How long/how much did it cost to develop iPhone SDK & App Store

Question

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How much does it cost to develop an iphone application?

Hope somebody can help. I have been googling trying to get an indication of how long it took apple to develop the AppStore & the iPhone SDK?

My Co. have had an idea to try and do a similar thing internally for our own apps and massively underestimating the amount of work that will be required.

If anybody has any idea how long Apple spent developing the SDK & AppStore, links to any pages even better, I would be very grateful for the info so that I can use that for discussion about the plans.

Cheers

Answer 1

Well apple has hundreds of trained engineers working for them, even still at launch, Steve Jobs said the iPhone took around 6 years to create. Along this time frame they were creating the iPhone SDK which they used to create all the apps built in to the phone. Since then they have been constantly updating the SDK several times a year, expanding a lot. The App Store, my guess is that they used the robust iTunes base they already had for distribution, and then all the rest (legal and technical) things should have taken no time at all.

I'm not sure what your company wants to do but it seems without Apple's resources you'd be better off not.