Every piece of reporting I've read, including books like Isaacson's bio and Lashinsky's Inside Apple, shows that the initial plan was to not have an SDK for the iPhone, because of fears about security and terrible apps "ruining" the experience.

It was only after it launched that Jobs reversed himself and Apple came up with the idea of the App Store process to manage those fears.

It's not as though the public SDK was a totally new thing. It contained some new components, but AFAIK most of it was existing stuff that they just hadn't released an SDK for (heck, a lot of it was stuff the iPhone inherited from OS X). All the awkwardness surrounding the SDK's actual release — for example, the neverending, absurdly restrictive NDA that seemed to flummox Apple's own community reps — really did feel like a rush job. I find it a little weird to think that Apple didn't intend to release the Cocoa Touch SDK after touting it so highly, but it did kind of feel that way.

And the App Store was just an extension of the iTunes Store. Adding a section to your existing online store in one year is not exactly breakneck speed.

Apple had obviously already developed the tools (most of them being extension of the OSX tools) and some (or many) of the APIs (again most of them being extensions/rethinks of the existing OSX APIs) for their own internal use.

A year later, things still felt pretty awkwardly rough.

They diverted extra developers to those projects, which ended up delaying the upcoming OS X release.

It's very clear who reacted to whom:

"The Software Development Kit for iPhone OS was announced at the iPhone Software Roadmap event on March 6, 2008. [...] The App Store opened on July 10, 2008 via an update to iTunes. On July 11, the iPhone 3G was launched and came pre-loaded with iOS 2.0.1 with App Store support." [1]

"Android 1.0, the first commercial version of the software, was released on 23 September 2008." [2]

"The Android Market was announced by Google on 28 August 2008, and was made available to users on 22 October. Support for paid applications was introduced on 13 February 2009 for developers in the United States and the United Kingdom" [3]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App_Store_(iOS)

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_version_history#Version...

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Play#History