidone arranged a now-legendary deal with Hotz. In exchange for handing over the world’s first unlocked iPhone, the young hacker would be given Daidone’s Nissan 350Z — a high performance sports car — and three brand-new 8GB iPhones. The final part of the deal was the offer of a consulting job for Hotz, so that CertiCell could learn how to unlock other iPhones and train its staff.
“We do not have any plans on the table right now to commercialize Mr. Hotz’ discovery,” Daidone told reporters. “However, we are keenly interested in having Mr. Hotz assist our engineers.”
The Hacker Army Grows
Hotz continued to work on hacks for the iPhone, but now he had competition. A bunch of clever software hacks to open up the iPhone appeared on the scene. Any iPhone owner with an interest in tech back in 2007 would have familiar with a host of peculiar utilities, including PwnageTool, BootNeuter, and Yellosn0w. This host of bizarrely named programs were coded and released for free by equally bizarrely named hacker-groups. There was iPhoneSimFree — a hacker team that demonstrated that Hotz’s hack could be done without physically opening the iPhone. There was also the influential iPhone DevTeam, a loose international team of hackers that described itself as “a group of people who work together over IRC from various parts of the world… a completely self-managing, self-regulating and member-funded organization.”
Another interesting character was 37 year-old Italian hacker, Piergiorgio Zambrini — known to most of the community simply as Zibri . He would become, for some, Geohot’s nemesis. Zambrini created an application that automated many of the steps in the unlocking process, popularizing the technique for a less savvy audience.
ZiPhone, a software suite created by Piergiorgio Zambrini, helped the general public unlock their iPhones.
SOURCE: Reproduced with permission of Piergiorgio Zambrini © 2011 Piergiorgio Zambrini.
Depending on who you ask today, Zambrini is either one of the greatest hackers of his generation, or a misanthrope who stood on the shoulder’s of Hotz’s work. Some members of the hacker community were outraged by Zambrini’s popular ZiPhone software, but they were equally distressed by Hotz’s television appearances. They felt the Hotz’s openness with the press violated their “strict hacker code” and broke the cover of a private group that “would more than likely not recognize each other if [they] walked past one another on the street.”
The iPhone DevTeam took to referring to Hotz disparagingly as, “the self appointed media front man for last year’s iPhone hacks” and claimed that he “couldn’t abide by rules” — the hacker code. They also claimed that Hotz had led a “media circus” and asked him to leave the hacker community.
Hotz’s repeated appearances on television didn’t sit well with the anti-capitalist ideologies of the iPhone DevTeam, although they appeared blind to the obvious irony. They were all developing software for the world’s socioeconomic elite — who else could afford the first iPhone?
Apps Invade by Stealth
In-fighting broke out between various hacker enclaves, but progress on developing for the iPhone continued throughout the summer of 2007. It culminated in the achievement of a hacker named RipDev, who finally completed the iPhone puzzle, launching a piece of software called installer.app. This was the crucial link between third-party apps and the iPhone. Installer.app let the owners of jail-broken iPhones install software on their devices. Used together with Cydia or Icy (two homebrew predecessors to the official App Store), it was now possible to browse a library of apps and install them on your phone with a few taps of the finger.
Cydia was the iPhone’s underground app store before Apple’s official version stepped onto the scene.
SOURCE: Reproduced with permission of Jay Freeman © 2011 SaurikIT.
By the fall of 2007, users who had jail-broken their iPhone — using the suite of hacker’s tools — now had access to a fully functioning App Store with hundreds of games and utilities available to download for free. The strange thing was, Apple hadn’t built this App Store, or agreed to any of it.
By the time of the App Store’s official launch, the jail-break community had been installing and using apps for almost six months. It had all been made possible by a hardcore set of programmers who just could not wait for Apple to get around to allowing apps on the iPhone. They’d set about figuring out how to make software without the company’s help.
When the official App Store opened in 2008, many of the programmers whose apps appeared on the new store had already been developing them for a year, honing their skills in the wild west of the jail-break community. Now these programmers could go legit and unleash their creations on the credit-card wielding iTunes-loving masses. It was going to be one hell of a party.
Jail-breaking in action: The process was complex for inexperienced users, but it meant access to apps months before Apple sanctioned them.
SOURCE: Reproduced with permission of Jay Freeman © 2011 SaurikIT.
The Bedroom Programmer Awakes
In the heady months of late 2007, there was a sense that something peculiar was about to happen to the computer-software scene.
The garage-programming scene had been stagnating for years. Traditional computer game budgets had escalated into the millions and many indie developers were effectively shut out of the mainstream console market. Sony’s PlayStation and the Nintendo Wii were no place for a bedroom programmer. The price of entry alone was off-putting.
The cost of the development kit for the PlayStation was a minimum of $10,250 and a similar kit for the Wii cost anywhere from $2000 to $10,000. Even then an indie software developer would have to convince an existing publisher to distribute their title.
The only viable alternative for a small team was to distribute PC or Macintosh software over the Internet. But this tactic smacked programmers square in the face a seemingly unsolvable problem: Customers were unwilling to make the thousands of credit card payments necessary to recoup development costs on a modest software project. There was, sadly, no centralized, easy way to buy and sell software over the Internet.
The newspaper and magazine industry had clearly demonstrated that consumers weren’t keen on paying small fees (micro-payments) for access to content over the Internet — the publishing industry was floundering — and newspaper marketing teams were far better equipped than any home-programmer. What hope did the independent developer have?
Not only did indie developers have no easy means of advertising their software, but they also had no method of collecting credit card payments that didn’t involve the customer filling out a bespoke form for each transaction. The software industry was a hodgepodge of disconnected websites and incompatible payment mechanisms. Consumers didn’t have the patience, or the confidence, to enter their credit details in every esoteric form they came across. But the problem was much bigger even than this. The simple fact was that the public had made a collective judgment that the Internet was “free.” In a post-Napster world, it was almost impossible to get people to pay for anything online.
This was a landscape where a title’s only hope of real success was to be bundled with PCs, or physically sold on the shelves of Best Buy.
The iTunes Supremacy
Apple realized that the solution to this tangle had been staring the company in the face: Why not take the same mechanisms used to sell songs on the hugely successful iTunes and use them to sell software for the iPhone? The idea was attractive enough for investors to jump in right at the start — years before Angry Birds was so much as a sketch on a diner napkin.
To coincide with the announcement of the App Store, Silicon Valley venture capitalists Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Beyers launched an “iFund” — a $100 million stash available to anyone who, in KPCandB’s opinion, could demonstrate “market-changing ideas and products that extend the revolutionary new iPhone and iPod touch platform.” While the world was yet to see any tangible evidence that money could be made from Apple’s mobile application store, there was already optimism in the industry. There was a belief that Apple’s infallible string of successes — from iMac to iPod to iPhone — meant the company would not struggle to attract consumers to its new App Store.
Trism
While the venture capitalists danced their grim fandango of cash, the future Appillionaires sat crouched over their Macs, eagerly installing the official Software Development Kit (SDK), a free download from Apple that allowed anyone to try their hand at programming for the iPhone. Across the world, thousands of programmers began to explore what Apple’s new toolkit had to offer. By September 2008, just two months after the launch of the App Store, something bizarre happened. Rather than Disney or Nintendo, or any one of the established software companies striking it rich on the App Store, it was a lone individual who emerged as the first poster boy of the iPhone platform — a 29-year-old programmer from San Francisco named Steve Demeter.
Demeter came from inauspicious beginnings: He had been a software engineer for ATMs. But after attending an iPhone conference the year before the launch of the App Store, he saw potential in Apple’s new platform and began work on an app.
Trism, one of the earliest-known success stories on the iPhone.
SOURCE: Reproduced with permission of Steve Demeter © 2011 Demiforce LLC.
Demeter was one of several programmers whose app actually predates the existence of the official Apple App Store. Demeter first released his game to the jail-break community through the Cydia store.
When Demeter’s app, Trism, was later released on the official App Store in 2008 it earned him more than a quarter of a million dollars in just two months. The game was sold at $5 (a price that would be unsustainable a year later as the race to 99¢ began). Trism was downloaded by thousands of iPhone owners but Demeter had spent very little money on creating the game — paying just $500 to a friend who had produced the graphics — yet the return was astronomical. This, the remarkable difference between the cost of developing the app and the amount it made on the App Store, would become a running theme in the Appillionaire story and provide an irresistible enticement to hundreds of other developers dreaming of riches.
Coding in the Dark
Trism began life as a project on the iPhone well before the official App Store opened. Demeter worked with the unofficial and unsupported tools that George Francis Hotz and the other iPhone hackers had developed over the summer of 2007.
Demeter would later describe this first attempt as “a bit of a kludge . . . I really had to go back to my roots as a low-level hacker in order to be patient enough with a system like this.”
Demeter’s talent was in his ability to navigate both the maze-like complexities of the undocumented iPhone OS and yet to have the artistic sensibilities to produce a genuinely enjoyable gaming experience. Like many successful app designers who would follow him, Demeter was that rarest of creatures — an artist and an engineer.
When Demeter created the first Trism game he didn’t have access to a Mac — not that this necessarily hindered him; there were no official development tools on the Mac back then either.
In a triumph of inventiveness, Trism was hacked together on a PC using an open source toolkit called the GNU Compiler Collection, together with a UNIX-like interface for Microsoft Windows called Cygwin. These two tools allowed the earliest indie programmers of the iPhone to develop apps without help from Apple. Neither tool was designed expressly for the task, but it all worked — just about. Developers the world over were running similar creaking, leaky hacked-together Frankenstein’s-monster iPhone development kits. These were acts of engineering brilliance and technical finesse borne out of desperation to be the first to create apps for Apple’s device.
Early iPhone programmers were forced to resort to esoteric Windows-based tools like Cygwin.
SOURCE: Reproduced with permission of Cygnus Solutions © 2011 Red Hat.
For a non-programmer, the extent of Demeter’s ingenuity is difficult to put in perspective, but imagine trying to compose a complex musical piece on a piano, in a pitch-black room, without being able to hear the notes you’re playing. Programming for the iPhone before Apple’s official SDK was a similar experience.
The tools Demeter used were so crude that the system was not even able to tell him accurately when and where an error had occurred in the code he was working on.
Programmers can find it hard enough to solve a problem when they know where the problem is located in the code. But to watch your app fail to work and to simply know only that somewhere, vaguely among these thousands of lines of numbers and symbols, there is a problem; that is an enormous test of patience and skill.
Trism Goes to GDC
Demeter worked around the clock to get Trism ready for the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco. The GDC is the biggest gathering of game developers on earth and Demeter was hopeful that a games company at the conference would snap up his work and publish it.
On February the 18th, 2008, Demeter arrived at the Game Developers Conference. It was a crisp, clear day in San Francisco and the sun was shining as Demeter walked up to Howard Street to the Moscone West Center. He entered the building and stepped into the fray of developers, graphic designers, and engineers eager to figure out what the next big thing in the games industry would be. In his pocket, Demeter carried an iPhone with Trism installed on it. He went from publisher to publisher, showing off what would later become, for a while, one of the most popular games in the world. He showed these games publishers how Trism reacted to the orientation of the iPhone — using the accelerometer. He walked them through the gameplay and clever sequencing of shapes and colors.
How did these companies react — these kings and queens of the videogames world — did they offer him a job, or negotiate a licensing deal? No.
They told Demeter that his game was worthless to them because there was no way it would make money.
Selling Trism His Own Way
It was then that Demeter made a decision that would change the public perception of what it was to be a programmer forever. It was also a decision that would give hope to hundreds of other programmers who would later tread the same path. Demeter would publish the game himself and promote it through YouTube.
“I sent the link to 50 friends and contacts, thinking it’d have maybe 1,000 views or so,” Demeter later explained to Knitware. “What happened though blew away my expectations. Within four days, it was up to 100,000 views!”
Within just two months of Apple’s official App Store opening, Demeter had made over $250,000 from his game, and the money kept rolling in.
For the first time in history, the work of an individual designer-craftsperson was being sold and promoted through the retail arm of a globally powerful multinational that never met the artist in question. This unlikely combination of David working with Goliath meant that a programmer like Demeter, working in his bedroom in San Francisco could, for first time, make millions of dollars without leaving the house.
As one indie developer, Peter Pashley, creator of the iPhone app Aftermath, later explained it to me, “It was the first time that a distribution channel existed for a single creative to distribute their work to tens of millions of people. If you’re a musician that never really happens — unless you have a label. If you’re an author that rarely happens — unless you have a publisher. People are actively looking for apps all the time and, if you make something good, it has the potential to spread like wildfire. Books and CDs never had that.”
With Trism, indie programmers now had their major success story on the iPhone. The age of the Appillionaire had begun.
Summary
Here’s a roundup of the important points covered in this chapter:
• The iPhone didn’t technically have any apps at all when it first launched. Apple bundled a few software programs that it later came to be understood were “apps,” but third parties could not write software for the device
• A group of determined hackers led a community effort to “jail break” the iPhone and allow users to install software on the iPhone without Apple’s blessing.
• By the time the official App Store had launched, many developers had been working on games for months and there were hundreds of apps available for underground app stores like Cydia.
• Trism was one of the earliest known success stories of the official Apple App Store. The developer behind Trism, Steve Demeter, had originally written the app without any help from Apple whatsoever. At the time he first programmed the app, there were no official Apple tools available for developers on the iPhone platform. His achievement was an impressive feat of ingenuity and determination that would inspire the app scene for years to follow.