Well, a complete development toolchain for example. Does Steam provide an IDE, compiler, debugging tools, etc? No. You got to license that shit from someone else. Does Steam provide developer support for any of the OSes their client runs on? No they don’t. If I’ve got a question about Windows internals, I have to pay Microsoft for help. Then there’s lots of services my apps can use for free, like the push notifications service.

People like to shit on Xcode, but they likely didn’t do any mobile development before the App Store was a thing. I’m talking 2005-2007 era. Development tools for S60, J2ME and BlackBerry were so bad, it was like they were built by someone who hates developers. The software was actively developer-hostile.

You want on-device debugging? Haha, why don’t you go fuck yourself instead? Oh no, I need to sign my iOS app. which takes all of 1 second and is done locally. With BlackBerry your app would be split into dozens of small chunks, and each chunk would need 3 different signatures to be able to access all APIs. Of course this signing wasn’t done locally, no it was done on one of BlackBerry’s servers which was slow as molasses, and each signature, which any non trivial app would easily need 100+, was requested separately. Of course you needed to do this every time you wanted to run your app on a device. To add insult to injury, the signing server was down all the time, to the point that someone made a website (something like ‘isthesigningserverdown.com’) to easily check its status.

Of course, that was if you were lucky and even got access to the signing server. You’re not a Fortune 500 company and want access to BB api’s that require signing? Why not go fuck yourself instead?

Of course you’re thinking, if testing on device is so painful, I’ll just test in a device simulator, right. Hahahaha, no. Because fuck you.

Also, all phones were super buggy to the point that our codebase was full of device-specific workarounds. We actually had a kind of database that kept track of which specific bugs were present in which device that was used in combination with a pre-processor to build a device-specific version of our apps. We didn’t upload 1 build to an app store, we built 200+ versions of our apps (which took hours btw). We didn’t have to buy a few ‘expensive’ iPhones to test on, no we literally bought every single phone that had any significant market share. We literally had to test our apps on hundreds of phones. We’d buy new phones every week. We had an entire team of people who did nothing all day but test our apps on different phones.

Also, since there was no app store we had to host the apps ourselves, that meant we had to buy and maintain our own servers (including writing all the server code) just to let users download the apps. There was no app store to handle payments, payment was usually done through reverse-billing SMS (a.k.a. premium SMS). You text a keyword to a shortcode and you’d get an SMS with the install link. We had to write and maintain the code to handle that. We had to pay to receive the SMS. Then the mobile operator took a 70% cut. Not for any kind of app store, there wasn’t anything like that. Not for hosting the app. Not for providing development tools. No, just for sending the premium text message with the install link.

So when Apple announced the app store. With good development tools. With them handling payments. With them handling the download. With an actual good OS that wasn’t buggy as fuck and actually got updates. And they only took a 30% cut? You bet everyone in the mobile app industry was jumping for joy.